If you live in the northern hemisphere, you’re well into your spring season. And if you’re like me, you’ve been too busy to get outside much, let alone go fresh water fishing!
But I did have some free time this past Sunday. So I hopped online and bought my resident fishing license and finally got to go fishing with my sons. We went to our local creek and had some fun catching lots of sunfish or “sunnies” as we call them. Most of the fish looked like a cross between a redbreast sunfish and a pumpkinseed sunfish. They all had very brilliant orange bellies and their upper coloring varied but was usually a bluish-gray color.
I didn’t get a picture of one (I’ll include one next time we go) but they were fiesty and very hungry!
I used my trusty old Hildebrandt spinner and caught a fish on my 3rd cast! I’m not sure why the fish like spinners in the spring – but I do know that the spinners work best this time of year! Here’s a picture of my spinner:
My favorite springtime spinner
So we had a fun, successful and wet trip (I got my feet wet trying to save my younger son’s tackle box!) to start off the new freshwater fishing season.
Hopefully all of your trips will be successful throughout the year!
There’s so much information to be found on the Internet!
I was reading about a gentleman who caught a rather large catfish in Texas last month. How large – the catfish weighed 45 pounds, measured 41 inches long, had 28 inches in girth and was 9½ inches across its head. Oh! … And it was caught on 6 lb test line!
Now I know that certainly isn’t a world record fish, but you’ve got to give props to the guy for landing such a large fish on such light gear! Unfortunately there was no picture of the fish in the article I was reading. Perhaps that’s because he was too embarrassed to show the pink spinning reel he was using! (He claimed it was his wife’s!) lol
But I digress … The reel (pun intended) reason for the topic of this post is the other catfish caught down in Texas. The one that had the coloring which was similar to a killer whale! The size of the fish was not given, but the coloring was. The catfish was “a blue catfish that was colored in a vivid black and white pattern, much like a killer whale.” Very unique coloring for sure!
Turns out that this wasn’t the first catfish caught in that lake that had this coloring. There were 3 – 4 other fish caught in the last 4 decades that exhibited this coloring pattern. Another fellow, who is the curator of aquaria for the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center, said that he had a “black and white blue catfish on display in that facility that eventually reverted to a normal bluish gray color. The same thing happened to a killer whale-colored blue cat in Cabela’s Fort Worth store, where curator Tim Huebner said it took about 18 months for the fish to morph into a traditional color.”
Biology professor Tim Bonner at Texas State stated that the condition is called partial albinism and could result from an injury or stress caused by environmental conditions. Who said that the chameleon is the only animal to change its color?
So I was wondering what it was that was in that lake in Texas that was causing such stressed out catfish? Perhaps the fish there can read and all the bad news going around is stressing out those poor cats! Hah – guess we’ll never know!
If you’d like to read the article, you can find it here:
Editor’s Note: Biology professor Tim Bonner at Texas State was kind enough to send a picture of the uniquely colored catfish for everyone to view. He said the picture was sent to him from Texas Parks and Wildlife fish biologist – Bruce Hysmith (the actual photographer is unknown). So here’s the picture and many thanks to Professor Bonner!
