Nebraska Man Catches Fish That Doesn’t Belong

When my father was in the Air Force, we spent a couple of years living in Nebraska. I was about eight or nine, about old enough to go fishing with my dad on his weekends off.

It was definitely one of those times in your life that you remember.

Of course, we didn’t end up too far away from the base just based on my dad seemingly always being on alert.

It was during the Cold War, so we had to keep relatively close to home. So when we would go fishing we ended up not exactly seeing too wide a variety in what we caught.

A lot of places are like that. You aren’t going to see too many different species in any small island body of water because if there were suddenly hundreds of different species of fish, it would screw up the ecosystem so quick it would snap your pole in half.

That being said, every once in a while you will see something that doesn’t belong.

In Nebraska, a new species has been recorded that hasn’t been spotted before within the state.

“We hear about new species in Nebraska from time to time, but most of them are unwanted, invasive species,” Daryl Bauer, Fisheries Outreach program manager of the state’s Game & Parks Commission

“I get reports almost every year of aquarium fish that were illegally released in our waters and then found dead or even caught by anglers.”

Well, last week Mr. Bauer got a call from a friend who caught a five inch and change long, two ounce longear sunfish.

Here’s the thing about it, that species of fish is native to Kansas.

And unless fish have suddenly developed the ability to walk on dry land, that is a fish that definite;ly should not be within the waters of the state of Nebraska.

The fish itself was caught with a simple nightcrawler, and given the fact that was only two ounces, didn’t exactly require a whole lot of fighting to reel it in.

The question though, is how the little fella managed to get all the way from Kansas to Nebraska.