We finally got around to slicing up the more reliable structures for aging. I got a surprise. On the scales, we got the first 9 annuli right, but it turns out there are a lot of annuli that are mushed together so much at the edge of the scale that we could not pick them out from looking at the scale. Vertebral centra were the best aging structure for this fish. SO - final age - between 17 and 19 years old. This fish grew really well during the very high water years of the 1990s, then slowed down after that. If the fish was 18 years old, the 1993 flood year was a HUGE growth year - and for that reason I suspect that 18 is the real best guess.

Thanks for the update. Did you ever figure out what the bondo like stuff in the fish was?

cool. thanks for the info

I never did find out - but I'll bet you dollars to donuts (actually not such a good deal these days - paid a buck for a cinamon roll this morning - but you get my drift) that it is some artifact of the molding process.A big fish like this is bound to get some substantial dents in it after sitting on ice for a few days. I imagine it may be standard practice toput something into the cavity to push the dents back out. Or it even could have been a fungus or something going on inside the dead fish, perhaps the result of some preservative chemical or something going on biologically that I've never seen before. I do NOT suspect Darin of any wrongdoing. It was weird-looking, though. I was going to weigh the gonads of the fish and one of them was full of the stuff, inside the ovary - or it even looked a bit like the ovary had turned into the stuff, because it was'nt any larger as a result. It was hard to tell where the ovary began and ended, where it was all grey stuff. So I did not get total ovary weight. The grey stuff was no heavier than regular biological material - not like bondo - and it was as soft as ovarian material, or softer - not like clay or anything like that. Incidentally, if I was going to try to doctor up the weight of a fish by adding something to the cavity, I would have added substantially more material than what I found here, unless I was trying to barely knock the weight up over some target weight. Darins fish was WAY larger than the previous record, and theweightof weird stuff on the inside of the fish would not have made a substantial difference. Why put an obviousworld record in jeopardy by stuffingenough weight in it to make it a just barely largerrecord? Doesn't make sense. I don't think that was the reason for your question, but I figured someone would think of that question eventually, so I wanted to put my two cents in on it right away.

No, I certainly don't think Darin doctored the fish. Never had crossed my mind. Good clarification though.

I was just curious if it was from the taxidermist or some sort of anatomic anomaly. There are all sorts of fish fillers that taxidermists use for bulking up cast specimens. I haven't ever cast a fish tho', so I'm not sure what they look like.

Yeah - I just wanted to make sure that no one else had that idea. Also - if I had doctored a world record fish, the last thing I would do would be to happily donate the doctored fish to be inspected by a scientist. And also, I would not want future sportsman-scientist relations tobe marred by something that I would do that would impugn the honor of an honest sportsman.

On the grey stuff - it looked like parts of the cavity, mostly but not entirely within the posterior half of the right ovary, had transformed to some kind of soft greasy grey stuff. Like it had really rotted badly, except it didn't smell worse than the rest of the fish - which was not that great to begin with, I'll admit. And the texture was more uniform than I would have expected for just rotting stuff.