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Pike

Pike (Esox lucius), Not in pregnancy at all; one to two meals a month for everyone else.. 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

Weed beds, reed edges, drop-offs and slow river bends across the whole region — and, unusually for a freshwater predator, out in the brackish coastal Baltic as well, where pike spawn in shallow bays and flooded shore meadows as soon as the ice goes. A pike holds a small territory for years, which is why the fish in your net is a record of that particular water rather than of the sea in general.

Why the advice says what it says

Pike is the reason mercury advice exists in this region. Methylmercury moves up a food chain rather than being diluted by it: each step concentrates what the step below has already concentrated, and pike sits at the top of a freshwater chain that may be four or five links long. It also lives a long time — the big females in a lake are usually the oldest fish in it — and mercury is not excreted at any useful rate, so the load is cumulative over a whole life. Two consequences follow, and both matter at the kitchen table. First, a 5 kg pike is not simply a bigger version of a 1 kg pike; it is an older animal with more accumulated mercury per gram of flesh. Second, methylmercury binds to the protein in muscle, not to fat, so it is distributed through the fillet itself. Trimming, skinning, soaking and cooking do not remove it — cooking drives off water, so the concentration per gram goes slightly up. Water chemistry matters too: brown, acidic, humic forest lakes and flooded reservoirs produce markedly more methylmercury than clear, lime-rich waters, so two pike of the same size from two lakes an hour apart can be quite different foods.

The advice

The rules

What the rule book says about this fish, described by instrument rather than printed as a number:

• Pike has a minimum landing size in each of the three countries, and the number is not the same in all of them — nor always the same across one country. A local rule for a named lake, river or bay can be stricter than the national one and overrides it.
• Spring spawning closures are the norm. In several waters pike may not be targeted at all for a stretch of weeks while it spawns in the shallows, which is precisely when it is easiest to catch.
• Length is measured from the tip of the snout to the tip of the tail fin. Carry a measure; guessing is not a defence.
• An undersized fish goes back at once, in the water where possible, handled with wet hands and never by the gills.
• Gear matters as much as size: gill nets, longlines and spearfishing are permitted separately from rod fishing and often need a named permit.

In the kitchen

Pike is one of the leanest fish anyone eats here — under a gram of fat per 100 g — so it goes dry and cottony the moment it is overcooked. It also carries the notorious row of Y-shaped intramuscular bones along the upper fillet, which is why so much pike ends up minced into quenelles, fish cakes and terrines rather than served as a fillet. None of that changes the mercury: mincing, soaking in milk, salting and long simmering all leave it where it is, in the muscle protein.

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

Fish, pike, northern, raw. Values are the USDA row published on this site's food data pages.

Related published rows:

• Northern pike, cooked — 113 kcal per 100 g

Typical round weight for the calculator: 1.0–5.0 kg.

Pike fillets cleanly but the Y-bones cost you flesh if you cut them out rather than mincing through them.

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

Fish in the same advice group