Williams' catch now holds the record for the world's biggest paddlefish ever caught, surpassing one from Oklahoma by 13 ounces, according to MDC. And it dwarfed the paddlefish that Smith is accustomed to. Before Sunday, he said the biggest one he'd boated was 108 pounds, with keepers typically weighing between 40 and 70 pounds.

"I've been doing this for 18 years, and it's off the charts for anything I've ever seen," Smith said.

The fish was a female and full of eggs that were not close to maturity. Paddlefish of legal keeper size, such as the record-breaking fish, cannot be released in Missouri, in order to disincentivize anglers from throwing back male fish and keeping only females, whose coveted eggs can be processed into caviar that commands thousands of dollars. The black market has attracted poachers to Missouri from around the globe.

"Poaching is a big problem," said MDC's Branson. The sturgeon that are the source of eggs for famed Russian caviar have "been way overfished," fueling a hunt for alternatives like paddlefish eggs, he said.

"A lot of the world is looking to the next best thing," said Branson.

Despite the interest that paddlefish generate from poachers in the black-market caviar trade, their populations are doing well, MDC said.

An approximate age of Williams' fish was not immediately clear, but Clary, the state biologist, said that paddlefish can live up to 30 years. MDC officials took the jaw from the fish; studying its cross-sections will help them determine its age, in a way that's similar to counting tree rings.

MDC will also conduct other tests to learn more about the fish, including DNA analysis that can reveal whether it's a wild-born paddlefish or one of the many that are stocked by the state into three lakes formed behind dams: the Lake of the Ozarks, Truman Lake and Table Rock Lake.

Dams generally prevent the fish from successfully spawning in the lakes behind them because paddlefish ordinarily require different conditions to reproduce. But there is some evidence of natural paddlefish reproduction in Truman Lake, and it's possible for the fish to come downstream from Truman Lake into the Lake of the Ozarks, said Clary.

The lake-raised paddlefish tend to get bigger than their river-dwelling counterparts.

"We knew we had world-record (paddlefish) out there," Branson said. "It was just a matter of when someone was going to get one."

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