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Garfish
Garfish (Belone belone), A spring visitor with alarming green bones that are entirely harmless.. The national eating advice, why it applies, the rules that matter when you catch it, and what the kitchen changes about the numbers.
Where it lives
Garfish arrives on the Baltic coast in late spring, following the herring in, and is gone again by late summer. It is a long, thin, silver fish with a beak full of small teeth, it swims at the surface, and it is one of the few sea fish here that can be caught reliably from a pier with light tackle in May and June. Its arrival is a fixed point in the coastal year in Estonia, Finland, Latvia and southern Sweden alike.
Why the advice says what it says
The thing everyone asks about garfish has nothing to do with contaminants: the bones are bright green, and they stay bright green after cooking. This is entirely harmless. The pigment is biliverdin, a normal bile pigment — the same green that appears in a healing bruise — which in this species is deposited in the skeleton rather than being excreted. It is not spoilage, not copper, not a sign the fish is bad, and it has no effect on flavour or safety. Beyond the green bones, garfish is a lean, fast-growing, short-lived surface fish that eats small fish and crustaceans for a season and does not live long enough to accumulate much of anything. No national advisory names it, and there is no contaminant story to tell.
The advice
| Who it applies to | What the advice says | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Everyone | No frequency restriction and no contaminant advisory. A short-lived seasonal fish. | Absence from national advisories; reasoning from the species' short life |
| Anyone put off by the bones | The green is bile pigment in the skeleton and is harmless. Nothing is wrong with the fish. | Established explanation of biliverdin deposition in Belone belone |
The rules
What the rule book says about this fish, described by instrument rather than printed as a number:
- Garfish is lightly regulated across the region: in most places no minimum size and no closed season apply to it specifically.
- The general coastal rules still apply — gear permits, protected areas and any local restrictions on the stretch of coast you are fishing.
- Because it is a short seasonal visitor, the practical constraint is the calendar rather than the rule book.
In the kitchen
Cut into sections and fried, or coiled and grilled whole; the flesh is firm and slightly sweet and the backbone lifts out cleanly in one piece. In Denmark and southern Sweden it is a celebrated seasonal fish; further east it is treated more as a curiosity, which is a shame given how easy it is to cook.
This is a reference page, not a fishing licence and not medical advice. Minimum sizes, closed seasons, bag limits and licence prices are set per country and per water body and change most years, so no number for them is printed here — each species page says which instrument sets the rule and where to look up the figure for the water you are standing on. If a clinician has given you a fish frequency or a contaminant instruction, that instruction outranks anything on this page.
Nutrition figures
Eating advice: Finnish Food Authority and Swedish Food Agency national advice on Baltic and inland fish. Contaminant ceilings and the Baltic derogation: Regulation (EU) 2023/915; weekly tolerable intakes: EFSA methylmercury (2012) and dioxins/dioxin-like PCBs (2018). Nutrition figures: USDA FoodData Central rows published on this site. Checked 2026-09-06.
Frequently asked questions
Why are garfish bones green, and is it safe?
It is biliverdin, a natural bile pigment that this species deposits in its skeleton instead of excreting. It is harmless, it is present in healthy fresh fish, and it survives cooking. A garfish with green bones is a normal garfish.
Fish in the same advice group
Cod
Lean and low in mercury; the problem with Baltic cod is the stock, not the fillet.
Flounder
A lean bottom-feeder low in the food chain; watch for local harbour advisories.
All species compared
The full table, grouped the way the advice groups it.
Eat the fish, log the fish
TempoLife tracks what you actually ate against the same food data linked on this page, so a fish meal shows up in your omega-3, vitamin D and salt totals without a second thought.