Whitefish: What It Is, When It Spawns, How Big It Gets and How to Catch One

To a Great Lakes angler, whitefish means the lake whitefish (Coregonus clupeaformis): a silver, small-headed cousin of the trout that runs 17 to 22 in (43–56 cm) and 1.5 to 4 lb (0.7–1.8 kg) and lives near the bottom of cold, deep lakes. It is the fish in the Door County fish boil and the main commercial catch of the upper Great Lakes. Below: how to tell it from the fish it gets mixed up with, when whitefish spawn, how big they get, how to catch one through the ice, and why the catch in two of the Great Lakes has fallen apart.

Maine biologists aged an 11 in whitefish at 43 to 45 years old. And the biggest whitefish on record never saw a hook: 42 lb, from a Lake Superior net around 1918.

What is a whitefish?

Three different things carry the name. On the Great Lakes it is the lake whitefish. In a Rocky Mountain trout river it is the mountain whitefish. At the seafood counter it is any lean, white-fleshed sea fish, cod or haddock or pollock, and no relation at all.

The freshwater whitefishes all belong to the trout and salmon family and all carry the small adipose fin on the back, near the tail.

Whitefish or cisco? Look at the mouth

Minnesota DNR settles it in two sentences: the lake whitefish has a snout that overhangs the lower jaw, and the lower jaw of the cisco extends up to or beyond the tip of the snout. A whitefish feeds down, off the bottom. A cisco feeds forward, on plankton.

Two more checks. A lake whitefish has two small flaps of skin between its nostril openings, and a round whitefish has one. A sucker has thick lips, a mouth built for suction and no adipose fin. Big whitefish grow a fleshy hump behind the head that makes the small head look smaller still, which is why Minnesota anglers also call the fish humpback.

How big do whitefish get?

Great Lakes commercial fish run 17 to 22 in and 1.5 to 4 lb. Maine’s inland whitefish are normally 14 to 20 in and 1 to 3 lb. Michigan DNR notes that fish of more than 20 lb were once taken, more often fifty years ago than now.

They can be far older than they look. Michigan gives a lifespan of over 25 years and New York up to 30 or more. The Maine fish in the quote above was 11 in long and four decades old.

Minnesota’s record went to a man from Oklahoma who was ice fishing for walleyes at sunset.

When do whitefish spawn?

In November and into December on the Great Lakes, once the shallows cool to about 43 to 46 °F (6–8 °C). Five agencies, side by side:

There is no nest. The fish rise toward the surface in twos and threes at night and scatter the eggs, 10,000 to 130,000 from one female depending on her size. The eggs settle into the rocks and lie there all winter. Wisconsin DNR biologist Scott Hansen puts the hatch around March and April.

That long winter on the bottom is the weak point. Ice cover shields the eggs from storm waves, and the Great Lakes have had less of it since the late 1990s.

Where whitefish live

The native range runs from Alaska across most of Canada, south to the Great Lakes and east through northern New England. In the West the fish is an import: stocked into Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho and Flathead Lake in Montana, probably in the late 1800s, it spread down the Columbia and now supports a winter fishery on Washington’s Banks Lake.

Whitefish want cold water and stay close to the bottom. New York’s assessment puts them at 40 to 130 ft (12–40 m) in the warm months; Michigan says 200 ft and deeper as summer heat climbs. They come shallow twice: in spring, and again in late fall to spawn.

How to catch whitefish

Ice is the main season, from December to March, and the method is small and near bottom. Maine’s fisheries department is the plainest: small baited jigs in the lowest two to three feet of the water column, in 30 to 60 ft (9–18 m) of water.

• Green Bay, Wisconsin. A winter fishery big enough to keep more than 20 guides busy. The rig Dale Bowman described for the Chicago Sun-Times is typical: a small jigging lure on the bottom of the line, with a No. 6 hook baited with a waxworm sliding above the swivel. Fish shallower on cloudy days and deeper on sunny ones.
• Lake Simcoe, Ontario. Gord Pyzer of In-Fisherman uses minnow-shaped jigging lures and a small spoon tipped with a minnow head. His warning: whitefish are bottom fish, but he never starts on the bottom, because they will hit a bright lure as much as 10 ft (3 m) above it.
• Light line, soft hands. Michigan DNR describes a small, exceedingly delicate mouth. Washington’s biologists fish 4 to 8 lb line and a size 8 or 10 hook and call the fish hook-sensitive.
• Lake Michigan piers in November. Whitefish come to the pierheads to spawn, and anglers take them on a small hook with a single fish egg. At Grand Haven, Muskegon and Whitehall, Michigan allows only one unweighted single-point hook from November 1 to 30, because too many fish were being snagged.

In a western river in January the fish on the line is the mountain whitefish. Idaho Fish and Game’s advice for it: a single salmon egg, a piece of worm or a small weighted nymph, drifted through slow water in the warmest part of the day.

The Great Lakes decline

The whitefish is the most valuable commercial fish in the Great Lakes, and in two of them it is in trouble. The Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s 2021 review counted a 54% fall in the catch from the 1998 peak to 2019. By lake, the decline was 68% in Lake Michigan and 57% in Lake Huron, against 24% in Lake Superior.

The young are not surviving. The number of new fish produced per kilogram of spawners fell 76 to 80% in Lakes Michigan and Huron, and doubled in Lake Superior. The review ties it to the invasive zebra and quagga mussels that took hold in the late 1990s and stripped the food web the larvae and adults depended on. Lake Superior has been largely spared because its water lacks the calcium the mussels need for their shells.

Green Bay was the bright spot. Whitefish all but vanished from the bay for much of the 1900s, returned in the 1990s and were booming by 2006. Wisconsin DNR’s creel clerks counted 117,000 to 158,000 whitefish taken through the bay’s ice each winter from 2014 to 2018. In 2024, a winter with poor ice, the count was 5,750, and the bay’s stock is reported to have shrunk by half since the mid-2010s.

Limits, and the table

Wisconsin allows 10 whitefish a day on Green Bay. Michigan allows 10 on the Great Lakes, counted together with cisco and round whitefish. Minnesota set its first limit ever, 15 fish, on March 1, 2025. Check the current rules for your water; all three have been under review.

On the plate it has been praised for three centuries. Cadillac, at Mackinac around 1695, wrote that a better fish cannot be eaten. The Door County fish boil is still made with Lake Michigan whitefish; smoked whitefish is the other classic. State advisories for PCBs and other contaminants differ by lake, so read your state’s guide before making it a weekly meal.

Related

• Other freshwater fish: burbot, sturgeon, gar, bowfin and the rest of the fish outside the big families.
• Burbot: the other deep, cold-water fish that bites best through the ice.
• Lake trout: the whitefish’s neighbor in the cold depths.
• Fish species: every species guide in one place.