Giant Trevally:
Meanest, hardest
fighting fish you
could ever hope to
tangle with on a
12-weight.
By Brian Gies
Apex Predator
H
AD SWEDISH
NATURALIST
PETER FORSSKAL
had the good fortune
of being an experienced saltwater
fly angler, he likely would have
chuckled at the clever double
meaning of his standing taxonom-
ical identification of the first Giant
Trevally, Caranx Ignobilis. The year
was 1775 in the Red Sea between
Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and
while the Caranx genus of trev-
ally was obvious to him, the rest
of the package was so mysterious
and foreign he named the species
Ignobilis to denote its “obscure and
unknown” attributes. The humor
in this today is that the current
definition of ignoble typically
reads “not honorable in character
or purpose, degenerate, mean or
savage.”
traveling angler
55