Mythical Catfish?......

[DARK30]

Most of us have no doubt read the "Minnesota River Fishtails" piece done by Konrad Schmidt. You can find it easy enough by doing a search. Legends of a 153 pound Flathead and a 160 pound Blue seam to be around but good evidence is hard to come by. I got in touch with Konrad via e-mail and his response was this..

I've been in the field and have not had a chance to go through what Fisheries

currently has a file for the two fish you inquired about.

Having once been an avid catfish angler, I was interested in how large they got.

>From what I recall, there is no additional information on the former state

record flathead. I got blue cat account from Dr. James Underhill who was a

former curator of the fish collection at the Bell Museum of Natural History. He

had found a very old newspaper article that I believe was from Granite Falls. I

cannot recall the year, but sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s. The

description of a fork tail and size could only be a blue cat. Today, the species

does not occur in Minnesota probably due the lock and dam system on the

Mississippi River. In the late 1970s, the DNR did stock them in the St. Croix

River, but never became established.

Hope this helps.

Konrad

I'll keep my ears open for any more info...and if there are any good investigators in house, by all means knock your self out on this one. The Bell Museum might be a good place to start or maybe some newspaper archives from Granite Falls.

I Want To Believe.

[goblueM]

Konrad is a good guy, we used to ask him about fish ID when we had any questions when doing research trials. If you go to him and ask where to get a particular species he can tell you down to the pool in a creek where to get it at a certain time of year. Knows a TON about the fish in this state.

The Bell Museum is a great resource as well, its pretty amazing.