SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Randy Straker thought his eyes were playing tricks on him Sunday afternoon when he noticed a neon green blur swim by his boat after a hooking a fish.

Yellowknifer Randy Straker pulled an unusual 14 pound jackfish from the North Arm Sunday afternoon. The fish's strange turquoise/green colouration remains a mystery. - Photos courtesy Craig Thomas Avid angler Randy Straker poses with a 14-pound Northern pike pulled from the North Arm of Great Slave Lake on Sunday afternoon. The fish's unique turquoise/green colouration remains a mystery.

It was after 4 p.m. and Straker had been out fishing with his friend Craig Thomas in the North Arm of Great Slave Lake for most of the afternoon. They were getting ready to head home when he felt a tug on his line.

Catching a 14-pound Northern pike is not unusual for the location but as the pike got closer to his boat, Straker said something seemed off.

"It came by the boat once and did a pass-by right on the surface and I thought, 'Oh that's a weird colour,'" he recalled. "It kind of flared open and opened its mouth and we saw bright green and bright blue."

He said at first he thought the polarized lenses on his sunglasses were causing the fish to look abnormal.

"I was about to take my glasses off and my buddy goes, 'Whoa! That's a weird looking fish,'" he said with a laugh. "The fins had a blue tinge to them, along the back was a lot greener and then when you saw the mouth it almost looked like it was wearing bright green lipstick."

Straker said he has been fishing the area for nearly five years and has never come across anything like it.

"We've seen some that are kind of albino with half regular colour and half more white and occasionally you'll see fish with spots on them but nothing like this," he said. "It was just a very strange fish."

Yellowknife biologist Peter Cott said he has heard reports of a few strangely-coloured fish caught in the North Arm this summer.

"I've been told by a colleague who is an avid pike angler that there have been a few caught in the North Arm this year," he said. "They are referring to them as 'neon pike'."

He said in the past he has seen pike organs with similar colours but never such intense pigment on the exterior. In both cases, he says there is no definitive cause.

"I've found some parts of pike to be bright green - their livers, I've seen being bright green, like a weird, unnatural bright green and have no idea why," he said. "I don't know what the issue is."

Straker said he posted the photos on his Facebook page hoping to get some kind of answer - so far, people are stumped.

"Someone on my Facebook said it looked like a 'rave fish' - that it looked like it was heading to a rave," he said. "You hear everything - maybe it's the diet, or a genetic anomaly but no one has really come back to say it's definitely this."

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