Fish don't always read the field guide. A handful of anglers across the United States have proved it this summer, landing fish so far off the standard colour chart that even seasoned rods did a double take.
In eastern North Dakota, 21-year-old Ethan Bear of Jamestown was jigging a worm in 20 feet of water when something glinted wrong. "It was a super weird flash in the water," he said. The fish was a 27-inch walleye glowing gold - a rare pigment mutation, xanthism, that blocks the usual green and turns the fish the colour of bullion. "I've heard of fish like that," Bear said, "but before this I had never even seen pictures or known of anybody who has caught one." He let it go, as he does with any big walleye: "Our goal is just to go down and catch as many big fish as possible."
Down in Texas, kayak pro Kristine Fischer boated her own riddle from the Brazos River - a five-pound, 21-inch bass she pegged as a "meanmouth," the wild cross of a smallmouth and a largemouth. "The colors are very different from most other bass," she said. "There was a very visible lateral line on my bass, and the mouth was huge. I could have fit a softball into its enormous mouth!" She was quick to add the caveat: "The only sure way to know it was a meanmouth would have been to take a fish scale to a biologist for inspection."
One fish is a genetic one-off; the other is two species blurred together. Both make the same quiet point: what swims below is stranger and more varied than any tackle-shop poster suggests, and the surest way to meet an oddball is to keep casting.
