Most anglers fish for years without landing a single state record. Akeley Fahnholz has now collected two before she is out of primary school.
The young angler from Carmen, in Idaho's Lemhi County, has claimed the Idaho catch-and-release state record for chiselmouth, a fish most anglers have never heard of and fewer still target on purpose. She landed the 11.25-inch fish on 8 June on the Salmon River, near the town of Salmon, and released it alive.
Chiselmouth are not the sort of fish that usually make headlines. They belong to the minnow family, rarely grow beyond 12 inches, and spend their lives scraping algae and small insects off river rocks with a hardened, blade-like lower jaw. Idaho Fish and Game says they are the only members of their taxonomic group found in the state, and they almost never appear in the record books.
"Chiselmouths, as their name implies, literally chisel their dinner off river rocks," Idaho Fish and Game said in announcing the record.
The species is so overlooked that the department paired its record announcement with a basic explainer for anglers who had never seen one. Chiselmouth are native non-game fish, more likely to be caught by accident than by design, which is part of why the record category sat open and why an 11.25-inch fish was enough to claim it.
For Fahnholz, the odd little fish is the second entry on a growing resume. She first made the record books in February 2023, when, as a five-year-old, she landed a 14 1/8-inch peamouth on the Snake River near Bliss to set the state catch-and-release record for that species. The mark she broke had been held by her own uncle. Before that, she was recognised for landing a jack Chinook salmon from Hayden Pond at the age of four.
Idaho's catch-and-release record program is built for exactly this kind of fishing. Rather than requiring an angler to kill and weigh a fish, it certifies records by length. Applicants submit a Record Fish Application with photographs showing the fish measured against a ruler, and the fish is returned to the water alive. The format has opened the record books to smaller, less glamorous species, and to younger anglers who might never haul in a trophy trout or sturgeon.
That has made room for fish like the chiselmouth to get their moment. The category rewards anglers willing to identify and document whatever comes up on the line, not just the species that fill tackle-shop walls. It also fits a run of unusual entries in Idaho, where recent catch-and-release records have included native minnows and other non-game species alongside the trout and bass that dominate the certified-weight list.
Whether Fahnholz keeps adding to her tally is anyone's guess, but she has already done something most anglers never manage: put her name in the state record book twice, for two species plenty of people could not identify, before she is old enough to drive to the river herself.