The jury remains to be out on whether or not John Foster’s 4-plus-pound crappie will stay an Iowa report. Foster caught the fish on Sept. 23, and officers with the Iowa Division of Pure Assets introduced the brand new fishing report in a Facebook post two days later. Quickly after, nevertheless, the DNR up to date its put up to make clear that Foster’s black crappie would possibly truly be a hybrid crappie — through which case it wouldn’t qualify as a brand new state report. The fish is at the moment dwelling in an aquarium at a Bass Professional Outlets as officers attempt to confirm the species.
Foster caught his crappie from Sunset Lake, a non-public lake that’s accessible solely to members of a neighborhood householders’ affiliation. The roughly 400-acre lake is in Appanoose County, roughly 85 miles southeast of Des Moines.
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“I’d already caught six or eight crappies from a brush pile in six toes of water,” the 67-year-old retiree tells Outside Life. “Then I made a forged with a 1/16-ounce Highway Runner jig and misplaced a giant fish that obtained my line tangled in cowl. I re-rigged with one other Highway Runner and made one other forged to the identical spot, and I obtained a success from one other huge fish.”
The fish tried to get again into the comb, however Foster saved a good line and rapidly obtained it into his boat. He scooped the crappie up with a touchdown web and couldn’t consider how huge it was. He knew he ought to weigh the fish, so he known as his brother-in-law and fishing companion Steve Harding, who met him on the marina.
Photograph courtesy John Foster
After seeing the fish, Harding determined they need to contact the DNR to get it formally weighed and verified. The 2 anglers known as up the state’s Rathbun Fish Hatchery and introduced Foster’s fish there.
“[Someone] there informed me it was a black crappie as a result of it had seven or eight spines within the dorsal fin,” Foster says. “He stated it might be a state-record black crappie and to have it weighed on a licensed scale. The size on the hatchery wasn’t licensed, so we drove to a close-by meat market. It weighed the identical on the meat market’s licensed scale because it did on the hatchery — 4.08 kilos.”
That weight was greater than sufficient for Foster’s crappie to interrupt the earlier Iowa black crappie report, which weighed 3.88 kilos and was caught in 2013. However inside a pair days of his fish being added to the report e book, Foster heard from a DNR official who stated they weren’t optimistic his fish was a black crappie in spite of everything, and that it might be a hybrid crappie. (Iowa is dwelling to each white and black crappies, and whereas it’s uncommon, the 2 species are able to hybridizing in the wild.) The company informed Foster they’d want a fin pattern from the fish to confirm its species, which wasn’t an issue as a result of Foster’s crappie was simple sufficient to search out.
“After we weighed the fish on the meat market, I known as Bass Professional Outlets close to Des Moines and requested in the event that they’d prefer to have a state-record black crappie to place of their retailer aquarium,” Foster says. “They stated positive, so we drove the fish to Bass Professional … and so they launched it into the massive aquarium show tank inside the shop.”
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Foster says a DNR official went to the shop a couple of days later and took a fin clipping. These DNA outcomes nonetheless haven’t come again but, and at this level, Foster’s fish remains to be listed because the state’s black crappie report. If the fish seems to be a hybrid, nevertheless, Foster says it is going to be faraway from the Iowa report e book as a result of the state doesn’t acknowledge hybrid crappies as information — although neighboring Illinois and Nebraska do, as Foster factors out.
“That will appear to be a logical resolution to this situation. Simply make my fish the Iowa hybrid crappie report,” Foster says. “However both approach, it’s nonetheless an excellent fish, and I’ll have a duplicate mount of it made … I can even go to the fish anytime I need and watch it swimming across the Bass Professional tank.”
