The jury is still out on whether John Foster’s 4-plus-pound crappie will remain an Iowa record. Foster caught the fish on Sept. 23, and officials with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources announced the new fishing record in a Facebook post two days later. Soon after, however, the DNR updated its post to clarify that Foster’s black crappie might actually be a hybrid crappie — in which case it wouldn’t qualify as a new state record. The fish is currently living in an aquarium at a Bass Pro Shops as officials try to verify the species.
Foster caught his crappie from Sundown Lake, a private lake that’s accessible only to members of a local homeowners’ association. The roughly 400-acre lake is in Appanoose County, roughly 85 miles southeast of Des Moines.
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“I’d already caught six or eight crappies from a brush pile in six feet of water,” the 67-year-old retiree tells Outdoor Life. “Then I made a cast with a 1/16-ounce Road Runner jig and lost a big fish that got my line tangled in cover. I re-rigged with another Road Runner and made another cast to the same spot, and I got a hit from another big fish.”
The fish tried to get back into the brush, but Foster kept a tight line and quickly got it into his boat. He scooped the crappie up with a landing net and couldn’t believe how big it was. He knew he should weigh the fish, so he called his brother-in-law and fishing partner Steve Harding, who met him at the marina.
Photo courtesy John Foster
After seeing the fish, Harding decided they should contact the DNR to get it officially weighed and verified. The two anglers called up the state’s Rathbun Fish Hatchery and brought Foster’s fish there.
“[Someone] there told me it was a black crappie because it had seven or eight spines in the dorsal fin,” Foster says. “He said it could be a state-record black crappie and to have it weighed on a certified scale. The scale at the hatchery wasn’t certified, so we drove to a nearby meat market. It weighed the same on the meat market’s certified scale as it did at the hatchery — 4.08 pounds.”
That weight was more than enough for Foster’s crappie to break the previous Iowa black crappie record, which weighed 3.88 pounds and was caught in 2013. But within a couple days of his fish being added to the record book, Foster heard from a DNR official who said they weren’t positive his fish was a black crappie after all, and that it could be a hybrid crappie. (Iowa is home to both white and black crappies, and while it’s rare, the two species are capable of hybridizing in the wild.) The agency told Foster they’d need a fin sample from the fish to verify its species, which wasn’t a problem because Foster’s crappie was easy enough to find.
“After we weighed the fish at the meat market, I called Bass Pro Shops near Des Moines and asked if they’d like to have a state-record black crappie to put in their store aquarium,” Foster says. “They said sure, so we drove the fish to Bass Pro … and they released it into the big aquarium display tank inside the store.”
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Foster says a DNR official went to the store a few days later and took a fin clipping. Those DNA results still haven’t come back yet, and at this point, Foster’s fish is still listed as the state’s black crappie record. If the fish turns out to be a hybrid, however, Foster says it will be removed from the Iowa record book because the state doesn’t recognize hybrid crappies as records — even though neighboring Illinois and Nebraska do, as Foster points out.
“That would seem to be a logical solution to this issue. Just make my fish the Iowa hybrid crappie record,” Foster says. “But either way, it’s still a great fish, and I’ll have a replica mount of it made … I can also visit the fish anytime I want and watch it swimming around the Bass Pro tank.”
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