David,
My post has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how you caught it. There's a world of difference between a bluish walleye and the blue walleye that formerly existed in the Great Lakes. I've personally examined specimens of it that were collected back in the 1920s and preserved in museums; they had much larger eyes that were set closer together than wallleye, and were otherwise fundamentally different from all other walleye, sauger, pikeperch, whatever. They should have been recognized as a valid species rather than a subspecies. They were formerly abundant enough to support a substantial commercial fishery (there's a great discussion of this in Trautman's [1983] Fishes of Ohio) and used different spawning shoals at different times of the year than sympatric walleye. They're gone, period. A former colleague was working on the formal description of the southern walleye from the Mobile Basin (which is really dang close to extinction, too), and we got to play with all sorts of neat specimens (including blue walleye) for comparative purposes. Talk about blue walleyes that were stocked somewhere years back and have survived... well, it's just talk, and it distracts from real conservation efforts on underappreciated and understudied fish like southern walleye.
"Bluish" walleyes (but otherwise normal) occasionally show up in various places across the range of walleye, and folks always seem to jump on them as being the "last of the breed" or whatever. They're as special or unique as a piebald deer or an albino bullfrog.
Congratulations on your axanthic walleye, looks like it was a nice fish.
Topic: Once-in-lifetime fish found in local lake (Read 10631 times)