I've Had it With These Mother F** Gambusia in This Mother F** State!

Mosquitofish are annoying enough in Florida, where they are supposed to be but make it a real pain to catch. As soon as you've caught one of a species you've caught enough, frankly. I've still got other gambusia to catch in Florida and elsewhere, but I have Eastern and Western so I don't need to catch any more of those. Unfortunately, the find a way. CT doesn't have native gambusia. Noah and I found a new population in a deep Central CT pond this spring while we were looking for bridled shiners and central mudminnows. With a fair degree of certainty we identified them as Western mosquitofish, Gambusia affinis. That was strange and surprising and a little annoying, though it was a new species for both of us, and that whole thing is chronicled here: Mosquitofish in CT, and here: The Mosquitofish Saga Continues.

But those little buggers won't leave me alone, and it has turned me into Samuel L. Jackson. On Saturday, I went poking around some ponds I make it to a couple times a year. It was nothing abnormal, typical early fall bluegills on small dry flies. At least initially. I should have known this wasn't a totally ordinary day when I caught a fish on a hook that the point had broken off of.

Lepomis macrochirus 

Then I decided to visit a tiny pond I don't think I'd ever tried to fish back some trails, near the top of a meadow. My friend Bruce had mentioned to me that there may be some unusual fish in this pond. I didn't doubt it entirely but I will admit I had practically written this pond of as a possible fish holding water body. It was disconnected from anything else with fish and very small. When I got to its edge though, I could see some small fish spook off. I fished the same beetle I still had on from the previous pond for a bit, and I did catch a few very small bluegills. Those obviously weren't anything odd at all, and they were what I was seeing in the margins either.

I tied on the smallest soft hackle I had with me and set about to catch these mystery fish. The size 20 wasn't ideal, it was pretty big, but these tiny things were all over it. Eventually I realized that if I dragged it across the surface the fish would attack it repeatedly and I would be able to feel when they took well enough for a possible hookup. That worked, and low and behold... it was a gambusia. Probably affinis. Maybe holbrooki. 

So, that begs the question. Why? For what reason did someone dump mosquitofish in this tiny secluded pond, where there is no reasonable expectation of them surviving the winter?
And why do I have to keep finding these damn things in this state? If I have to catch some weird invasive species where they haven't been documented yet, I'd much rather it be something more interesting, like a northern snakehead or a flathead catfish, or some wacky one-off aquarium release arowana.
Gambusia are live bearers, that's pretty cool, so I won't give them too much flack. But I don't need to see another CT mosquitofish ever again. Go away.

I stopped at a different pond on the way home, one with no non-natives as far as I can tell, as a way to redeem things some.

Notemigonus crysoleucas

Lepomis gibbosus

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