Flamm City Fish ID

[Seth]

33 minutes ago, snagged in outlet 3 said:

Those long front fins look like the pickerel in your pictures.  All kinds of crazy stuff comes out of the Mississippi....

Good catch. I change my vote to chain pickerel then too.

[moguy1973]

Definitely not a gar with that forked tail.  Gar have a one piece tail.

[trouty mouth]

Thank you for all the replies. 

I agree with the people thinking it's a pickerel.

I'm pretty good with my fish identification and I swear that this thing was a pike. It's head shape/proportions didn't match up to what I've seen as far as pickerel go and the coloration/pattern was pike like. I just really want to believe it was a misplaced pike. 

How cool would it be to hook up to a monster Mississippi pike?

 

[jdmidwest]

Looks like a dead rotten carcass.

[Al Agnew]

Very little obvious difference between pickerel and pike if you can't see the color pattern well.  It's absolutely one or the other, and I think it is a pike.  For one thing, chain pickerel are not found in the Meramec system, grass pickerel are, and the color pattern, what little you can see of it, does not match grass pickerel at all, plus they are usually smaller than that.  Pike are rare anywhere in Missouri, but have been caught now and then in several parts of the state, including the Meramec.  This was probably a stray that came down the Mississippi from Iowa or Wisconsin.

[tjm]

It's been 35-40 years since I caught either but that fish appears to have scales on the gill cover =pike and it doesn't appear to have the teardrop (black vertical line below eye) that  pickerel would have, another pike characteristic is the rounded dorsal and anal fins compared with the pickerel's almost square fins. All these are visible in the images Seth posted. The dead fish is a northern pike, imo. As I recall these differences aren't obvious in fish less than 10'' or so, but I had both in some waters and they each had different regulations, so ID was kinda necessary.  In that area if it was over 2' it was a pike.

[Seth]

11 hours ago, Al Agnew said:

Very little obvious difference between pickerel and pike if you can't see the color pattern well.  It's absolutely one or the other, and I think it is a pike.  For one thing, chain pickerel are not found in the Meramec system, grass pickerel are, and the color pattern, what little you can see of it, does not match grass pickerel at all, plus they are usually smaller than that.  Pike are rare anywhere in Missouri, but have been caught now and then in several parts of the state, including the Meramec.  This was probably a stray that came down the Mississippi from Iowa or Wisconsin.

I wonder why the Meramec river system has grass pickerel, but not chain pickerel? Every so often, I see a grass pickerel hanging out in the weeds in the Maramec Spring branch. I've got a few of them to bite a jig and a trout worm, but have never been able to keep them on long enough to land one.

[tjm]

MDC inventory of the Meramec shows samples of northern pike in the 1940s, '50s & '60s and also grass pickerel. It would be about the extreme southern limit of pike's native range although the Mo. river held pike historically. Pike have been stocked Lake Ozarks ('97), Miller Lake ('66), Stockton Reservoir ('75) and in the Meremec River ('67) according to USGS.

[fisheye]

The Float Operator up from Highway 8 Bridge at the Meramec/Meramec Springs had a picture of a PIKE someone caught just upstream from the bridge.  This was at least 25 years ago.

PIKE looked to be over 30 inches long.

[Al Agnew]

There used to be a fish hatchery on a tributary of the upper Meramec, and they raised pike for a while.  Apparently some escaped from the hatchery, and showed up in a few collections on the upper portion of the Meramec for a few years.  There was never any evidence that they reproduced naturally in the river.  There have been occasional records of pike showing up in strange places in the state.  Like I said, probably this one, if it is a pike (I'm pretty sure it is) strayed down the Mississippi from farther north.

All of us fish nerds are waiting on the new book on the fish of Missouri to come out.  The old book has this to say about northern pike in Missouri:

"Before Department biologists began stocking northern pike in 1966, occasional specimens were reported by fishermen from widely scattered localities in northern and central Missouri.  Most reports were from the lower Osage River, where a small self-sustaining population may have existed.  Other records may have been based on individuals that strayed into Missouri from the north along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.  In recent years, the number of reports of northern pike from along the Missouri and upper Mississippi rivers has increased, and it is possible that limited reproduction is occurring in these areas.

The first stockings of northern pike in MIssouri were of adults into Deer Ridge Lake, Lewis County, and Miller Lake, Carter County, in March 1966.  Adults were also placed in ponds at Indian Trail Hatchery, Dent County.  The latter fish spawned successfully, and some of the resulting fry may have escaped into the Meramec River.  Northern pike were subsequently stocked into Thomas Hill Reservoir in 1967 and Stockton Reservoir in 1970.  Stocking of northern pike was discontinued in 1974, and natural reproduction has not been sufficient to maintain populations in any of these lakes.

...Currently, some of the largest natural populations of northern pike in Missouri are in borrow pits and drainage ditches on the flood plain of the Mississippi River in Clark and Marion counties."

As for chain pickerel, they apparently are not native to anywhere in the state except the St. Francis and Black river systems (the Black river system includes Current, Eleven Point, and Spring rivers), and waters that connect to the St. Francis River in the Bootheel (this includes Duck Creek).  In the "Fishes of Missouri" book, Pflieger says he examined a 24 incher an angler had caught on the lower Big Piney, and received reports of others being caught in that area, but has no idea how they got there, since they have never been collected anywhere else in the state besides the rivers mentioned above.