Rudd

Deep bodied with large silvery scales, iris golden. Bright red fins. deeper bodied fish than the roach. The eye is gold and the pelvic, anal and tail fins are bright red. The pelvic fins are positioned forward of the dorsal fin. Also one of the differences between a roach and Rudd is that the Rudd's lower lip protrudes further than the top lip, as they are predominately a mid to surface feeder. Because the species has a tendency to hybridize with roach and bream, true rudd are quite hard to find and are easily mistaken.

Rudd lives predominantly in lowland, slow-flowing waters, but also inhabits the still waters of dams, ponds, blind river arms, pools and lakes in former gravel quarries. It prefers densely over-grown Territory, where it keeps to the vicinity of banks.

Rudd is a shoaling species and feeds at or beneath the water surface. Surface feeding rudd are easily located by looking for the ripples they cause as they rise to the surface to feed on floating insects.

They are sexually mature after 3 or 4 years and spawn from mid May to early June. The average rudd produces 108,000 -211,000 eggs. The fry hatch after 3-10 days, lying passively hidden in the growth until they have digested the yolk-sac. They can live for up to 17 years.

There are two main different methods when fishing for rudd depending on the circumstances. In still water fish with a float, since the fact that a bait that is slowly falling down to the bottom seems to be irresistible to a rudd. A regular match rod and a standard float is an effective combination. Place the shot close to the float as mentioned, a slowly sinking bait seems to be irresistible to a rudd. Another method is the use of a light cage feeder as this allows you to build up an effect bed of bait. Make sure your hook link is at least two feet long as this trailing hook link couple with a nip of bread flake slowly comes to rest and again seems to be irresistible to large Rudd.