Endangered Fish in the United States: Which Ones You Might Hook, and What to Do

The federal endangered species list carries 167 listings for fish in the United States: 90 endangered and 77 threatened (USFWS ECOS, October 2026). That makes fish the largest group of animals on the list, ahead of mammals, clams and birds. Nearly all of them live in fresh water or run up rivers from the sea to spawn. A handful are fish an angler can actually hook: sturgeon, bull trout, native trout of the Rockies and the Southwest, salmon and steelhead, the big minnows of the Colorado.

The Fish and Wildlife Service calls the Devils Hole pupfish the rarest fish in the world. It lives on one rock shelf of 215 square feet in a Nevada cavern, and in spring 2025, after two earthquakes shook the water, divers counted 38.

How many fish are endangered in the United States?

The count comes from the Fish and Wildlife Service’s ECOS database, which tracks every species protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). One species can appear more than once. Steelhead are listed eleven times, as eleven separate runs from Southern California to Puget Sound, and Atlantic sturgeon five times.

Source: USFWS ECOS listed species summary, read October 2026.

The problem is worldwide. In January 2025 the IUCN published the largest assessment yet of the world’s freshwater animals, in Nature: at least 4,294 of the 23,496 species assessed are at high risk of extinction. Freshwater fish came in at 26 percent threatened. That is worse than dragonflies (16 percent) and behind only crabs, crayfish and shrimp (30 percent). The American list is the local edition.

Which listed fish might you hook?

The table holds the thirteen listed fish anglers meet most, plus the Apache trout, delisted in 2024. Most of the 167 are fish you will never see on a hook: 1-inch pupfish in desert springs, darters under riffle stones, cavefish, madtoms. These fourteen take bait and lures and share water with fish you may keep. Status and listing year are from ECOS.

Also listed: Atlantic salmon of the Gulf of Maine rivers (endangered, 2009), the southern population of green sturgeon (threatened, 2006) and the Kootenai River white sturgeon (endangered, 1994). So are two small California trout, the Paiute cutthroat and the Little Kern golden trout (both threatened).

Salt water has a short list too: the U.S. smalltooth sawfish, the Nassau grouper, the oceanic whitetip shark, the giant manta ray, and the yelloweye rockfish and bocaccio of Puget Sound. Atlantic bluefin tuna is not on it; NOAA reviewed it in 2011 after a petition and did not list it.

Two fish have look-alikes. The pallid sturgeon shares the Missouri with the shovelnose sturgeon, which is legal in several states; Montana FWP tells them apart by the barbels. On a pallid the inner pair is usually a little shorter than the outer pair; on a shovelnose all four are about the same length and sit in a straight line. The two are so hard to tell apart in the wild that since 2010 the shovelnose has been listed as threatened for “similarity of appearance”. Its take ban covers only commercial fishing for shovelnose and their roe where the two live together; sport anglers follow state rules. Montana’s phrase: if you don’t know, let it go.

The bull trout’s look-alike is the brook trout, also a char with light spots on a dark body. The brook trout has worm-like markings on its back, black marks on its dorsal fin and a black line behind the white edge of its lower fins; the bull trout has neither.

In Montana the bull trout may be targeted only on Hungry Horse Reservoir, part of the South Fork Flathead and Lake Koocanusa, with a free catch card for Koocanusa or for Hungry Horse and the South Fork. Under the 2026 rules Koocanusa is catch-and-release all year and the South Fork in July only. Hungry Horse allows one bull trout a license year, from the third Saturday in May through August 15. A live bull trout may not be possessed for any reason, and every other water is closed to fishing for it.

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What do you do when you hook one?

Keep it in the water, unhook it or cut the line, and let it go. The Endangered Species Act forbids the “take” of a listed animal, and defines take as to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture or collect (16 U.S.C. § 1532). “Capture” is on that list, so even a fish hooked by accident has, strictly, been taken. The Act’s criminal penalties are for knowing violations, and the rules for some threatened fish, such as the humpback chub and razorback sucker, allow catch-and-release under state law. Keeping a listed fish is different, and so is fishing for it where no rule allows it.

The penalties are in § 1540. A knowing violation can bring a civil penalty of up to $25,000 in the Act, now $65,653 after the Fish and Wildlife Service’s inflation adjustment (50 CFR 11.33). The criminal penalty is a fine of up to $50,000, up to a year in prison, or both. Knowingly breaking the regulations that protect threatened fish carries lower caps: $31,513 civil in the Service’s table, and $25,000 and six months criminal. Any other violation can bring a civil penalty of up to $1,659. The fish is forfeited, and on a criminal conviction so can be the rod, the net, the truck and the boat.

What the agencies ask is simple:

1. Leave the fish in the water. A 6 ft (1.8 m) sturgeon lifted into the air is hurt by its own weight.
2. Back the hook out if it is in the lip. If it is deep, cut the line as close to the hook as you can, the same advice as on the catch-and-release page.
3. Hold it upright, head into the current, until it swims off on its own.
4. Take no fish out of the water for a photograph.
5. Report it when the agency asks. NOAA wants to hear about any stranded, injured or dead sturgeon on the Atlantic coast at (978) 281-9328, in the Southeast at (844) STURG-911 or (844) 788-7491. A tagged fish is worth a call to the state agency with the tag number, place and date.

