THE ULTIMATE ANGLING BUCKET LIST

A species, I personally haven't come across in home waters yet, but one which I may well have caught
in Florida, where I had all sorts of weird and wonderful small bright coloured freshwater fish out of the
pumpkinseed – bluegill mould.
Had I wanted to target this fish in the UK, then Tanyards Fishery in Sussex was the location I had in
mind. However, on further investigation, I started finding other suggested locations dotted around here,
there, and everywhere, all the way from Hampshire to Derbyshire, and Cambridge through to Somerset,
which suggests to me that its threat as an invasive species is already well under-way.
Whether that's down to fishery owners stocking them, which is doubtful, or the irresponsibility of
anglers spreading them, is not for me to say.
The world record stands at less than two pounds, and the British record under a pound, so what is the
attraction here. Granted, they are highly colourful fish, but that's about all they have going for them.
Any easy fish to identify then, and certainly a fish which will stand out from the crowd, even if you
don't know what it is, with its deep bodied perch-like profile, spiky first section to its dorsal fin followed
by a softer section, and its ctenoid scales, which again like the perch have a dry rough feel to them,
particularly when rubbed against the grain from tail to head.
But it's the colouration and patterning here that are key, which when compared to our indigenous
species, is spectacular in the extreme.
The base colour can be anything from green or brown through to blue or even orange, with prominent
vertical bars containing lots of spots. There can also be orange spots on the dorsal and anal fins too,
plus the tail, in addition to a bright orange spot on the edge of a larger black spot on the gill cover, with
blue lines radiating out from the eye on to the head, cheek, and gill cover.
NOTE: The remaining freshwater fish in both the record lists and on my bucket list are all game species.
That is, fish with a small fleshy blob on their back just front of the tail known as an adipose fin. All
home waters freshwater game fish species have this feature, and in freshwater, here in the British Isles
at least, no other fish does.
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