Last weekend at Ocracoke visitors got to witness are startling but completely normal phenomenon. The so-called bluefish blitz was responsible for hundreds of fish flopping around the North Carolina shores. The fish literally throw themselves onto the beach and in the water, it looks as though they are being churned around in a washing machine. Ultimately it led to hundreds perhaps thousands of dead fish on the beach.
Bluefish have a large number of teeth and will notoriously eat anything and everything in their path. This includes their own kind and other fish species. The smaller fish essentially blitz the shore to avoid being eaten. Unfortunately, this doesn’t save them as most will die ashore.
Website FishingStatus.com says that the species possesses a single row of teeth in each jaw that are uniform in size, knife-edged, and sharp. They go on to say that the bluefish are extremely aggressive. And what is known as the Bluefish Blitz occurs when they chase bait through the surf zone, and literally onto dry beach. Thousands of big bluefish will attack schools of fish in inches of water. This causes the churning of the water like a washing machine. In turn, the fish will willingly run themselves high and dry on the sand, where they will suffocate, rather than be shredded by the marauding bluefish schools. And this Bluefish Blitz is what occurred at Ocracoke North Carolina over the weekend.
