David Whitworth was sure he had caught a state-record fish. The massive carp he caught in a downstate lake earlier this summer weighed 63 pounds, according to one scale. But Whitworth, a strong advocate of catch-and-release, would not take it to be weighed on a certified scale, so he had to be satisfied with photographing the fish and believing he held the record but not officially certifying it.
“There was no way I was killing a 60-pound carp,” he said. As he debated how hard to push for the record, he had a carp expert he knows – upstate guide Michael McGrath – see pictures of the fish. McGrath concluded the lunker was not a common carp – for which the 50-pound record would have been shattered – but was instead a grass carp, a fish imported to the U.S. from Asia for the purpose of weed control. Whitworth agreed when McGrath pointed out subtle feature that separate the species.
Grass carp are only to be stocked in small ponds by state permit and only sterile (triploid) fish are to be introduced into state waters to eliminate reproduction, so the state Department of Environmental Conservation does not recognize a sport fishing record for them.
Whitworth, a Brit who grew up sport fishing for carp in England where carp are a major species targeted by anglers, said the fish initially did not appear to him to be a grass carp, which generally have a more silverish body than brown common carp. The fish did have a mouth that was not the distinctive downturned mouth seen in common carp, but Whitworth believed that stemmed from its age.
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