Freshwater Fish Species Outside the Big Families: Sturgeon, Gar, Bowfin, Burbot

North America has 1,453 freshwater fish species, by the 2023 count of the continent’s two fish-science societies, and anglers chase only a sliver of them. About a third of the native species are minnows and a fifth are darters and perches; a Virginia Tech extension paper puts the familiar sport fish at about 5%. Beyond the bass, trout, catfish, pike and perch families sits a short list of fish that every angler meets sooner or later and few can name. Below: ten of them, how to recognize each, how big it gets, and where it lives.

A Texas rule of thumb for alligator gar: every extra foot doubles the fish’s age. Three feet at two and a half years, four feet at five, seven feet at about forty.

Start here

• Burbot: the freshwater cod that spawns under the ice and tastes like lobster.
• Lake whitefish: when it spawns, how to tell it from cisco, and why the Great Lakes catch has halved.
• Pike, muskie and pickerel: the toothy ambush hunters, told apart.
• Types of salmon: the five Pacific salmon and the Atlantic salmon.

Ten fish outside the big families

The armored ones: sturgeon and paddlefish

The lake sturgeon belongs to a line at least 150 million years old. A typical adult is 4 to 6 ft long, 30 to 80 lb and 50 to 100 years old; the rod-and-reel record, 168 lb, came from Ontario’s Georgian Bay in 1982 on a spinner and 12 lb line. The white sturgeon of the Pacific coast is bigger again: more than 10 ft, a century old, and the largest freshwater fish on the continent. Its record of 468 lb was caught at Benicia, California, in 1983.

The paddlefish is the odd relative. It eats only plankton, swimming with its mouth open, and its paddle can be a third of its body. The record weighed 164 lb, from Keystone Lake, Oklahoma, in 2021.

The living fossils: gar and bowfin

The alligator gar is the giant of the South. Texas Parks and Wildlife gives fish of 8 ft and more than 300 lb, and a 327 lb gar netted in Mississippi in 2011 was probably at least 95 years old. The current IGFA record is 283 lb, caught by Art Weston on Sam Rayburn Lake, Texas, in September 2023 on 6 lb line; it replaced a Rio Grande fish that had stood since 1951. The longnose gar is the common one, across the eastern states, and its needle of a snout is unmistakable.

The bowfin is the last of its family. It gulps air and survives in stagnant, low-oxygen water. In 2022 scientists split it into two species. Much of the Midwest calls it dogfish, and it is the fish most often mistaken for a burbot or an invasive snakehead; the burbot page has the three side by side.

The ones you hear and the ones that travel

The freshwater drum, or sheepshead, is named for its sound: grunniens is Latin for grunting, and the fish can be heard doing it. It ranges from the Appalachians to the Rockies and eats zebra mussels in Lake Erie.

The American eel is the only freshwater eel in North America. Every one of them was born in the Sargasso Sea, in the middle of the Atlantic, and goes back there once to spawn.

Carp and buffalo

The common carp came from Eurasia and is now recorded in every state except Alaska. The buffalo fishes look like carp but are native suckers, and one of them holds a record no game fish comes near: a bigmouth buffalo has been aged at 112 years.

And two cold-water outsiders

The burbot is the only cod relative that lives its whole life in fresh water. The lake whitefish belongs to the trout and salmon family, though few anglers think of it that way; it has been the commercial fish of the Great Lakes for generations, and it carries more omega-3 fat than Atlantic cod.

Where to go next

• Fish species: every species guide in one place.
• Catfish: channel, blue and flathead catfish and the bullheads.
• Panfish: bluegill, perch and the sunfish.