Every so often a fish comes over the gunwale looking like nothing in the book. This summer has served up a run of them across North American freshwater, and the stories say as much about genetics as they do about luck.
The headline oddity came out of eastern North Dakota, where Ethan Bear, a 21-year-old wind-tower technician from Jamestown, was working a jig and worm in about 20 feet of water when a strange colour flashed beneath the boat.
"It was a super weird flash in the water," Bear said. What he landed was a 27-inch walleye the colour of a gold coin - the product of a rare pigment mutation, sometimes called xanthism, that leaves the fish unable to lay down its normal green and instead glowing yellow-gold. "I've heard of fish like that," he said. "But before this I had never even seen pictures or known of anybody who has caught one."
True to a catch-and-release ethic that has quietly become the norm among trophy hunters, Bear did not fillet his once-in-a-lifetime fish. "I don't generally keep walleyes over 21 inches," he said. "Our goal is just to go down and catch as many big fish as possible." He kept the lake to himself, too, declining to name the water to protect it.
A few days earlier and some 1,500 miles south, kayak pro Kristine Fischer pulled an equally puzzling bass from the Brazos River in Texas - a broad-shouldered, five-pound, 21-inch fish she suspected was a "meanmouth," the natural hybrid of a smallmouth and a largemouth.
"The colors are very different from most other bass," Fischer 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 honest about the limits of a field diagnosis: "The only sure way to know it was a meanmouth would have been to take a fish scale to a biologist for inspection." Meanmouths turn up where the two parent species overlap, but they remain rare - aggressive and hard-fighting enough that some fisheries now breed and stock them deliberately.
The common thread is genetics playing dice. A golden walleye is not a separate species; it is a single walleye that drew an unusual hand. A meanmouth is two species blurred into one. Both are reminders that the fish beneath the surface are more variable than a tackle-shop chart lets on, and that the odds of meeting one climb the more time you spend on the water.
For Fischer and Bear, the reward was the same: a photograph, a story, and a fish returned to keep swimming. "Fish of a lifetime," as Bear put it.