08-08-2019, 08:21 PM
http://www.startribune.com/record-catch-...525677101/
Alec Lackmann doesn’t quite have his Ph.D. yet, but he’s already made his mark on science.
Lackmann, a graduate student at North Dakota State University, set out to study the buffalo fish — and what he found amazed him.
Sampling in the waters of west-central Minnesota and collecting catches from anglers, Lackmann found five bigmouth buffalo fish more than 100 years old — including a 112-year-old female taken from Crystal Lake near Pelican Rapids in Otter Tail County.
Bomb radiocarbon dating verified the fish’s age, making it the oldest age-validated freshwater fish ever taken. Lackmann and his research team recently published their findings in the scientific journal Communications Biology.
“It was quite stunning and shocking to comprehend that there was a fish that old,” Lackmann said Wednesday. “Initially, I was very skeptical at what I was looking at. I thought there was no way these fish were that old.
Impressive, but there is a sad side to this too. Most of the fish they found were 80-90 years old, indicating that they've had difficulty reproducing in recent years .
Anyway, I wonder whether there are any older ones out there? (I will note that 175-year-old fish have previously been discovered in saltwater, so I wouldn't think it was out of the question )
Alec Lackmann doesn’t quite have his Ph.D. yet, but he’s already made his mark on science.
Lackmann, a graduate student at North Dakota State University, set out to study the buffalo fish — and what he found amazed him.
Sampling in the waters of west-central Minnesota and collecting catches from anglers, Lackmann found five bigmouth buffalo fish more than 100 years old — including a 112-year-old female taken from Crystal Lake near Pelican Rapids in Otter Tail County.
Bomb radiocarbon dating verified the fish’s age, making it the oldest age-validated freshwater fish ever taken. Lackmann and his research team recently published their findings in the scientific journal Communications Biology.
“It was quite stunning and shocking to comprehend that there was a fish that old,” Lackmann said Wednesday. “Initially, I was very skeptical at what I was looking at. I thought there was no way these fish were that old.
Impressive, but there is a sad side to this too. Most of the fish they found were 80-90 years old, indicating that they've had difficulty reproducing in recent years .
Anyway, I wonder whether there are any older ones out there? (I will note that 175-year-old fish have previously been discovered in saltwater, so I wouldn't think it was out of the question )
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