How to Catch a New Species...

...four months after you actually caught it. And some other stuff.

Back in the first week of July I was fishing the Battenkill above the blue ribbon trout water when I caught a number of odd little fish that looked like creek chubs, but also not quite like creek chubs. They were odd enough that I spent about an hour that I could have spent catching more fish trying to figure out what the damn things were. I failed to come to any conclusion other than their just being creek chubs.

Fast forward to this morning. I was pouring over electro-fishing data to build a list of places likely to produce the last handful of species in Connecticut that I have not yet caught. There are enough that it'll be a few years of really hard effort to get them all. But one of the fish on my list of targets was cutlips minnows, Exoglossum maxillingua. I realized while listing down places where they had been found in the state that I wasn't quite sure how to identify them. Upon a quick examination, I got a little bit excited. I realized I had just solved the mystery of that odd looking little fish in the Battenkill, and added a species to my list that I caught more than four months ago. Thank God I took a photo of one's mouth! This isn't the first occasion where I managed to do this kind of thing but it is the most satisfying. That little bastard kept me awake at night more than once, wondering if I was right about it being a creek chub or if it actually was something else, a new species perhaps. Now I know it is one, #95 on the lifelist, and one of the most interesting. Yes, cutlips minnow, a dull colored, small cyprinid, is one of the more interesting species I've ever caught for one very strange and morbid characteristic. When competition is high or food scarce, cutlips minnows will pluck the eyes out of their fellow school mates. Yup. You read that right. They eat each other's eyes. Their eye plucking isn't limited to their own species either, they'll eat whomever's eyes they can safely get to. It's a strange behavioral trait to carry, and hard to picture with such a tiny soft-mouthed fish. It is something I'd kinda like to see happen though, being the complete and utter fish nerd that I am.

So, welcome to the list Exoglossum maxillingua, sorry I almost missed you completely!

Now that I've finally put that one to bed, I can get to some other stuff I haven't. Basically, there's been a lot of really good days this fall that I haven't written about and don't even plan too, but they resulted in good fish or photographs that are worth sharing. Here are some of those things:

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Thanks for joining the adventure, and tight lines.