She turned crap-pie into gold.
A Missouri woman became the envy of anglers everywhere when she caught a super rare golden fish while casting lines in her backyard pond.
Angler Holly Haddan’s once-in-a-lifetime catch was identified by officials as a golden crappie, which is born with a genetic condition that makes its scales a shiny, gilded yellow color.
“I was very surprised to pull this one in,” Holly Haddan told McClatchy News of the aquatic anomaly, which she landed on October 3 while fishing at her new property in Springfield, Yahoo News reported.
“I decided to go down there with my family,” the Missourian said of striking living gold. “And we were all just bobber fishing with worms.”
Haddan explained that she didn’t know “much about this pond” and was “just fishing it to kind of see what was in it.”
Little did the angler know, that she would soon hook up with the gill-ded rarity.
“I wasn’t even paying attention,” she said. “I was talking to my brother who’s just recently home from the Marines, and he said, ‘Hey sis, your bob’s gone.’”
Haddan set the hook and subsequently reeled in her fortuitous fish. The fisherwoman initially thought her shiny quarry was a yellow perch until she examined it more closely and saw that it had the mouth and fins of a crappie — a type of panfish.
Accompanying Facebook photos posted by the Missouri Department Of Conservation show Haddan’s bedazzling two-pound, 13-inch catch.
Haddan’s golden crappie is the “rarest of the crappie species,” which is normally colored black and white, Crappie Fisher reported.
The golden crappie suffers from xanthochromism, a genetic condition that causes unusually yellow or orange pigmentation in animals, “similar to how albinism causes a lack of pigment,” per the Facebook post.
The phenomenon only affects fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds.
Needless to say, Haddan was overjoyed at her “vibrant” trophy.
“The picture doesn’t do it justice,” the lucky angler gushed. “It shines like gold when the sun hits it just right.”
“I’ve seen other people that say they’ve caught them, but I’ve never caught one myself or seen one with my own eyes,” added the overjoyed gal, who is currently housing the glittering critter in her Koi pound. She said she found her high-karat catch especially miraculous as “wasn’t aiming for it; it just happened to choose my worm.”
Haddan put the fish in a koi pond after catching it, and plans to later release the specimen back into the pond where she found it. “I like to eat fish, but I also don’t see the need to kill something when there’s no need for it,” she said.
This isn’t the first time someone has discovered a creature with a peculiar pigment.
In 2020, Indian villagers stumbled across a softshell turtle whose entire carapace was yellow.
