You’ve gotta love the Internet.

You open up your e-mail, and there sits a picture, sent by a friend or a friend of a friend, of a giant fish, a monster buck or some mythical creature.

Then come the details. Where, when, how. And that, of course, is how you  can tell they’re bogus. I got this picture today, Feb. 2, 2010. Here’s what the body of the e-mail said:

“Big Fish !!

“This Sturgeon was caught on the Black River at South Haven Michigan last
week.

“It weighed out at over 1,000 lbs and measured out at 11′1′. It was 56′
around the girth,
“And took over 6 and a half hours and 4 dozen beers for the 4 guys taking
turns reeling.”

Now, I know some hardy souls, folks who pooh-pooh the very notion of winter. But I can assure you that not even they would jump into Lake Michigan in short sleeves in January to show off a fish.

Because they can’t. It’s frozen.

Now, let’s assume that I’m being a little too niggling. Maybe the fish was caught last summer, that the e-mail went out a week later and is only now getting to my inbox. OK, fair enough.

But the e-mail claims the fish weighed 1,000 pounds. Uh oh. Problem. The type of sturgeon that lives in Lake Michigan is, fittingly enough, the lake sturgeon. They get big. Really big. But a thousand pounds? Half a ton? Hardly. According to the International Game Fish Association, the all-tackle world record lake sturgeon was a 168-pounder caught by Edward Paczkowski on the Georgian Bay in northern Lake Huron in 1982.

That’s a mighty big fish. And now we’re to believe that one SIX TIMES that size was caught in Lake Michigan, but no one heard about it until an e-mail circulated? Remember that in the summer of 2009, a world-record brown trout was taken from the Manistee River and made news everywhere from Newaygo to New Zealand. The angler who caught it, Tom Healy, was swamped with phone calls and interview requests from around the world. Yet a sturgeon that would have beaten the world record by 800 pounds wasn’t worth mentioning? And it was caught by “four guys”?

Ahem. You see my point. Now, let’s assume that it wasn’t a lake sturgeon but a white sturgeon, the really big kind that inhabit the Pacific coast. The world-record white sturgeon was 468 pounds, still less than half the size of our supposed Lake Michigan fish.

And we’re to assume that a saltwater white sturgeon grew to twice the world record size in fresh water more than 2,000 miles from home?

Yeah. And I’ve got a bridge for sale.

My guess is that the guys pictured were showing off a big shark, and some clever soul inserted a sturgeon in the picture via Photoshop.

And then told a real whopper.