The consumer be damned, what’s important is the IGFA will have proper protocol for certifying all them lab-induced trophies we can look forward to in the coming millennia …

As every watershed could wind up whelping mongrel fish; escapees from fish farms mating frantically with whatever genetic material is pumped into the overly warm trickle by Fish & Game, the real question is for us anglers – can we broaden our minds long enough to redefine our catch?

We’ve failed horribly in the past.

Recent sampling in Europe has found as much as 30% of fish at market mislabeled. While no one is pointing fingers at some broader conspiracy to replace fancy cuts with mongrel fillets, our collective palate wouldn’t know guppy from Fillet O’ Fish.

… we prove that daily at the drive thru …

“Fish passes through so many hands from the time it’s caught to the time it’s sold that it’s hard to tell where the mislabeling occurs or whether it’s intentional. That makes the process very difficult to police,”

In the US, Consumer Reports suggests 20-25% of the fish on store shelves isn’t the product advertised.

Genetic bar coding will allow many extra world records of the more mundane variety, like hybrid Rain-browns, or the fabled Kokanee-Walleye-Musky mixture, known fondly as the “Kowalski” – takes artificials voraciously, fights like hell, only you have to teach it to swim …

Outside of a chaste population of fingerlings in some chilly headwater, genetic bar coding will confirm that everything that bumps ass on algae has some form of interloper in its bloodline, and outside of the hoary ancient records where only a shock tippet and a couple of feet of leader was needed, nearly all non-digital IGFA records will likely join Roger Maris’s as some quaint but meaningful codicil is attached (*61).

There will only be two kinds of fish left; Mother Nature fish – found behind glass in aquariums – whose pedigree rivals that of royal and ancient, and *fish … “real” having been trademarked in an earlier court battle …

*Fish :  contains lips, beaks, heavy metals, nitrogenous fertilizers, soy meal, jowls, gills, scales, copepods, and organic matter. Organic Matter contains more lips, innards, test tube genetic material, red dye #4, and the occasional fingernail …