Johnson Jr. posed this question, and I have no idea. Dolphin, answered I confidently, having just seen one jump over 30 feet at the aquarium. Oops…
After having set myself straight, we considered the possibilities. Flying fish obviously get completely clear of the water, but I’m guessing they don’t get very high. I figure it must be something larger, along the lines of a swordfish or marlin. But something more authoritative than my supposition is always good for the little one.
So, the question is, what fish jumps the highest? And do they do it on a whim, when they’re not hooked?
If you mean which fish can simply jump the highest out of water, it would be difficult to tell since no one has set out to experiment on every kind of fish and found a way to get it to jump on cue to it’s max height in a way that would let you measure it accurately, blah blah blah… in short you won’t know for sure. Then there’s the whole deal of which fish does make the highest jumps normally, and which ones have the power and speed ability to jump higher yet, even though they normally don’t. I imagine it would be one of the larger fast moving marine species though.
Some freshwater fish can make pretty impressive jumps too, especially when making migrations over barriers up rivers. Anadromous adult steelhead can jump around 3.5m, and smaller fish can make more impressive jumps in regards to their size. This summer I saw juvenile rainbow trout no more than 4" long jumping from a pool 6" deep and clearing a 3-foot dam - so that’s almost 10X their own length they can jump vertically. If a six-foot fish could do that, it could clear a 5-story building… but I doubt any could.
If it isn’t porpoise or dolphin my guess would be sailfish or marlin as having the potential of jumping the highest. They have been measured at 70 mph in short bursts. Next would probably be tuna measured at 50-60 mph. The numbers come from the book Through The Fishes Eye by a couple of marine biologists. Unfortunately it seems to be missing from my bookshelf (my wife probably “neatened up” heh, heh) so I can’t give their names or the publisher just now.
I guess my asking which “fish” jumps the highest, that means dolphin (the mammal) and whales are excluded, so my vote would go for the tarpon. They can do some impressive leaps when hooked. Marlin and sailfish do jump, of course, but mainly their runs are horizontal along the surface rather than vertical.
On a pound-for-pound basis, though, I’d say that it would either be spawning salmon or a smallmouth bass. I’ve caught smallmouth that have jumped up to eye level when I was standing on the deck of my pontoon boat. Neat.
Actually, I think weight doesn’t matter. If air resistance is negligible, which I think is a valid assumption for streamlined shapes at these speeds, then the trajectory depends only on the initial speed and angle of launch. Once the surface is breached, the acceleration downward is equal for all objects and they all lose velocity at the same rate (and I don’t want any guff about “right hand” or “left hand” fish). So it seems to me that the velocity that a fish can attain is the determining factor. Through The Fishes Eye gave swimming speeds for various fish, and no freshwater fish could swim as fast as the fastest of the ocean types.
The highest verified leap out of the water by a fish was around 30 feet by a mako shark. This was captured on film back in the early 1970’s.
There are great white sharks that regularly leap out of the water when attacking their prey. They are located off the california coast, and there have been a couple of tv specials about them on Discovery/Animal Planet recently.
In response to the above statement weight or size does matter - for getting up to speed in the first place. Since a small fish has a lot more surafce area and drag relative to body mass, it can’t swim as fast as a large fish of the same species, and can’t acheive as fast a take-off speed. It’s well known that for the most part “big fish swim faster than small fish”.
But still the smaller fish do tend to make more impressive jumps for their size; read my examples above. I’ve seen 4" rainbow trout jump 3 feet high starting from a 6" pool… they jumped about 9X their length high. Going by the literature a 3 foot steelhead (actually the same species) with a 12 foot deep pool can’t jump much higher than 11 or 12 feet, which is only 4X their length. There are factors such as burst speed, body/fin shape, and jumping conditions to take into account, so it’s not quite as simple as the fastest fish can jump the highest.
Sure getting up to speed is different for different sizes. Once the speed is achieved however the fasted can jump the highest no matter how long it took to get up to speed.