Blowfish (Blowie)
Shore / EstuaryThe blowie — WA's most despised bait-robber. A small pufferfish that swarms estuaries, jetties and beaches across the South West, shredding baits and frustrating anglers. IMPORTANT: blowfish flesh is highly poisonous (tetrodotoxin) — DO NOT EAT, and DPIRD asks that you return every blowfish to the water immediately, as dead blowies left on the shore can be lethal to dogs.
Overview
Blowfish — universally 'blowies' in WA — are the bane of the bait fisher's day. Small, abundant pufferfish that swarm estuaries, jetties, groynes and beaches throughout the South West and lower west, they descend on a bait in numbers and strip the hook in seconds with their hard beak-like mouths. No angler targets them; everyone catches them. Beyond the frustration, two things matter: blowfish are highly poisonous to eat, and they should never be left dead on the shore. DPIRD's standing advice is to return every blowfish to the water immediately — they're scavengers that play a real role in the ecosystem, and a dead blowie on a jetty or riverbank is a genuine, sometimes fatal, hazard to dogs that eat them.
Identification
Blowie, puffer, pufferfish, toadfish, toado
Small, torpedo-to-pear shaped fish with a blunt head, big eyes set high, no pelvic fins, and a hard fused beak in place of teeth — four plates, which is where the family name Tetraodontidae comes from. WA's common blowie (Torquigener pleurogramma) is silvery with dark speckling and faint bands along the flanks. If it inflates into a ball when you handle it, it is a blowfish. Porcupine fish and the various toados are relatives and carry exactly the same problem. There is no edible lookalike you would lose by letting it go, so the rule is simple: anything that puffs up goes back.
How to Catch
N/A — blowfish are an unwanted pest, not a target. They'll take almost any soft bait (prawn, mulie, worm) meant for other fish.
N/A
Not a target species. When blowies move in and start shredding baits, the practical move is to change spots or switch to lures, which they largely ignore.
There's no technique for catching blowfish — the technique is for avoiding them. When they swarm, baits vanish in seconds and other fish are pushed out. Move to a different spot, fish harder-bodied or larger baits they can't easily strip, or switch to lures and metals. If you do hook one, unhook it carefully (mind the beak) and return it to the water alive.
A year-round nuisance, worst in the warmer months (spring through autumn) when they swarm the estuaries and nearshore in plague numbers. Warm, calm conditions in the rivers and over sand bring them in thickest.
Commonly 10–25cm
Year-round (spring–autumn worst)
Size & Growth
Blowies are small — most of the fish shredding your baits are 10–20 cm, and 25 cm is a big one. They are short-lived, breed prolifically and appear in plague numbers when conditions suit, which is how a spot goes from clean to unfishable inside a week. Nobody keeps records on trophy blowfish and nobody should start. What matters practically is that the small ones are the worst offenders: a school of hand-sized blowies will strip a mulie off a set of ganged hooks faster than you can wind it back in to check.
Diet & Habitat
Blowies are omnivorous scavengers, crunching molluscs, crabs, worms, seagrass and carrion with that beak — the same beak that goes through a prawn bait, and through your leader if it gets the angle. They swarm shallow sand, seagrass and estuary flats, and gather hard around jetties, groynes and boat pens where berley and cleaning scraps collect. In WA they are thickest through the lower west and South West: the Swan and Canning, the Peel-Harvey, Cockburn Sound, Mangles Bay and every metropolitan jetty. Warm, calm water brings them in, and a cold, dirty, blown-out day is one of the few reliable ways to be rid of them.
WA Size & Bag Limits
Blowfish are not a table species and should not be taken for eating. DPIRD advice: return captured blowfish to the water immediately — do not leave dead blowfish on jetties, rock walls or riverbanks, where they pose a life-threatening risk to dogs and other animals that may eat them.
Eating Quality
Do not eat blowfish, in any quantity, prepared any way. Pufferfish of the family Tetraodontidae carry tetrodotoxin, a nerve poison far more potent by weight than cyanide, concentrated in the liver, gonads, skin and gut but not reliably confined to them. It is heat-stable: cooking, frying, smoking, drying and freezing do not destroy it, and careful filleting does not make the fish safe. Poisoning starts with tingling around the mouth and progresses to paralysis and respiratory failure, and there is no antidote. The licensed fugu trade in Japan uses different species, specific training and a legal framework that does not exist here; it is not a model for a jetty and a fillet knife. The dog hazard is just as real — a dead blowie left on the sand or the jetty has killed pets in Perth. Return every one to the water.
Perth Tips
When the blowies arrive, the bite for everything else effectively ends — accept it and move. Carry long-nose pliers to unhook them without touching the beak. Never throw dead blowfish up onto the bank or leave them on the jetty: it's both a fineable bad look and a real danger to dogs. Return them to the water alive wherever you can.