Thanks, that was neat! I've seen a very large (about 2 feet across the shell) snapping turtle in a large (more than a square mile) inland lake in Michigan, and someone I know has pulled a pike more than 4 feet long out of an inland lake (those two critter types are probably responsible for most of the ducks with a foot missing) -- it wouldn't surprise me if even larger ones exist in Lake Michigan, and they have the advantage of being local species.
Quite likely a musky.....Torch Lake has them and Lake St. Clair has some monsters.
The current record is 59 inches and 58 lbs. and it was caught in one of lakes that feed into Torch Lake.
That article was well done. A great retort.
A fun aside: I live on Lake Michigan, a couple of hundred miles north of Chicago. When I clicked on this thread, my BS meter was off the chart.
I forget how many decades ago I read a great prank apology in our local paper. It pretended to be from a marine biology lab doing experiments in a man made lake adjacent to lake Michigan. It was apologizing to the public that a number of sharks having been bred to live in fresh water had escaped into the big lake. They were assuring the public it would never happen again.....
That bit of humor could have come from the Babylon Bee.
That story was the genesis of my screen name.