And Esshup brings up a point I hadn't noticed. The gill flap appears relatively intact in this photo, and it seems to come to a point, with no evidence of an opercular tab like a 9" RES should display.
And yellow eyes on a RES?
The opercular tabs are "gone", as in eaten. I may not have pointed that out, thinking it was obvious in the picture when it might not have been. It was obvious to me when handling the fish. Both sides were gone. That could be throwing you a loop if you were looking for the red opercular tab, because it is not there at all. It is in some animal or bird or turtle's excrement by now.
Yellow eyes........... could the fact that the two darker pictures were taken after the fish had dried out on the bank under the sun all day have a bearing? I don't know. Would the red pigment stay in the eyes after the fish had dried out.
I'm giving you guys poor pictures and poor descriptions of the event, so any errors of identification are certainly going to be understandable. The picture of the gill raker is when the fish is pretty fresh and still limber. The other two pictures is after the fish had dried out on the bank all day and was completely stiff. Might have been good if I would have pointed that out earlier.
