Another One of Those Weird & Ugly Fish!

On Saturday "La Brisa" was out withs some anglers who had traveled a REALLY long way to be here; Campbell & John Fergurson are from Melbourne, Australia, which is a very long flight.  They were fishing out at Punta Gorda and had already caught a striped marlin that weighed around 150 lbs (thanks guys for making us look good, when fishing has been ahem.....slow) when the crew saw something odd floating on the surface and went over to investigate, it was a ratfish, also known as a quimera and it was dead. They gently lifted it into the boat to bring back to shore and to the scientists. You may recall that we saw the first one of these two years ago and nobody had a clue as to what it was. It was identified by local scientists who went on to do research with the specimen we gave them. We followed up with a second fish several months later and now they have this one. It appears that this is a new species of ratfish, not known before and they are expected to publish a paper on it soon. We applaud the crew of La Brisa, as they have been working with the scientists on several projects and all of our crews are showing a keen interest in conservation and want to learn more. They did well to recognize this as something unusual and to get it to us intact to the freezer.