Seeing someone keep one is another matter. The Fish and Wildlife Service takes wildlife crime tips at 1-844-397-8477 (1-844-FWS-TIPS), and NOAA’s enforcement hotline is (800) 853-1964 around the clock. The Act lets the agencies pay a reward, from the fines collected, to whoever gives information that leads to an arrest, a conviction or a penalty (§ 1540(d)). Your state’s warden line is on the first page of the regulations booklet; the terms on that page are defined under fishing terms.

Does your state have its own list?

Yes. Every state keeps its own list under its own law. New York lists 19 fish as endangered or threatened, from the shortnose and lake sturgeon down to the pugnose shiner and the mud sunfish. Texas lists 32 fish as threatened or endangered under state law. Only 11 of them carry a federal status on the state’s table; the other 21, among them the paddlefish and the blue sucker, are protected by Texas alone. A state listing forbids possession inside that state whatever the federal list says.

The practical rule is the one for any fish you cannot name: let it go, and look it up afterward, starting from the species hub.

What is the rarest fish in the United States?

The Devils Hole pupfish, which the Fish and Wildlife Service calls the rarest fish in the world; by head count it is also the most endangered fish in the country. It is 1 to 1.5 in (2.5 to 4 cm) long, iridescent blue in the males and olive in the females. The whole species lives in one water-filled cavern in a detached piece of Death Valley National Park in Nevada, and feeds and spawns on a shallow rock shelf of about 215 sq ft (20 m²). It has been on the federal list since the first list in 1967.

Divers count it twice a year, and the count reads like a heart monitor. From 1972 into the mid-1990s the spring count averaged around 200 and the fall count around 425. It fell to 35 in spring 2013 and climbed back to 191 in spring 2024.

Then earthquakes in December 2024 and February 2025 sent waves through the cavern that swept algae and eggs off the shelf. The spring 2025 count was 38; a March 2025 dive had found about 20. For the first time, biologists added 19 captive-raised pupfish to the wild population. The spring 2026 count found 77, and fish spawning again.

No angler will ever hook one. It shows the margin: a shelf the size of a parking space.

Why are freshwater fish in trouble?

A river is a line: everything upstream flows down it. The IUCN found that pollution, mainly from agriculture and forestry, affects more than half of the threatened freshwater species. It also names land cleared for farming, water extraction and dams, and says overfishing and invasive species have played a particularly strong role in extinctions.

The Colorado pikeminnow was the top predator of the Colorado basin, a minnow that may have reached 6 ft (1.8 m), with historical accounts of 88 lb (40 kg), and ran the river from Wyoming and Colorado to Mexico. Dams cut its migrations and changed the flows it spawned on. It is now found in three sub-basins, the longest fish of recent years was about 4 ft (1.2 m), and the San Juan population exists because hatchery fish were stocked there.

The pallid sturgeon was listed in 1990 for habitat destruction and change and overharvest, in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s summary. It is built for big, free-flowing, warm and muddy rivers; changes to the Missouri and the Mississippi head the Service’s list of what holds it back, ahead of illegal harvest. A female pallid takes 15 to 20 years to mature, so its recovery is measured in decades, not seasons. The humpback chub, found only in warm-water canyons of the Colorado basin, was listed because large dams and water use changed the river’s flow.

None of these fish was fished out. They were engineered out, by water taken for farms and cities, by dams, and by the fish stocked on top of them. The angler’s part is small but real: the fish you release is one the program did not have to raise.

Do listed fish ever come back?

Yes; the list is not a one-way door. The Apache trout was removed from it on September 4, 2024, the first sportfish delisted due to recovery, in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s words. There were 14 populations in 1979; there are 30 today, in 175 miles of White Mountain stream.

The Gila trout moved from endangered to threatened on August 17, 2006, with a special rule that let New Mexico and Arizona open angling. New Mexico opened its first Gila trout water on July 1, 2007, for the first time since the 1960s; a license and a free permit now put you on it.

The greenback cutthroat was down to four miles of Bear Creek near Colorado Springs when genetics found it in 2012. It was confirmed breeding on its own in Herman Gulch in 2022. The Lahontan cutthroat of Pyramid Lake, gone from the lake by 1943, was rediscovered in a Utah creek in 1977. It is back in Pyramid Lake, where it may be kept within a slot.

The humpback chub went from endangered to threatened in October 2021. The Fish and Wildlife Service counts more than 11,000 fish in the Little Colorado and over 3,300 in Westwater Canyon. The razorback sucker followed in July 2026. On the next edition of the list, a few more will have moved.

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The Water Temperature Fishing Chart. Take one water temperature reading, find it on the chart, and see which of 26 freshwater fish are spawning, feeding hard or slowing down. Six pages go deeper: bass, crappie, bluegill, walleye, catfish and trout. For your phone and the tackle box.

• Where they sit and what to throw at every band: bass, crappie, bluegill and walleye; catfish by species; trout: the 68 °F line where you stop, and where they hide
• A bass that drops 3 ft feels more pressure change than the biggest cold front: the front day by day, and what to throw on each
• The three thermometer mistakes that make a reading lie (the first one is the surface)
• The 26-fish chart: who's spawning, feeding hard or slowing down at your reading

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The chart's numbers come from state fish and wildlife agencies and fisheries research: 61 sources, each listed on the site.

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