Mysterious Cave Discovered in Hubei Province, Tens of Thousands of “Spitting Fish” Caught Every Year

In a small mountain village called Pijiagou in Shiyan City, Hubei Province, there is a cave that crazily spews out fish around the time of the Qingming Festival every year, lasting for two to three weeks. The amount of fish coming out of the cave each year weighs over ten thousand pounds, and over time, the locals started calling this cave the “Flowing Fish Cave”.

According to a report from the Sohu account “Jingya Pinshi”, ever since the ancestors of Pijiagou village discovered this secret, during the Qingming Festival, every household would bring fish baskets to the entrance of the “Flowing Fish Cave” to catch fish. As long as the villagers align the fish baskets at the cave entrance, with little effort, they can easily catch twenty to thirty pounds of fish. As more and more people learned about it, even people from neighboring villages started flocking to the cave.

The fish in this cave are mostly around ten to twenty centimeters long, with small internal organs, no muddy taste common in river fish, and the flesh is tender with fewer bones. Just a sprinkle of salt and a quick roast make for a delicious meal.

As the reputation of Pijiagou village spread, even the media heard about it, and they came to do a special coverage, catching the attention of a fish expert from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

After the expert visited Pijiagou village, they discovered that the fish spewed out of the cave are actually a nationally protected fish species called Mandarin Fish. In the past few decades, the population of Mandarin Fish has drastically decreased, facing the threat of extinction.

Mandarin Fish is a warm water freshwater fish species that prefers living in the clear water and sandy bottom of high mountain streams. The reason the fish are “spat” out of the cave is explained by the expert as Mandarin Fish seeking shelter in the cave during winter to lay eggs, and they only come out when the weather warms up around Qingming Festival, creating the magical sight of fish spewing out of the cave entrance.

Upon realizing that Mandarin Fish are precious and scarce, the villagers stopped fishing for them. However, even though they gave up the tens of thousands of pounds of fish they used to catch each year, their village became a popular tourist destination thanks to the “Flowing Fish Cave”. During Qingming, a large number of tourists come to witness this miraculous flowing fish phenomenon. As a result, the villagers have increased income and built new homes.