Community & Business
11 November, 2026
One in ten million!
AN ordinary night out on the water at Tinaroo quickly turned into the experience of a lifetime when a local fisherman reeled in a metre-plus albino barramundi.
Tolga fisherman Benjamen Martin was lost for words when he reeled in a 107cm albino barra at Tinaroo recently.
“I’ve heard of platinum barra, which are similar, but I’d never heard of a full albino with the red eyes and all. I was pretty lost for thoughts, the only thing I could think of was just get it in the boat,” he said.
“I hooked it, and it was as if it was a normal fish. But once I saw it come up, I looked over to another boat that was sort of near me and I yelled out that it was albino. From there I knew I just had to get it in the boat.”
Albino barramundi are extremely rare, with the odds of encountering or catching one in the wild estimated to be around one in ten million.
“I don’t know how many they stock in the lake. I think they stocked five-to-ten thousand this year. So to put that in perspective, one in ten million is pretty rare,” he said.
After catching the rare species, Ben said he “just measured it, put a tag in it, and let it go”.
“Suntag is a company that tracks the growth rates and other things of fish. One of the guys that was on the other boat, he tags fish to track their growth and see where they travel around the dam,” he said.
“So, the next person to catch it can ring the number or go online to put the data in and they can find out when it was originally caught and tagged by us, and then we’ll get updated as well.”
Because of their colour, albino barramundi stand out in the water and are therefore easy targets for predators when they are young, making a catch like Ben’s a real once-in-a-lifetime moment.
“I never really imagined (catching one) to be honest. I always chase big barramundi – I’ve gotten some pretty big barra out of there – but to get an albino, it’s just something I never really thought of. It’s pretty hard to imagine I’ll ever do that again,” he said.
