The jury continues to be out on whether or not John Foster’s 4-plus-pound crappie will stay an Iowa document. Foster caught the fish on Sept. 23, and officers with the Iowa Division of Pure Assets introduced the brand new fishing document in a Fb publish two days later. Quickly after, nonetheless, the DNR up to date its publish to make clear that Foster’s black crappie would possibly truly be a hybrid crappie — by which case it wouldn’t qualify as a brand new state document. The fish is presently dwelling in an aquarium at a Bass Professional Retailers as officers attempt to confirm the species.
Foster caught his crappie from Sunset Lake, a personal lake that’s accessible solely to members of an area owners’ affiliation. The roughly 400-acre lake is in Appanoose County, roughly 85 miles southeast of Des Moines.
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“I’d already caught six or eight crappies from a brush pile in six ft of water,” the 67-year-old retiree tells Outside Life. “Then I made a solid with a 1/16-ounce Street Runner jig and misplaced an enormous fish that received my line tangled in cowl. I re-rigged with one other Street Runner and made one other solid to the identical spot, and I received successful from one other massive fish.”
The fish tried to get again into the comb, however Foster saved a good line and shortly received it into his boat. He scooped the crappie up with a touchdown internet and couldn’t consider how massive it was. He knew he ought to weigh the fish, so he known as his brother-in-law and fishing companion Steve Harding, who met him on the marina.
Photograph courtesy John Foster
After seeing the fish, Harding determined they need to contact the DNR to get it formally weighed and verified. The 2 anglers known as up the state’s Rathbun Fish Hatchery and introduced Foster’s fish there.
“[Someone] there informed me it was a black crappie as a result of it had seven or eight spines within the dorsal fin,” Foster says. “He stated it might be a state-record black crappie and to have it weighed on a licensed scale. The size on the hatchery wasn’t licensed, so we drove to a close-by meat market. It weighed the identical on the meat market’s licensed scale because it did on the hatchery — 4.08 kilos.”
That weight was greater than sufficient for Foster’s crappie to interrupt the earlier Iowa black crappie document, which weighed 3.88 kilos and was caught in 2013. However inside a pair days of his fish being added to the document ebook, Foster heard from a DNR official who stated they weren’t constructive his fish was a black crappie in any case, and that it might be a hybrid crappie. (Iowa is dwelling to each white and black crappies, and whereas it’s uncommon, the 2 species are able to hybridizing within the wild.) The company informed Foster they’d want a fin pattern from the fish to confirm its species, which wasn’t an issue as a result of Foster’s crappie was straightforward sufficient to seek out.
“After we weighed the fish on the meat market, I known as Bass Professional Retailers close to Des Moines and requested in the event that they’d prefer to have a state-record black crappie to place of their retailer aquarium,” Foster says. “They stated certain, so we drove the fish to Bass Professional … they usually launched it into the large aquarium show tank inside the shop.”
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Foster says a DNR official went to the shop a couple of days later and took a fin clipping. These DNA outcomes nonetheless haven’t come again but, and at this level, Foster’s fish continues to be listed because the state’s black crappie document. If the fish seems to be a hybrid, nonetheless, Foster says it will likely be faraway from the Iowa document ebook as a result of the state doesn’t acknowledge hybrid crappies as information — despite the fact that neighboring Illinois and Nebraska do, as Foster factors out.
“That will appear to be a logical answer to this challenge. Simply make my fish the Iowa hybrid crappie document,” Foster says. “However both method, it’s nonetheless an important fish, and I’ll have a duplicate mount of it made … I may go to the fish anytime I would like and watch it swimming across the Bass Professional tank.”