Big fish caught in Lancaster County | News, Sports, Jobs

Last week, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission announced the certification of a new state record flathead catfish.

Michael Wherley of Fayetteville, Franklin County, caught the fish from the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County on May 14 using a live rainbow trout for bait. After boating the monster catfish, Wherley and his companion immediately took the fish to a nearby tackle store to have it weighed on a certified scale.

PFBC Waterways Conservation Officer Jeff Schmidt was present at the weigh in to verify the species and the certified weight of the fish, both necessary requirements for any fish to be recognized as a new state record catch.

The huge catfish topped the scales at 66 lbs., 6 oz. and measured 50.25 inches long with a girth of 35 inches. Wherley’s fish broke the state record by more than 10 pounds. The previous record flathead came from the Schuylkill River in May 2020 and weighed 56lb., 3oz. To be considered a new state record, a fish must exceed the previous record by at least two ounces.

A remarkable final note to this fish story is that giant flathead is likely still swimming in the Susquehanna River. To transport the catfish to the weigh-in site, Wherley and his fishing companion kept it alive in a large plastic tote box filled with water and equipped with an aerator.

After all the required inspections and witness verifications for the record were completed, Wherley returned to the river and released the prize catfish, possibly to thrill another angler with the catch of a lifetime.

As a fisherman, it’s always encouraging to hear of great catches, especially new record-size fish. And there have been several new state records established here in Pennsylvania in the past four or five years.

CWD updates

For deer hunters here in south-central Pennsylvania, however, some news is not so encouraging as the ongoing problem of chronic wasting disease in our deer herd continues to expand.

There is no method to test live animals for CWD. Since July of 2022, the Game Commission has taken samples to test about 11,000 deer for the presence of CWD, with more than 7,000 of those samples coming from deer harvested by hunters.

More than 400 deer tested positive for CWD, and 243 positves were deer harvested by hunters. Last year, CWD testing revealed 243 deer tested positive, and 174 of those were animals harvested by hunters.

Of course, Blair and Bedford counties were “Ground Zero” for the first wild deer detected with CWD back in 2012 and became part of Disease Management Area 2, which has expanded over an extensive area of south-central Pennsylvania. Several years ago, the Game Commission designated a section of DMA 2 as an “Established Area” because CWD is now considered to be established within the deer population there. The EA includes parts of Bedford, Blair, Franklin, Fulton, and Huntingdon counties and has produced almost 90 percent of all the positive tests in wild deer since 2012.

“CWD surveillance is crucial to managing the disease,” said Game Commission CWD Section Supervisor Andrea Korman. “CWD is a serious threat to deer and elk.

Knowing where the disease is allows us to focus our efforts to keep more deer from becoming infected.”

One fact regarding CWD in our region that I found especially troubling last year was that one in five adult deer harvested by hunters in Wildlife Management Unit 4A, which includes the EA, had tested positive for CWD. According to the CWD surveillance information for 2022-2023, that ratio has now increased to one in three hunter-harvested adult deer that have tested positive for CWD.

To monitor the rates of CWD infection, the Game Commission began a research study in cooperation with the Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Penn State University and the Wildlife Futures Program at Penn Vet, the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine.

Thirty-two deer were captured in Bedford and Fulton counties and fitted with ear tags and GPS collars. When one of these deer is harvested by a hunter or otherwise found dead, researchers will test the animal for CWD. Hunters or anyone finding a tagged deer is asked to call the number on the tag to report it.

A wild deer in Dauphin County has tested positive for CWD. This is the first time CWD has been detected in a wild deer on the east side of the Susquehanna River.

“Because of this continued spread, we increased the antlerless allocations in WMUs where CWD has been detected for this upcoming hunting season,” Korman said. “We will be closely monitoring the harvest to see if that increased allocation was sufficient to slow the spread of the disease, and if not, other options will be considered, including extending the seasons to create more opportunities for hunters to harvest deer in these areas.”

For more information about CWD in Pennsylvania, including access to the CWD Surveillance Dashboard and the CWD Response Plan, is available at www.pgc.pa.gov/cwd.