Alex's Column 19 June 2025
- NAFA
- Jun 20
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 20
Notwithstanding this year’s weird wet season, there has been an explosion of baby barra across much of the Top End.
Our two most-popular river systems are chockers with juvenile barra that were spawned probably from October last year to January this year.
Down the Daly River, everyone fishing is metre-mad; that’s because plenty of great big barra have been moving up the river on the bigger tides.
Of course, the reason they are travelling up is for the tucker, and there is no more favourite tucker to a big female barra than a succulent juicy young male barra.
When you think about it, there must be a bit of a battle of the sexes thing happening here, because all small barramundi are males and all big barramundi have changed sex to become females.
This natural sex change, called protandry, is a key part of the barramundi life cycle.
A typical barra begins life as a male and may change to female at around 70cm to 90cm in length, depending on environmental conditions and population dynamics.
This ensures that the bigger, older, more fecund females are protected within the population structure, allowing for more successful spawning events.
Barramundi generally begin spawning with the approach of and during the wet season when large freshwater outflows create ideal estuarine nursery habitats for larvae.
They prefer coastal bays, tidal creeks and floodplains rich in nutrients and baitfish – ideal conditions for juvenile survival.
After hatching, the larvae settle in these brackish backwaters, feeding and growing rapidly during the early wet season months.
As they mature, they migrate upstream into freshwater billabongs and rivers, only returning to saltwater to spawn once they reach sexual maturity.
During the recent tournaments on the Daly, there were lots of baby barra caught; and the further up the river you fished, the more prevalent they were.
We’re talking fish from 25 to 40cm mainly, thousands and thousands of them, and perhaps a lot more than that.
The other river system is the Mary where little barra are in truly plague proportions, mainly in the freshwater.
Ronald Voukolos reported thousands of baby barra in the freshwater lagoon at Shady Camp.
“Two blokes caught over a hundred barra fly fishing and only four were legal size,” he said.
These little barras form what is called a 0+ year class; that is, they are all fish between 0 and one year old.
Next year, they will be a 1+ year class, and you can expect to see barra between 50cm and just legal in huge numbers.
The following year, as 2+ fish, they’ll all be legal and mainly in their 60s.
Each year, we will be able to follow these fish as they grow into a new year class.
Make a mental note now: in the year 2031, you’ll be catching mobs of 6+ barra in both the Daly and the Mary Rivers, and these fish will be up around the 85-95cm mark.
Of course, one can also look at the current year classes of barra that are strong, and try to match them to significant wet season events years before.
For example, all these barra measuring 115 to 120-plus centimetres that have been caught in the Daly over the last few months indicate a strong year class perhaps 12 to 15 years ago.
A check with rainfall figures around that time will show that 2010–11 was actually the wettest Top End wet season on record, with Darwin receiving 2918.4mm of rainfall.
I’m not saying this is the case, but it may well be that many of these big barra were 0+ fish way back then, and in what was a strong year class.
Make no mistake about it either, there are still more big metreys to be caught this year.
They’ll keep moving up the rivers on the big tides to feed on all those juvenile barra; whether the water will be clear enough for them to see the lures will be the issue.
As the freshwater coming down the big rivers slows, the influence of the bigger tides pushing up will mean dirty water increasingly further up the river.
Make the most of it while it lasts.
