iStockphoto / Lisyl Songco
A massive invasive species was removed from Glen Lake, Michigan, a lake that sits just inland from Lake Michigan in the northwest portion of the state. The Japanese Koi fish caught by a bowfishing team from the Thundering Aspens Sportsman Club ended up bagging a world record koi (on the bow) when it tipped the scales at 24.5 pounds.
To say this fish looks nothing like the other native fish in that area is an understatement. The world record koi fish looks like a mutant goldfish on steroids or a pokémon IRL.
This capture was 5+ years in the making, according to MLive. The Glen Lake Association started receiving calls 5 years ago about ‘strange fish in the water’ and those calls only increased over the years as more and more people spotted the fish. Eventually, the Glen Lake Association decided to take proper action and called in the bowfishing team from Mesick, Michigan to remove the invasive koi fish.
According to Facebook/Instagram posts from the Glen Lake Association, the world record koi fish captured by the bowfishing team was a female and a specimen capable of producing over 1 million eggs per spawn.
New Koi Fish World Record For Bowfishing
The GLA shared that 3 of the 4 large Japanese koi fish removed by the bowfishing team were pregnant. By capturing this world record koi and the others before spawning they were able to head off potentially millions of eggs from being released into the lake. Invasive species like this may look beautiful but they can destroy local ecology by disrupting the food chain and crowding out native species.
Koi fish are a species of carp introduced to the United States as playthings/pets because they come in such beautiful colors. The rarest and most beautiful specimens can sell for exorbitant amounts of money. Back in 2018, one koi fish sold for $1.8 million and set a world record at the time for the most expensive koi ever sold.
Are Goldfish and Koi Fish The Same?
While it’s easy to look at that specimen and think it’s a goldfish, they are two distinct species. However, both the goldfish and koi fish share a common ancestor in the common carp.
Carp breeding programs date back to the Tsang Dynasty in China in the 600s and that’s where koi fish began to diverge from the common carp, according to NextDayKoi.
Anecdotally, last time I was in Michigan I was golfing and saw a bright orange blob in a pond on the course. The amorphous blob was moving in a shape I couldn’t make heads or tails of and figured it was trash.
Then when we circled back around a few holes later I got a closer look and saw that it was a brood of about 100 small goldfish or koi fish fry, it was hard to tell, but they looked like baby versions of the fish above. This was in Detroit btw, so hundreds of miles away but still evidence of the invasive fish problem in Michigan.