Rare fish with vivid blue mutation caught in Virginia. See ‘one-in-a-lifetime’ catch

A Virginia angler reeled in a rare catch — a fish with a “vibrant” blue mutation, photos show.

John Byrd said he was fishing when he pulled a chain pickerel out of the water and discovered its mouth was bright blue.

“I’d never seen one that color,” Byrd told the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources in a July 13 blog post. “And I’ve been fishing in that pond for more than 20 years.”

Pictures that Byrd shared on Facebook show the 11.5-inch creature had a vivid blue hue inside and outside its mouth. It turns out, the fish was OK but had a genetic mutation that caused it to deviate from the normal yellowish-green pigment.

“The coloration expressed by the blue pickerel is extremely rare,” Scott Herrmann, a regional fisheries biologist, said in the blog post. “It pretty much falls into the one-in-a-lifetime category of catches.”

Byrd, a Bowling Green resident who served in the military, is a longtime fisherman. But he said the unusual pickerel caught him by surprise.

“I can’t stop grinning right now,” Byrd wrote June 29 on Facebook.

Chain pickerel are found in rivers, streams and other bodies of water in Virginia. Though experts say the blue coloring isn’t common, sightings have been reported in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

Byrd kept his unique catch, which he reeled in at a private pond in Caroline County. The region is roughly 40 miles northeast of Richmond.

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