Much Ado About Nothing

Mystery of the one-in-a-million 'Frankenstein fish' - Telegraph

 

 

By Hannah Furness

11:56PM BST 28 May 2012

Mark Sawyer, 53, said he was fishing for carp when he hooked the odd-looking specimen, which he initially thought was a common brown goldfish.

But on closer inspection he found it appeared to have the head of a roach, the body and tail of a brown goldfish and the rear fin of a bream.

Mr Sawyer, who works as the tackle editor for trade magazine the Angling Times, photographed it before throwing it back into Magpie Lake in Cambridge.
 

 

Dr Paul Garner, a fisheries ecologist, described the fish as truly one-off and said: "I have never seen one in the UK before. It must be at least a one-in-a-million fish and the odds of actually catching it are even greater than that.


"Goldfish and carp and from the same family of fish and it would not be uncommon for them to come together.
 
He added one of its parents is likely to have been a fan-tailed goldfish that had been kept in a garden pond and released into a waterway.
 
 
Another fish expert, Dr Mark Everard, said he thought the odd specimen is the result of a fan-tailed goldfish and a normal goldfish mating and had probably been released into the lake from a private aquarium.