A Minnesota angler wasn’t sure what to think after reeling through the ice a brightly colored fish that resembled a crappie in shape only.
“I thought maybe it was a sunfish due to the color, but after I got it out of the hole I thought it had the body of a crappie,” Rick Konakowitz, 60, told FTW Outdoors. “I was a little perplexed.”
Common crappie are speckled, greenish-colored panfish targeted by anglers across the United States.
The nine-inch crappie caught by Konakowitz last Wednesday at Clear Lake was bright yellow and gold, described by the angler as “a once-in-a-lifetime fish.”
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Alan Lackmann, a researcher at the University of Minnesota Duluth, told ABC affiliate KSTP that crappie of this color are “extremely rare in wild populations.”
The crappie boasted what KSTP described as “an over-expression of pigment.”
Loren Miller, a biologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, told the network, “It’s a rarity for sure for any one individual to manage to catch one.”
Because the crappie could not blend with its surroundings and was vulnerable to predatory fish, both scientists were surprised that it had survived this long.
Konakowitz, who is from Hanska, was ice fishing with a Glow Devil lure and had landed at least one ordinary crappie before his monumental catch.
“The golden crappie to me was the biggest surprise in all my years of fishing,” he said, adding that he plans to have a taxidermist construct a replica for a trophy mount.