Mullet predators, injuries and infections.

The thin lipped mullet are back in Lewes again after spawning at sea off of the coast of Holland and as always they have come home with wounds and sea-born fungal infections.

As was surmised on my 2016 BBC Springwatch program; https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03wwztx

Their reason for coming here where the Winterbourne chalk stream enters the River Ouse behind the Linklater pavilion in the Railway Land nature reserve, Lewes is to use that cold spring water to heal their wounds and kill off those various fungi that only occur in saltwater.

I recently gave a slideshow of this in a presentation to the Seaford Natural History Society with a lot of my own underwater photos recorded after the TV film and here are some of them;

This fish has a River Lamprey attached to it, known as the 'vampire fish'. This creature pre-dates the Dinosaurs by 200 million years!

Another predator the mullet suffer from is the Mink; this one an albino!

As you can see, the injuries can be horrendus but;

...they can heal perfectly well in the spring water outlet in a few weeks but look closely at the fungal infection looking like a mushroom on this fishes head.

1 have recorded many different species of fungi but without killing or injuring these fish we may never know if some of these are new to science but one thing I am sure if is that these are all healed here and that this is crucial to the fishes survival. Steve