Misha Skopets’ Biggest Fish

ONE DAY in the summer of 1979, Dr. Mikhail “Misha” Skopets, a young Russian ichthyologist based in Magadan in the Soviet Far East, found a mysterious fish skeleton in the stomach of a Boganid char. He’d been cutting up the latter for dinner on an expedition to the remote and frigid Elgygytgyn Lake, a uniquely deep, round, air-clear basin of water created three and a half million years ago by a meteorite. Recognizing the skeleton as likely belonging to a new species, he arranged to return, six years later, to search for its owner, prepared to spend all three ice-free months if necessary.

For weeks he probed the lake edge with rod and reel. No luck. As the ice receded he began using a boat to get out onto the lake. There, using ropes and beach rocks to suspend a gill net at a depth of 300 feet, he snared, the long-finned char, turned out to be a new genus, an evolutionary link between char () and grayling () Astonishingly, one 12-inch specimen was 30 years old, the same age as him. “It was the most exciting moment in my scientific career,” the now older and phenomenally accomplished Skopets told me recently.