LIIDLII KUE/FORT SIMPSON
A strangely coloured fish raised some eyebrows and questions when it was pulled out of the water near Fort Simpson last month.

AJ Augier of Fort Simpson holds the abnormally coloured goldeye that he caught in a fishnet where the Liard and Mackenzie Rivers meet. The fish has a colour aberration that can also occur in carp.

AJ Augier was checking his fishnet at 6 a.m. on June 16 beside Gros Cap, the name for a point of land where the Liard and Mackenzie Rivers meet near Fort Simpson. Augier often puts his net in the evening and pulls out coney and whitefish the next morning.

On this occasion, Augier received a surprise. The net contained three goldeyes, two that were a normal silvery-white colour and one that was completely different.

"Right away it looked suspicious to me," he said.

Augier, whose father was a commercial fisherman and who grew up around the fishing industry both in Saskatchewan and Alberta, knows what goldeyes are supposed to look like.

"I've seen them since I was a kid," he said.

The fish had bright red colouration throughout all of its fins, around its eyes and gills as well as on the lower half of its body. The colours were really dark when the fish was alive, but faded a bit after it died, he said.

Augier's immediate thoughts were that maybe the goldeye had swum up from Alberta and had chemical burns. To find out more he gave it to the local office of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

Nic Larter, the department's local manager of wildlife research and monitoring, had never seen a goldeye before, let alone one like this.

"It's like someone injected a red dye in there," he said.

"It's something unique."

He sent photos of the fish to Deanna Leonard, a fisheries management biologist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Her response was that Augier's goldeye has a colour aberration that also occurs in carp.

"Not an albino, but very rare," she wrote.

Augier said he was interested to find out the answer for why the fish was red. Goldeyes can be found from the southern U.S. to as far north as Aklavik on the Mackenzie River. On average they are less than a pound and 30 centimetres in length.

The fish has notable golden irises and prefers turbid, slower moving waters of lakes and rivers where it feeds on insects, crustaceans, fish, frogs and mice.

Goldeyes are great to eat either fresh, frozen or smoked, said Augier.