---

Most Popular Stories

Caribou hunters' traditional practice violated state law, judge rules

Barrow red-hot entering Whaler Invitational

Wainwright girls, Barrow boys take team titles

Internship opportunities

First Point Hope hunter testifies in caribou hearing

---

Published on November 25th, 2009

Mystery fish stumps Barrow

By VICTORIA BARBER

Warning: file(galleries/data/.dat) [function.file]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/anico/aknews/functions/article_functions.inc on line 49

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/anico/aknews/functions/article_functions.inc on line 50

Warning: file(galleries/data/.dat) [function.file]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/anico/aknews/functions/article_functions.inc on line 49

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/anico/aknews/functions/article_functions.inc on line 50

Warning: file(galleries/data/.dat) [function.file]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/anico/aknews/functions/article_functions.inc on line 49

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/anico/aknews/functions/article_functions.inc on line 50

The morning that the mystery fish turned up Charles Maasak Brower had been doing his best to sleep in. But it was a Saturday and his wife was out of town, so with four sons running around the house he soon gave up.

"My boys were being boys and I got tired of the noise, so I asked them if they wanted to go caribou hunting and seal hunting," Brower said.

Around noon on Nov. 14 Brower packed his four sons - Qiuwak, 12, Matthew, 8, Thomas, 6, and Leo, 3 - into his Ford Explorer and set off down the beach toward Wainwright. It was still a little dark when, about six miles out of Barrow, Brower spotted something in the distance. Thinking it might be a seal, Brower got his gun out of the back of his car and walked closer, but whatever it was didn't move. When Brower finally got a good look, his jaw dropped.

"I said - what is that?!"

It was a fish of some kind, but Brower had never seen anything like it. Frozen solid, it had a long thick body that looked a little like an eel's, but with a bulging belly. About a foot tall, the fish had a blunt nose and pronounced lips. After scaring away a fox that was gnawing on its tail, Brower wrapped up the fish in a plastic bag to drive it home before it could thaw. Once there he mounted it on a tall box outside his window alongside the road.

Curious about his catch, Brower started asking people around town if they'd seen anything like it before. He asked elders, hunters and whaling captains. He asked biologists. He sent out a call on the VHF to the whole town - did anyone know what it was?

But no one had seen anything like it. About 200 people found their way over during the next couple days. At first they came from all directions in big groups, and then they came in a trickle of a couple people at a time, stopping by the frozen pedestal to marvel at the mystery fish. When Brower was home he'd open the window to lean out to field questions and give updates on the latest theory of the fish's identity. He took a photo on a digital camera so he could show it to people while he was making his way around town.

"They wanted to know if I got it in a net, if I got it on a fish hook, one asked if I shot it with a rifle," Brower said.

Local biologists came and were also stumped. They took photos to send to other biologists at universities in Fairbanks, Anchorage, Washington state and Canada. Brower started writing a list of all the different kinds of fish people thought that it might be - eel fish, wolffish, Pacific cod, rock fish.

"It might be a new species or something they don't even know about," Brower said.

Anne Jensen, general manager and senior scientist at Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corp., said that at first the fish looked like it might even be a prehistoric species but that was later ruled out. Both she and biologists at the North Slope Borough wildlife management department think it's most likely some kind of wolffish, a species that is known to live in arctic waters and in the Bering Sea.

That wouldn't make the find any less remarkable, because it doesn't look like any of the wolffish that have turned up around Barrow before.

"It's pretty clear that it's probably not a fish recorded here before," Jensen said. "It turns out it's a pretty weird fish."

Brower said that he's been getting updates from biologists about their ideas about his fish. So far, Brower said, it doesn't really look like they know. The specimens that they've been comparing his fish to are all sketches, or skin and bones preserved in a jar. Not an entire fish, minus the tail, frozen solid.

It is an unusual enough specimen that museums at the University of Fairbanks and the University of Washington have already expressed interest in adding the fish to their collections.

"It's a fairly big deal because it's an indication that things may be changing around here and we're seeing things that haven't been seen before, or it could be that it's such a rare species that it hasn't been recorded," said Jason Herreman, wildlife biologist with the borough.

But for now the fish remains - frozen outside - the hottest road side attraction in Barrow.

"It's my fish they say, I'm still wondering what I'm going to do with it," Brower said.

He might even eat it, he said. And he laughed.