Geoff Thomas: Cook just told a porgy

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New Zealand's favourite fish is not a snapper. But it is called snapper. Confusing? Well, it should be and Captain Cook can be blamed for the confusion. When he first encountered our snapper in 1770 - and you can just imagine how good the fishing would have been in those days - he named it snapper, after mistaking it for a true member of the family of snappers which he had found in American waters.

There are, in fact, many different snappers found throughout the world which belong to a different scientific family than our snapper. The records of the official record-keeping body, the International Game Fish Association, show seven different categories for snappers which are all found in North and Central American waters. They carry names like cubera snapper, Guinean snapper, mullet snapper, red snapper and yellowtail snapper. Most of their records are 9kg-12kg, but the cubera beats them all at 56.59kg.

Our snapper is in fact a member of a different family of fishes called porgies, which are also common in shallow inshore waters around North America, and is the only member of the family found in our waters.

So what happens when you want to look in the world records to see how big our snapper grows? You have to look for squirefish, because that is what the Americans, who run the IGFA, call our snapper. The heaviest official catch in the world is 16.8kg, which is the men's 24kg line class record, and was caught by Mike Hayes fishing out of Tauranga in January, 1999. Bigger specimens have been caught, but they have qualified for world records relatively recently and were not claimed as record catches. I have seen one of 19.5kg caught at Waihau Bay while jigging off Cape Runaway, and other 18kg fish have been reported anecdotally. The biggest snapper are found in South Australia, out of Port Lincoln, where for a short period of about six weeks around May the monsters move out of super deep water into depths where they can be targeted. It was a Kiwi commercial fisherman who discovered this fishery and it is becoming well known. The other place renowned for producing snapper over 20kg is at Norfolk Island.

In Western Australia, the snapper as we know it is called pink snapper, while young fish are called cocknies then red bream or pinkies when they reach legal size, which is 25cm in Queensland and 41cm in Western Australia. The spelling schnapper is sometimes used in Victoria.

The Maori name for them is tamure, while the Aboriginal people called them wollamie. Early European settlers in Australia knew the fish as a "light horseman" as they felt the fish's skull resembled the helmet of a soldier.

Did you know that large snapper often have a "companion"? A big snapper will sometimes be accompanied by a small trevally. It is a mutually beneficial relationship. The little fellow gains protection and a meal, and rewards his host by acting as a cleaning service, picking out sea lice from between his big scales.

Snapper have an interesting sex life - they are all actually born as females but before maturing sexually, about age 5, will change sex. At 6 years, they average 35cm and continue growing about 1cm a year, but growth rates vary considerably depending on local conditions of food, temperature and density of other snapper. A 5kg fish may be 20-50 years old. The oldest recorded was 60 years of age, and their maximum length reached is 1.3m.

Just to make things even more confusing, our own red snapper is also not a snapper at all. It is related to the deepwater species alfonsino and is a schooling fish found around the coast of the top half of the North Island down to about 400m. In Australia, of course, it has a different name - the nannygai.

But I reckon when we next head out on the harbour we will still be going snapper fishing, not porgy fishing or looking for a light horseman.