Guntersville Report: Check out this unusual fish!

The cold winter has erased even the majority of the lily stems from the shallows along with all the shallow grass at Guntersville. The millfoil is still around in the 8 to 14 foot range. l'm waiting for the crappie to move up, even though I found 60 degree water earlier this week they haven't for me. Lack of oxygen may be a factor in a lot of areas.

I only caught a couple crappie, but did find some huge shellcrackers in a small 100 yard area Friday. Water temps had cooled to 48-52 degrees.

I caught the majority of them on jigs, then found this guy hanging out with them in the area. I caught this one on a pink jig with a minnow under a bobber at about 3 feet down. When it finally flashed, I thought it was a bass. Since it was more than 30 inches, I got serious, lol. It even surfaced once, but pulled like a cat or drum most of the time.

Come to find out, since this is the first one of these I've caught in my 40-plus years of fishing Guntersville, that it's a bowfin, about the only Jurassic era fish still in existence in fresh water.....it breaths air and can walk on land if needed. They can live to be over 30 years of age and this one was very healthy. Plus it had a nasty set of razor teeth! And, the little tiny horns on its head make it sort of look like Satan, lol :)

The bowfin is able to breathe air, using its swim bladder, which is connected to its gastrointestinal tract and allows it to regulate buoyancy in the water, as a primitive lung. The fish can be seen coming to the surface and gulping air at times.

Maybe close to a record for the lake, don't think they actually have a Guntersville Lake record for bowfins, but the state record is 16 pounds and some change.

Well, it chased me around the boat a couple times, got a mini rattle trap stuck in my net and grinned at me, so I decided to put it back. Very healthy fish and boy what an attitude!

I keep checking outside my house to see if it followed me home!!
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Some other nicknames for them in the South according to Outdoor Alabama are: grinnel, brindle, blackfish, mudfish, dogfish, shoepike, cypress bass, cypress trout, choupique, scaley cat, buglemouth bass, German bass, spottail, grinner, and brindlefish.

The roe can be used for caviar. They eat them in Louisiana but I don't. The little ones make good flathead bait.

I catch them often in the shallow backwaters of Lake Wheeler. They're a very aggressive and strong fish.

yep, we called them mudfish in sc

Always called the scaley cats. I caught one in the creek behind the house when I was little, on a peice of a hotdog :D

Scaley cat. What we called them.

I've caught a lot of them in backwater sloughs. I can remember my great grandfather caught one that reached all the way around a #3 washtub. This was in the early 1950's.

I use to catch a lot of those when I was younger in my 20's. I had not seen one in years until the other day I saw 2 of them swimming at the pumping station but I did not catch them

I think another name is Bow fin.

Nice catch. Interesting. I've heard of them never seen one.

Yeah, Bowfin or Grinnell. Here in Arkansas, we catch them in the spring when catfishing. Their fins turn a bright lime green when they get in the grass/weeds.
Nasty fish

He's a mean looking SOB. I've never caught one, i would love to sometime though.

What's the odds seen this the other day
And my dad catches one of these out of Seminole yesterday.

Mudfish or Bowfin is what they are called up here. Pretty rare catch here but they are in there. My uncle caught one last summer while we were running limb lines in a small creek off of the Ohio river.

A friend of mine, who knows much more about these fish than I do, says they seem to be attracted to bright vibrant colors. Maybe that's why I caught him on the bright pink Bobby Garland with a minnow attached. I had 3 lines out and the straight minnow line was catching the most fish. I had another with a blue ice jig and minnow on it.

Yep, the oldest species of freshwater fish known! Biologists claim they swam at the feet of dinosaurs:)