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Leggett: Ryan family lands likely world-record Rio Grande cichlid

Mike Leggett / American-Statesman Correspondent

This beautiful and brightly colored male Rio Grande cichlid decided to strike an inline spinner that Jackson Ryan, son of Reid and grandson of Nolan, was fishing on the Llano River. The fish may have been a new world record but the father and son released it to swim away. [Contributed by Reid Ryan]

NORTH LLANO RIVER — One thing about fishing any of our clear Hill Country streams in the spring and summer is that you’re going to catch fish.

Sometimes it’s a bunch of fish and sometimes it’s something you didn’t expect and maybe didn’t even know how to identify.

That’s what happened with Reid Ryan and his 20-year-old son Jackson on a recent trip on the North Llano River.

Fishing an inline spinner, Jackson hooked a fish that was large and dark and fighting like a bulldog. As he reeled it close to the boat, his dad could be heard shouting on the video of the event: “What is that thing? That thing is huge.”

“I didn’t know what it was,” Reid said after asking me if I knew what the fish was. I immediately recognized the Rio Grande cichlid, or Rio Grande perch, as many people in Texas call them.

A native of northern Mexico and South Texas, the Rio Grande cichlid (which makes it a cousin to the peacock bass of Venezuela and Brazil and of many aquarium fish) can be found in large impoundments of South Texas and even in some Hill Country ranch tanks.

But the one Jackson had hooked was a giant, one that the Ryans later found out was most likely a world-record fish, based on it’s length and weight. It measured over 12 inches in length and as many males of the cichlid family do, had developed a prominent hump on its forehead when it reached breeding age.

They took a couple of pictures of the strikingly-patterned fish, a dark forest green body with thousands of small lime colored spots all over, before releasing it to the river where it had been living.

I have caught them on plastic worms in Mexico, and spinner baits here in Texas. There is one that hangs in a boathouse on a small lake on Camp Verde Ranch south of Kerrville. He’s gotten pretty large over the years though I don’t know if he’s the only one in that particular body of water.

When the bream get fed in there, he shows up to gobble down a few of the protein pellets when they hit the water. Then he hangs there in the clear water of the boathouse and stares at me.