The Hideous Trairão - Amazon Sportfishing

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The Hideous Trairão - Amazon Sportfishing

Ugly as sin, yet unquestionably one of the world’s greatest freshwater sportfish !!!
Relatively unknown (due to the limited fisheries where it’s present) and a stunningly underrated Amazon predator (probably due to its similarity to the smaller and less athletic traira), trairão are fantastic fighters. They attack lures both on the surface and beneath with gutwrenching violence and a powerful fight, accentuated by prodigious, head-shaking leaps. They can reach very large sizes (well over 35 pounds) and will give any angler more than they might expect. Their mouthful of wicked teeth, large scales and thick body gives them the look of a crazed sumo wrestler with the agility of an acrobat.
Identification Keys - Hoplius aimara Heavy bodied, thick fish with caudal peduncle nearly as broad as torso. Large scales, large, sharp canine teeth and proportionately large eye. 

Bars and Markings - Fins marked with darker bars and speckles on lighter brown background color. Body relatively uniform and free of any clearly visible markings, however, lighter colored specimens show a series of diagonal dark bars on posterior body.
Colors - Dark gray to brown lateral body, dorsally slightly darker. Abdomen whitish with darker mottling.
Size - Adults: up to about 40 pounds (1 meter)
Key Characters - Thick body; Large, thick tail; Mouthful of sharp, caniform teeth; large eye;
Similar Species - A recent study of H. aimara and H. macrophthalmus revealed that both names refer to the same taxon. H. aimara has priority as the earlier name. Another fish, Traira (H. malabaricus) looks like a smaller version of trairão and is found throughout South America
Known Range - Countries: Brazil, Guyana, French Guiana, Venezuela, Surinam. River Basins: Amazon, Orinoco drainages, rivers of Guyana, French Guiana, Surinam.
Behavior Notes - Primarily piscivorous, opportunistically taking small mammals and birds. Strikes violently on the surface and is a prodigious leaper.
Habitat - Common in slack water near waterfalls and rapids. Often lie in ambush near rocks.
Names - English: Giant Trahira, Aymara, Wolf-fish Brazil: Trairão Other: Aimara
IGFA records - 32 lbs. 15 oz. French Guiana, 2007
Fishing Tactics
The trairão is an accommodating critter. In those select rivers where it's present, it inhabits a wide variety of fishing environments and it responds to a broad array of tackle and techniques, offering a range of angling opportunities as wide as the largemouth bass. Once hooked however, the similarities abruptly end. The trairão is a larger, more powerful fish with a distinct aerial proclivity. If they weren't so darned ugly, they'd be one of the world's most acclaimed sport fish. Pugnacious to a fault, they’ll attack almost anything that looks like food, so lure choices are aimed at what’s deliverable into the fish's area of awareness.
They’re brilliant fun on surface lures, particularly walking stick baits equipped with extra sharp and extra strong hooks. In back-waters off the river or in slow water stretches, they can be found relating to surface or aquatic structure, such as fallen timber or rocky outcroppings. Probe these waters as you would for peacock bass. Trairão are more ambush feeders (like largemouths) than pursuit feeders (like peacock bass), so good casts, tight to structure are more likely to elicit a response. Set the hook firmly and more than once, since they have bony, toothy jaws. In spite of their thick, barrel-shaped bodies they are good jumpers giving anglers a mix of short powerful runs and impressive acrobatics.
Rocks in quicker water and at the edges of pools hold feeding trairão. Surface and subsurface lures work well here. These same waters may hold payara, bicuda and peacocks in the high gradient rivers that trairão favor, so they'll find you, often before the others do. In deeper stretches of rivers, steep banks near confluences may mark deep holes holding good numbers of especially large specimens. This is cut bait fishing, where you can use an Amazon catfish rig and drop it directly under the boat into the hole. If you find them, there will be many and they will be big. Although the style changes to still fishing and the thrill of the pursuit changes to waiting for a take, the fight remains as good as in other techniques and the size tends to be larger. There's plenty of excitement to be had when a 25 lb. trairão comes blasting up from the bottom and begins leaping scant yards from your boat. During very low water periods, trairão may stack up in certain creek mouths entering a river. Probably a function of spawning activity, they are violently aggressive in this habitat. Anglers can elicit strikes on every cast once such as spot has been located. 
Super Spooks with 2/0 extra-strong VMC hooks make for great sport with these hyper-active beasts. However you pursue them, and as ugly as they may seem to be, trairão are actually especially attractive targets for the Amazon angler.
The Characins (Order Characiformes) - Together with the Catfishes (Order Siluriformes), Characins account for almost 90% of the fish diversity of the Amazon. And diverse is what they are, both morphologically and ecologically. They range in size from tiny 13mm tetras to 80 lb. tambaqui and meter long payara and trairão. They range in shape from the roundest fish to the most elongate. They include the curimatidae, bottom hugging detritus feeders with no teeth at all and the piranhas, whose teeth we're all well aware of. They include some of the mildest mannered aquarium favorites to some of the fiercest and most exciting gamefish in the world.
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Edited by Acute Angling - 09/Jul/2011 at 5:47pm