Did some looking around. This current fish was taken in Alaska where the previous largest was around thirty pounds. In a interview a reporter asked a DFG official a regional manger how old the fish was. He said he did not know, but thought it might be 175 years or more.
Obviously he had no clue, and he is no Rockfish expert.
Of Course that didn't stop every stupid media outlet in the world from saying we are out there killing 200 year old fish.
This is why you have to be so careful about what you say to the media. Eventually someone might get around to publishing the true age of this fish but by then over half a million people will have seen the bogus story and will think we are killing fish as old as the Redwoods.
I learned about this the hard way when I was just a kid putting myself through collage part time fishing for a living.
After I caught a Striper larger then the state record a reporter showed up and asked a bunch of questions, one of which was: "Do you catch a lot of big fish?" I told him straight up that I was averaging a hundred stripers a year over ten pounds, with about a dozen over twenty, and a few over thirty each year. He then asked why I caught so many, and I told him I was on the water several days a week, and almost every day all summer, and since I fished so much I could recognize patterns which better allowed me to target the larger fish.
When the article came out that was turned into: "...Day kills hundreds of true trophy sized striped bass every year, when asked why he said "Skill and Tenacity"...."
Needless to say I got some shit for it.
People love to spin things for their benefit. They also like to take little things and make them into big things to piss people off, get a reaction, or paint someone they hate as the bad guy, especially now that we have message board, blog, youtube video viral type media fame.
Like I said watch what you say to the media because you never know how they will spin it.
It makes me sick to see this story all over the web with all the ignorant comments. The guy caught a legal fish, it's not as big as they get, or even the world record, it's just a big rockfish, and at the point he got it to the surface only good for mounting or dinner.
It's not the end of the world, these fish are not endangered, it's not like he broke into the National Gallery, stole the Constitution, then set it alight to start his BRBQ.
Sorry for the rant, these things tend to really piss me off. I just hate misinformation.
Jim