If they can find it.
Angling experts want to DNA test a record-holding stuffed 28lb 5oz British sea trout amid claims the gigantic swimmer is actually a salmon hybrid. If the committee can track down the fish it plans to subject it to DNA testing in order to prove once and for all what gene pool it comes from.
LINK (via: The Telegraph)
Having seen a number of (and caught a couple of – South American) 30-pound sea-trout and seen a genuine Welsh 30-pounder caught by a dead-of-night “freelance” coracle-netsman in an early 1970s winter (I was called out to the backroom of a country pub down the valley from where I was living, at 3.00am, by a notorious, local fisher, poacher and, he stressed, “registered Salmon and Game dealer”, to see “the biggest sea-trout you’ll ever see, Paul” – it was to be a 46-pound salmon a few weeks later, though this had fallen to a steel-hooked gaff in a lower-river tributary – you get the picture), I expressed extreme private doubt when I saw a photo of that fish back in the early-mid 1990s. Sea-trout of such a size doubtless do very occasionally run the Itchen and Test rivers that debouch into to the bit of salt where that now MIA record was caught (as do – or certainly did – some giant salmon), but something in me back then went “Hmm………”.
“Something fishy going on here … shades of that huge Thames Trout [brown] back in the 1960s that turned out to be a painted-up salmon….”.
As for the quality of work on the trophy pictured above – well, the “taxidermist” responsible really should have been taken out and shot, or at the very least mounted and stuffed (says me, a man sitting six feet away from a 1908-vintage, bow-fronted glass-cased example of the work of the best fish taxidermists ever, J. Cooper and Son of London.
Happy Christmas to all.
Hello from Canada Paul and I trust your Christmas was filled with family and friends.
I read your comment here and I was led to support you in your suspicions. Not because I know anything about anything but because I believe as an old fisherman and hunter of many things, that you go with your gut 99.9% of the time. I truly hope this mount is able to be tested for authentication. I do not believe it is such a good thing to keep real mounts any longer as synthetics are available but in this case there was no such thing available in the day so now there is opportunity to prove or disprove the story. Heck of a fish though.
PS – Pedant’s edit – make that 1906-vintage, a fish caught from a river a mile from where I’m sitting now and on which I began my downward spiral into piscatorial madness as a very small child.
There are no salmon trout hybrids, dumb ass it can’t happen!!!!!!@