Latest Bowfin Stories
By Bob Frye Henry Veggian took one look at the fish -- with its large scales, bony head, and long, single dorsal fin -- hanging on the wall at Tackle Unlimited in Jefferson Hills and thought he was seeing an alien. It had to have come from Europe, he thought, or perhaps Asia. It certainly couldn't have come from around here. "I thought it had to be an invasive species. I'd never seen anything like it in my life," Veggian said. Truth be told, the fish was pulled from the Monongahela River....
CHARLOTTE, N.C. _ A lazy Sunday afternoon, Mother's Day, like many Barry Faw had spent fishing on Lake Wylie. Until he lobbed a plastic lizard into the shallow backwater and "a wake started through the water, following the lure like a torpedo." Instead of the largemouth bass he'd hoped for, Faw had hooked a 13-pound northern snakehead, a toothy predator that doesn't belong in the Catawba River or anywhere else outside Asia. Alone in a 13-foot kayak, Faw went jaw-to-jaw with one of the...
Latest Bowfin Reference Libraries
The bowfins are an order (Amiiformes) of primitive ray-finned fish. Only one species, the bowfin Amia calva, family Amiidae, exists today, although additional species in six families are known from Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Eocene fossils. These included the huge Leedsicthys, the biggest fish that ever existed. The bowfin and the gar are two of the freshwater fishes still extant that existed, almost unchanged from their current form, while the great dinosaurs roamed the earth. The most...
