It’s a jump scare, we know. But we’re willing to risk your well-being this early in the morning to figure out the mystery haunting us all at Milwaukee Magazine: What kind of fish is this?
This weekend, a member of the Milwaukee Magazine team was wandering the beach along Lake Michigan’s shore near Cedar Grove, and she stumbled upon this fish … or at least what’s left of it.
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The carcass was pretty big – probably a little under two feet long, with a big head and a wide mouth filled with menacing-looking teeth. But it’s not a sturgeon, not a salmon, not a lake trout. So what could it be?
She brought the photo to our Monday morning staff meeting, and everyone insisted on passing her phone around, only to be met with a lot of uncertain guesses and “I don’t knows.”
“Look at those teeth!” one editor said.
“Good luck swimming after coming face to face with that thing,” another chimed in.
Many agreed that it’s kind of giving anglerfish, one of those creepy, bioluminescent sea-bottom dwellers.
“If only we had a large online audience that’s surely filled with experts on fish local to Wisconsin,” someone added.
Everyone turned to look at them.
“I’ll write something up!” I said.
So here we are. Do you know what this fish is?
We only want to know because we are curious. We need to know if this is some fish from the depths of Lake Michigan, a regular fish too mangled to look like itself after death or a creature from another world entirely.
