Angling anomaly
Golden bass caught in Nova Scotia a true mutant
Halifax, N.S. - Luke Osborne hooked a mystery last Sunday afternoon.
The Berwick man and his girlfriend Lindsay Tupper were angling for only a few minutes on Big Molly Upsim Lake in Annapolis County when a goodsized fish took his Rapala Skitter Pop lure.
“I guess it was within the first two or three casts and yeah, the fish just flew out of the water and grabbed the lure, I really just wasn’t expecting it,” said Osborne, 32, who has fished since he was a boy.
“And it took off in the water pulling on the drag on my fishing reel ... and then it took off under my boat and almost took my rod with it.”
After he finally got the fish into his kayak, Osborne realized he had something unusual on the line of his Abu Garcia Specialist 2.0.
“I honestly looked at it, like, two, three times, ... trying to figure out what it was. Initially I thought it was a smallmouth bass but then I looked at it again and like, it’s off, its colours aren’t right.”
He concluded it was indeed a smallmouth bass — weighing 2.8 pounds — but instead of the usual blackish-green colour, this fish had a golden-yellow sheen.
Osborne released the odd fish back into its Big Molly Upsim home but not before taking lots of photos. He sent them along to fellow angler friends, who, were also flummoxed.
After sending the photos to local fisheries officials, he was directed to an article in The Detroit News that recounted a similar fishing tale. The smallmouth caught by a Michigan man on the Muskegon River also sported a golden-yellow pigmentation, which is known as xanthism or xanthochromism.
The striking colour is caused by an inherited mutated gene and affects about five per cent of a particular population, said marine biologist Stefanie Colombo.
Colombo, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Aquaculture Nutrition at Dalhousie University, said usually animals with this genetic quirk don’t survive for long in the wild, making Osborne’s catch of an adult smallmouth bass even more unusual.
“Because they’re so bright it makes them attractive to predators,” she said in an interview. “They’re easy targets.”
Xanthism is also found in birds, frogs and humans.
In the pet industry, she said breeders sometimes seek out this genetic mutation in order to make birds and fish more colourful and appealing.
Brightly coloured skin or feathers in some animals can also be traced to their diet. For example, the pink pigmentation of salmon and flamingo comes from their favourite food of shrimp and krill.
Osborne said his xanthistic bass definitely represents his most unusual catch over decades of fishing in Canada and Asia. Besides smallmouth bass, he typically hauls in trout, striped bass and chain pickerel.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.