I took a 19# flathead back to sea lamprey camp for dinner. To hold it up I had to use two hands under each gill plate. Clamp! Hint, don't do that. Ouch! I could only stand there while the crew took a few minutes to free me from the fish. I'm not about to test a muskie.

What we are looking for here is a gnathodynamometer reading… yeah you like that?? I could not find any information for fish simply because it is not a popular subject. I did however find that when I attempted to use my thumb for that experiment the pressure was significant. For comparisons, humans generate around 120#s pit bulls around 320#s I would think most esox are in the 40 to 50 range. This is of course dependent on the physics of the situation as well. Using the lever formula and thinking of the jaws like scissors we know that the further back in the jaw the higher the pressure. When using spreaders they are normally placed at the tip of the rostrum (snout) which allows the maximum mechanical advantage for the tool. If the spreaders were placed at the corner of the mouth they would not accomplish much. Think of it this way, stick your arm straight out and try to lift something with your hand as opposed to back by your shoulder.

Some sharks can exert at the tip of a tooth 3 metric tons per centimeter squared. There have been lots of studies done on sharks but the data is skewed because this is at the tooth TIP only. As the tooth sinks into soft flesh (like that dudes leg) the pressure decreases dramatically as the surface area increases. Any way as esox also have triangular teeth they can develop significantly higher psi at the tip- Like when they bite your plastic lure- hence the difficulty in getting the lure to move enough for a good hook set. If they have the lure in their larger teeth they may only be contacting it with a few teeth causing much higher pressure. One need only see the depth of a few scratches to verify the pressure exerted.

Or the blood coming out of my thumb. When I got bit I could actually feel the teeth touching the bone as she clamped me for a out ten seconds and then let go. I am pretty sure that had she thrashed I would be sans thumb on my right hand.

Kevin