Experts have confirmed that a huge and unusually bright-colored fish recently caught in Minnesota is very old, which may have something to do with its rare vivid coloring.
Jason Fugate and his friend, Jamie Brichacek, were bow-fishing in the Brainerd Lakes Area when he caught a giant, bright orange, Bigmouth Buffalo fish.
Lackmann has seen thousands of bigmouth buffalo over the years, however he was surprised by the pictures of the one Fugate sent him.
Lackmann removed the otolith—ear stones found inside fish that can help calculate the age of a fish—and determined that the one Fugate caught was one of the oldest he's ever seen, which he thinks might have something to do with the special coloring.
"One of my hypotheses is that it's just a very old fish," he said. "And it might have just accumulated a lot of things over its lifetime. And that's why it was just so vivid orange like this."
He added that "it was previously thought that they could live 10 to 20 years max, maybe 30 years. But some of the first fish I began aging in Minnesota were well over 85 years old, even up to 110 years of age."
Fugate, who's getting the fish mounted, said there's more to it than just the special coloring.
"So about a year ago I started coming down with some illness," Fugate told KSTPTV. "And since then I've lost about 90 pounds. It's not a real good outlook for me."
"You know I'm not always in a good place, so in a lot of ways that fish kind of saved me," Fugate told KSTPTV. "Why was I there? Why did I get the opportunity with this fish? It showed me, you know, to keep going, don't give up."
Meanwhile, his wife, Kelly Fugate, is hoping the mystery of the fish will bring attention to her husband's mysterious malady.
"Hopefully we get some kind of answers soon. That's my hope," she told KSTPTV.
Fugate told Fox News the capture of the mystery fish has brought renewed hope to him and his family.
"Since it's happened, it's been a token of hope to me and my family with all the struggles that can happen," Fugate told Fox News.