The species list adapts to where you are. Open the app on the Cape coast and it starts with the fish you actually catch there — not a generic list written for somewhere else.
Drawn, not photographed
Every species in BitePattern is a drawn plate rather than a photograph. That is a deliberate engineering decision, not an aesthetic one.
Photographs of fish vary wildly in light, angle and quality, and they carry licensing. Plates stay consistent, weigh a few kilobytes, and — the part that matters — ship inside the app’s cached shell. They draw on a beach with no signal. A remote JPEG never will.
Three body types do most of the work
Elongate predator
Kob, and its relatives. One silhouette serves a whole family; markings and fin placement distinguish them.
Deep-bodied
Galjoen, blacktail, the breams. Vertical banding usually carries the identification.
Slender pelagic
Snoek, garrick, elf. Jaw line and tail fork do most of the identifying.
The South African starting set
Open the app on this coast and these are the keys you start with:
- Kob — Argyrosomus japonicus
- Galjoen — Dichistius capensis, South Africa’s national fish
- Blacktail — Diplodus capensis
- White steenbras — Lithognathus lithognathus
- White stumpnose — Rhabdosargus globiceps
- Elf / shad — Pomatomus saltatrix
- Garrick / leervis — Lichia amia
- Snoek — Thyrsites atun
A suggestion, never a cage
The regional set is only a starting point. A search field reaches every species, and anything you type is remembered as a key on your own pad. Fish somewhere unusual, or for something unusual, and the app follows you rather than arguing.
The keypad is a tally, not a menu: a species key only appears once you have caught one on that trip, in the order you caught them. Keys reading zero were the single biggest source of on-screen noise, so they are simply not there.
What we deliberately do not tell you
You will not find “best tide for kob” or “top bait for galjoen” here.
Not because it would be hard to write, but because it would be a guess dressed as advice. What produces fish for a species varies by coast, by mark, by season and by year, and a paragraph written once for everybody cannot know any of that.
BitePattern answers those questions from your record instead — which conditions actually produced that species, at your marks, across your trips. Under three logged trips it says plainly that it does not know yet. From fifteen it starts describing your water rather than fishing in general.
That is slower than a species guide. It is also the only version that is true for you. How the matching works →
Permits, closed seasons, size and bag limits are your responsibility. They differ by country, province and often by beach, and they change. The app does not check them and does not know them.