A fisherman in Canada keeps catching some of the strangest fish ever
A fisherman in Prince Edward Island is making waves for some of his unique and rather strange-looking catches hidden in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
Mackenzie Sapier, a 27-year-old from P.E.I., has been fishing commercially since he was about 12-years-old.
It wasn't until he moved to Australia for six years, however, that he began to fish recreationally.
Since then, Sapier has documented some of his craziest Canadian catches on social media — and you'll have to see the pictures to believe them.
One of Sapier's rarest catches? A blue lobster.
Sapier says that he caught the colourful creature in a trap last fall, fishing on the south side of P.E.I.
"Straight away, I could see that there was something weird in the trap," Sapier told Freshdaily. "Everyone was like, oh my god, that's a neon blue lobster. It was so colourful in the trap. It just stuck out like a sore thumb."
Even crazier? Sapier caught another blue lobster just a couple of weeks later, which is impressive considering that experts estimate blue lobsters are about one in two million.
Lightning really does strike twice.
Another one of Sapier's weird-looking catches is the snailfish, a slimy, benthic fish with one of the widest range of depths of any fish (we're talking around 8,000 metres).
"I wasn't sure what it was at all, really," Sapier said. "I wasn't even sure what sort of family of fish it would be in."
He added that the snailfish was hauled up in a snow crab trap about 50 miles off the coast of P.E.I.
"Nobody noticed it," he said. "It went in with the pan of crab below deck, and nobody noticed it until the next day."
But perhaps the scariest fish that Sapier has caught is the sea raven: a fanged, bulbous fish with rough skin like sandpaper and a swollen belly that looks straight out of Frankenfish.
"That thing is really weird," Sapier said. "We caught a few of them with fishing rods."
Sapier would hesitate to say that they catch sea raven often, but he admits that one usually turns up in the lobster traps every couple weeks.
"People kill them, but we always send them back down," he said. "I can't be bothered killing something that looks so cool."
Sapier says that his most unique catch in Canada took place this summer, when he fortuitously stumbled across a group of Northern pipefish while wading in a river.
"It's basically a Canadian sea horse," he explained. "I had no idea that we had them."
Sapier didn't have a fishing rod with him, but he did have a Go Pro, so he snapped a few photos of the slender fish that were floating against the current.
"They're long and slender like a stick," he said. "Whenever you get close to them, they swim off like an eel. Like a snake. It's really strange."
Sapier says that it's not just coincidence that he finds so many unique fish — he likes to got out looking for them.
He also rarely keeps the weird catches that he finds.
Speaking of the blue lobster, Sapier explained that he decided to release the colourful catch back into the ocean, even though it was big enough that he could have kept it.
Why?
"Because it's cool to have in the ocean," Sapier simply said.
His blue lobster probably appreciates it.
Mackenzie Sapier
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