Q: My family and I fished for nine days in the Florida Keys. While fishing for snapper, we caught this fish. It looked like a mangrove snapper and had the head of a mangrove, but with swirly markings and blue lines on its stomach. The tail was more forked than a normal mangrove. We showed it to a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officer, and he had never seen anything like it before. It was a beautiful fish and we decided to let it go. Was it some kind of a hybrid?
Mark Stiehl
Jacksonville, Florida
A: It certainly sounds like something unusual, but it's impossible to tell exactly without having the fish to examine. (It might have still been impossible to know even if you had kept the fish!) The fish definitely appears to be a gray (a.k.a. mangrove) snapper. The dark pigmentation associated with the fish's head and eye and the shape of its anal and caudal fins are all characteristic of grays. However, the fish's pigmentation is very unusual. At least some snappers display a blotchy pattern when dormant; perhaps a combination of turbid water and the fish's activity at the time had something to do with its pigmentation. My first thought concerning the stripes on the sides and belly was that this somewhat resembled the lines on a lane snapper, but lanes don't have blue lines. I've heard of some indistinct dark blue stripes on gray snapper, but I've never personally observed this. Hybridization is a possibility, but this occurs a lot less often than most people think. It may have just been a situation where the fish you caught had a slight genetic abnormality; it apparently doesn't take much of a mutation to alter a fish's pigmentation. I really think that if you had spread the fish's caudal fin a bit, most of the fork would have disappeared. The fish is most likely an unusually pigmented gray snapper, but without having the fish in hand for examination, it's impossible to say if hybridization could be a possibility. In any case, you had a very unusual catch, and that's part of what makes fishing so interesting. — Ray Waldner
