Now hang on, how could swoffers on the other side of the Indian Ocean know anything about catching Aussie Jewfish? The truth is that they do because the exact same species goes by the name of Kabeljou, Kob or Daga Salmon and is found right around the South African coast.

In South Africa, the species has faced a drastic decline in both average size and numbers, mainly as a result of big breeding females being targeted and current size limits being ineffective to protect them.

Several very similar species exist and some species names have been used incorrectly in the past both in South Africa and here in Australia. The genus name is Argyrosomus and the species name of the mulloway or kob is japonicus. For many years it was assumed to be hololepidotus but that species is endemic to Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean. A. japonicus has a much wider distribution being found throughout the Indo-West Pacific, in addition to the African southeast coast and the Australian coast, it is also found off Pakistan and the northwest coast of India and in the northern Pacific from southern Korea and Japan, along the Chinese coast to Hong Kong. For further information on the different species consult www.fishbase.org.

In South Africa, the size limit was set at 40cm based on the sexual maturity of samples collected offshore. These were in fact specimens of A. thorpei (squaretail kob) and A. indorus (silver kob). Subsequent research showed that the inshore mulloway targeted by recreational anglers was a separate species, the dusky kob (A. japonicus) that only reached sexual maturity at a size between 90cm and 1m.