Fake Fish Fit Any Size Tale

There’s little fish slime in the future of taxidermy.

More and more anglers are getting their dream fish mounted for their office wall, even if the fish is a dream.

You can have your bass mounted and release it, too, without even bringing the fish to the taxidermist. You don’t even need photos or measurements.

Such is the state of taxidermy in this virtual world: trophy fish can now be ordered like L.L. Bean boots.

The centuries-old art of skinning, stuffing and varnishing a fish so it can be stuck on the wall and bragged about is still alive. But taxidermists now make trophies out of resin and plastic, too.

They can simply go to a shelf and pull down a blank - an 18-inch rainbow, say, or a 21-inch largemouth bass - paint it, stick on synthetic fins, and voila.

The shift toward fake-fish trophies, which has accelerated over the last few years, has to do with their durability, as well as with a new environmental sensitivity that enables anglers to claim, the way movie credits sometimes do, that no animals were harmed in the making of this trophy.

A few saltwater species, like sailfish, have long been reproduced synthetically because their oily skin deteriorates quickly. But taxidermists now make replicas of everything from arctic char to piranha.

Costs still run around $180 for an 18-inch sport fish, about what a traditional mount would cost.

But that might be a lot cheaper in the long run, since you could chop out the expenses for bait, rods, reels, boat, and travel.

Some taxidermists say their customers initially come in with honest intentions. But when they find out they only have to shell out a little extra cash to make their trophy a few inches bigger, well, you know how anglers are.