Fishing is extremely entertaining. They are fond of not only men, but also many of the fair sex. For most of them today, this hobby is a real hobby, to which they devote holidays, weekends, and time off, and vacations.
Avid fishermen use professional equipment, read special literature, go on trips to distant lakes and bets, spend extremely long time there. Any such amateur necessarily has a personal record, captured in a photo with the caption: “My biggest pike”, “The most successful catch” or “The most successful fisherman”. This trophy is displayed with pleasure and pride to the guests.
Given the tendency of fishermen of all ages to some, to put it mildly, exaggerations, we can conclude that not all stories about huge pikes caught in the history of mankind can be trusted. For example, there is a legend that the largest pike was caught with a regular net in 1497, and its age was 270 years.
Determining how old the pike was was helped by a ring put on this fish by order of King Frederick the Second, allegedly in 1230. It must have been a pikecaught in those days, and then she was simply ringed, after which she was released.
They say that this largest pike was 5 meters 70 centimeters long, and its mass reached 140 kg! The same story adds that there was no natural pigment in her scales - she was pure white. There is also a legend that the skeleton of the caught fish was transferred to one of the museums in the German city of Mannheim.
But according to other sources, this skeleton was repeatedly analyzed, and the results showed that it is an ordinary fake. This is not the biggest pike at all, because the model was assembled from the spines of five different pikes.
But modern zoology has scientifically stated that the largest pike in the world today lives in North America, Canada. It is called masking. This species is extremely similar to the common pike.
Compared to their other relatives, masking pikes are much more enduring, have larger sizes and longer life spans. The coloration of the scales of this species of pike is also similar to that of the common pike. They are silver or brown, gray or green with stripes of a dark shade, breaking up into spots.
In 1660, an episode of catching a similar specimen was recorded by Pierre Radisson, a French explorer. The registered catch measured two meters in size and weighed seventy-five kilograms. And although material evidence in the form of photographs or a skeleton has not survived to our time, this information can be considered true, since somespecimens of these American predators reach a weight of 50 kilograms.
The Muskinong is the biggest pike. Photos taken by modern anglers definitely prove this. Let this instance not exactly 2 meters, but the episode is not listed in the Guinness book. For a fish of this species, a length of 180 centimeters is considered the most common.
Little muskinong squints are already beginning to feed on live food, as befits a predator, in the very first year of their existence, having a body length of only five centimeters. As a result, they grow extremely fast. Over their lifespan - and this is about thirty years - they gain weight on average 32 kilograms.
