Fishing is an extremely entertaining affair. He is fond of not only men, but also many women. For most of them today, this hobby is a real hobby, to which they devote holidays, and weekends, and days off, and holidays.
Inveterate fishermen use professional equipment, read special literature, make trips to distant lakes and stakes, spend an extremely long time there. Any such lover must have a personal record, captured in the 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 guests.
Given the tendency of fishermen of all ages to some, to put it mildly, exaggeration, we can conclude that not all the stories about the huge pikes caught in the entire history of mankind can be trusted. For example, there is a legend that the largest pike was caught using a regular net in 1497, and its age was 270 years.
To determine how old the pike was, the ring put on this fish on the orders of King Frederick the Second supposedly in 1230 helped. Probably, the pike was caught in those days, and then it was just ringed, after which it was released into the wild.
It is said that this largest pike was 5 meters long 70 centimeters, and its weight reached 140 kg! The same story adds that there was no natural pigment in its scales - it 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 already 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 collected 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, in Canada. It is called maskinong. This species is extremely similar to an ordinary pike.
Compared to its other relatives, pike of the maskinong species are much more resilient, have larger sizes and longer life spans. The color of the scales of this type of pike is also similar to the color of a regular pike. They are silver or brown, gray or green with stripes of a dark shade, decaying into spots.
In 1660, an episode of catching a similar specimen was recorded by Pierre Radisson, a French explorer. The recorded catch was two meters in size and seventy-five kilograms in weight. And although material evidence as photos or a skeleton has not been preserved to our time, this information can be considered true, since some specimens of these American predators reach a weight of 50 kilograms.
Maskinong is the biggest pike. Photos taken by modern anglers definitely prove this. Suppose that this instance is not exactly 2 meters, but the episode is not included in the Guinness book. For a fish of this species, a length of 180 centimeters is considered the most common thing.
Small maskingong pike already begin to eat live food, as befits a predator, in the first year of its existence, having a body length of only five centimeters. Thanks to this, they grow extremely fast. Over their lifetime - and this is about thirty years - they gain an average weight of 32 kilograms.
