A whopping 92 pound, nearly 50 inch Grass Carp was captured in Lake Concordia in Ferriday. Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries biologist Shelby Richard (Ree-shard) says the carp was taken during standard spring electrofishing sampling
“We know he was large but we didn’t know how big he was until we got back to the office where we could put him on a scale that could weigh him. And that’s when we saw he was 92 pounds and we looked up records and the IGFA record was a few pounds shy of that.”
Had this carp been captured by traditional fishing methods, it would have bested the current IGFA All-Tackle World Record by four pounds, which was caught in Bulgaria in 2009. It would have tied the current Bowfishing Association of America World Record, which was caught in Alabama in 2015.
Garss Carp are native to Asia and have been used in the United States since the 1960s to control aquatic vegetation in inland waterbodies. Richard says this is the first time they’ve ever observed a Grass Carp in Lake Concordia during sampling
“This fish had to travel through Bayou Cocodrie and whenever flood waters was bout flowing through the water control structure on Lake Concordia, that’s probably how he got in. Is going through that structure when it was overflowing into Lake Concordia.”
Richard says they are still trying to determine its age. They can live for 30 years. He says they’ve sent samples to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to see if it was sterile. But Richard says even if it was not sterile, Lake Concordia does not have the necessary habitat for reproduction
“If it was a smaller individual, then I’d be more worried. Okay do we have more reproduction going on close by. If it was small, I would think okay there might be more. Even if there is more, like I said they are not able to reproduce in that lake.”
