Syracuse.com - Strange appearance of lake trout innards results in concern from Cayuga Lake anglers

[HuntingNY-News]

DEC officials and fish pathologists, though, say it's nothing to worry about.

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Submitted photo-

I got the following email from John Creesey, who sent me this photo:

Last weekend my fishing buddies and I caught three lake trout on Cayuga lake. When we cleaned the trout, two out of three of them had this strange matter in their --lungs? My fishing buddies, Clea and Carl Barth, had never seen anything like it in their decades of catching lake trout. Could it be a bacteria or infection? Or maybe eggs in the development stage?

(I forwarded Creesey's email and photo to David Lemon, regional fisheries manager for the DEC's Region 7 office in Cortland. Lemon emailed me back with the following report:)

Lemon wrote:

"The organ in question appears to be the stomach and part of the digestive tract and obviously not a "lung". I forwarded to our fish pathologist and our the rest of the Regional Fisheries unit to be sure I wasn't missing anything but no one saw anything out of the ordinary.

"Given that the organ is in a bag it makes things look a little differently than it would naturally, but the yellow, wormy looking projections are simply pyloric caeca which are found in all trout and salmon and some other fish (for more, go this Web site.).

"Again, it doesn't appear to be abnormal in any way, except perhaps that it looks to have quite a bit of fat deposit around the caeca (a sign of a well-fed fish).

"Given there was a difference between what the angler "normally" sees inside the fish versus what he saw in this fish, I'd like to see a picture of what Mr. Cressey considers "normal" so we could, perhaps give a more definitive answer. My guess is that the high level of fat may be the cause of his confusion."

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog