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I've explained this about fifty times, but apparently I must (once again) clarify the rule on hybrids for the contest.:
HYBRIDS DO NOT COUNT IN THE CONTEST.
The ONLY EXCEPTION is if you catch a fish where it is obviously species X (where all the external characteristics are indicative of species X) but it happens to have some hybrid DNA in it (so a few small barely noticeable details indicate it might be mixed with species Y). In this case, you can still count it as species X.
YOU CANNOT COUNT IT AS SPECIES Y. EVER. OBVIOUSLY.
This has always been the rule, and I think it's perfectly clear. If you catch a bluegill but it looks like it perhaps has a little bit of green sunfish DNA in it, you can still count it as a bluegill.
Would a tiger musky count as a musky?
That's the reason the "we will allow certain hybrids if their parentage is absolutely 100% certain to be 50% or more the claimed species" rule was put in place. Tiger muskies are 100% gauranteed to have 50%+ muskie DNA in them. They are sterile, so will always be 50% muskie. This was NOT to allow people who catch a 10% or 20% introgressed hybrid of something to claim over and over again that their weird-looking bluegill is a warmouth hybrid, that their weird-looking white sucker is a razorback hybrid, or that the weird-looking carp you caught might have 2% Koi in it so it should count as a koi. That's what you're asking us to do. No thanks. I've tried it. It doesn't work.
And the ONLY reason we added this caveat about stupid hybrids in the first place is because of people whining about catching tiger muskies and not being able to count them as anything at all, as if they hadn't caught the fish.
But these introgressed carp/koi/whatever fish are an entirely different story. They might have a variable amount of koi parentage - maybe 1%, 2%, 50%, who knows? They might be hybridized with a fish that looks like a koi, but that koi might be 40-50% common carp itself because koi breeders constantly outcross their koi with common carp. The massive amount of hybridization was why I resisted adding the Koi as a seperate species in the first place, because I thought there was so much introgression that every common carp has some amount of koi DNA in it, and every single koi has some common carp DNA in it. They are not seperate species anymore. Every single one of these fish might have a little bit of koi DNA, but all carp have some koi DNA - how much is enough? 25%? 50%? How do you measure that?
After the contest is over, I'm going to remove koi as a valid species again, which is the right decision that I should've made instead of allowing this. Koi are not a catchable seperate species from Common Carp. If somebody catches an obvious 100% koi from somebody's backyard pond I will still count it. But once the contest is over the koi will be deleted because I was stupid to allow it in the first place.
AND we'll be going back to "no hybrids of any kind" from now on, if I choose to do this again next year.