Sunday, August 05, 2012

"Frankenstein" hybrid fish?

What is it? Well, it's a fish, but... Mark Sawyer, editor for an angling publication, has never seen a fish like the one he recently caught, photographed, and released in Briatain's Magpie Lake.  Neither has anyone else.  As this article describes it, Sawyer thought it had "the head of a roach, the body and tail of a brown goldfish and the rear fin of a bream." [NOTE: By "roach" he presumably means the common small fish known to ichthyologists as  Rutilus rutilus, though the name is hung on several other types in various locales.) He suggested it was a hybrid of two or even three species (which would mean it was the result of at least two generations of mixed breeding in the wild.)  A curious thing is Nature....

2 comments:

omegaman66 said...

I think this is nothing more than Carassius auratus. Possibly having breed with a released gold fish a generation or two further back.

I have a (fish id website) , so I am no trained/paid expert but I am fairly good at this sort of thing.

Matt Bille said...

Thanks for the info!