A Louisiana man’s ocean fishing trip turned life-threatening after he was impaled in the throat and skull base—by a fish.
The 31-year-old sports fisherman had just landed a 60-pound white marlin off the coast when things went…sideways. As he leaned over the edge of the boat to unhook the fish, it thrashed violently and launched its sharp bill straight into his mouth. The force knocked him backward, and he instantly felt a stabbing pain in his neck that radiated down his spine, according to a case report published in The Journal of Emergency Medicine.
He was rushed to the hospital by boat and helicopter, arriving with severe neck pain, stiffness, and blood in his mouth. Doctors initially spotted a tear in the back of his throat, but a standard X-ray didn’t show anything alarming.
A Man Was Stabbed Through the Throat and Skull—By a Fish
Still, something didn’t sit right. A CT scan finally revealed what the X-ray missed: a dense, pointed object had pierced the back of his throat, passed through the foramen magnum—the hole at the base of the skull where the spinal cord enters—and lodged itself in his spinal canal.
The object was the snapped-off tip of the marlin’s bill, measuring about 1.4 inches long.
Doctors immediately moved him into surgery. The broken bill fragment was lodged so tightly into his skull that surgeons had to make an additional incision above his top vertebra to extract it safely. Once removed, the patient was given a heavy antibiotic cocktail—five different kinds in total—to ward off infections from both marine bacteria and microbes found in the throat.
Miraculously, he walked out of the hospital eight days later and made a full recovery, with no lasting neurological damage. At his final checkup, doctors confirmed he was symptom-free.
The case stands out not just for how rare it is, but for what it hit. Injuries to the foramen magnum are extremely uncommon—and this is the first ever recorded case of one caused by a fish. According to the report, it’s also the first time a marlin bill has been documented as a penetrating cranial injury.
History has no shortage of freak injuries involving everyday objects. But nothing quite matches the image of a fish launching its bill into a man’s throat and spine.
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