The Rough Fish Revolution

Story by  Frank Bures

One day during the winter of 2021, a group of fishermen cut a hole in the ice on the frozen Minnesota River. Then, using sonar to help them see under the surface, they speared a shortnose gar and laid it on the ice.

Then they speared another gar. And another.

By the time they were done, they had speared 82 of the ancient, needle-toothed fish. They laid the long, missile-shaped carcasses in neat rows on the ice, and recorded a video of themselves and their trophies, thinking they’d captured a fun and harmless day getting rid of the river’s undesirable “trash fish.”

Yet instead of racking up “likes,” the video triggered a wave of outrage that helped fuel a nascent movement to protect gar and other maligned and neglected native fish—commonly known as “rough fish,” either because they’re difficult to clean, or because of other misinformed or arbitrary rationale.

“I don’t know what it was about 80 gar that got people’s attention,” says native fish advocate Tyler Winter. “I’ve seen social media posts where people are boasting about putting 500 buffalo”—another fish native to the region—”on a manure pile. But I’m glad it worked.”

Last April, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed the Native Fish Bill, which laid the groundwork to create new protections for these so-called “rough fish”—some 26 species native to the state, such as bowfin, quillback, buffalo, redhorse, and gar. Solomon David, a professor of aquatic ecology who runs the University of Minnesota’s Gar Lab, called it “the most comprehensive native fish conservation law in the country.” And while Minnesota may be at the forefront of such change, a new awareness of the value of these species is beginning to roll through fisheries across the United States.

“With all the news around the Native Fish Bill,” says Winter, who runs an advocacy organization called Native Fish for Tomorrow, “I have people reaching out to me saying, ‘I want to do this in my state!’”

For at least a century, American outdoorsmen have labeled those unappreciated species as “rough” or “trash” fish that didn’t need, or deserve, conservation protections. The term dates to the mid-1800s, when commercial fishing boats would “fully dress” higher-priced fishes, meaning they would gut and fillet them on the boats for later sale at market. The less valuable fish, meanwhile, would be “rough-dressed,” or just gutted, to be sold for lower prices. If ships needed to lose weight to pass through shallow water, they would dump the “rough” fish overboard. The term eventually grew to encompass all species that fisherman didn’t want.

Over time, rough fish came to be seen not only as worthless, but as actively harmful, because of the belief that they competed for food with walleye, bass, sunfish, and other highly prized game species. The invasive common carp, which was introduced from Europe in the mid- to late-1800s, was also lumped into the “rough fish” category.

This two-tiered framework resulted in various misguided efforts to eliminate “undesirable” fish. In 1957, for example, North Carolina wildlife officials used dynamite to kill more than 12,000 longnose gar in local waterways. In 1962, the Utah and Wyoming fish and game departments released a fish toxicant called rotenone into a 225-mile section of the Green River to rid the water of invasive common carp. The poison killed millions of native fish, and some species, such as the Colorado pikeminnow, razorback sucker, and bonytail chub, were extirpated from that stretch of river entirely. The carp, however, are still there.

Because we’ve assigned these native fishes lesser status, our knowledge about them has suffered, and confusion about their role in local ecosystems has been pervasive and continues today. As recently as 2023, for instance, the Iowa Department of National Resources had erroneously labeled shortnose gar an invasive species. “We’re probably 100 years behind what we know about walleye and salmon,” says David, of the Gar Lab. “Indigenous people have valued these fish historically, and they still do today: sturgeons, suckers, gars, bowfins. It’s really more of a colonial European perspective that switched these native fish to not having as much value.”

But rough fish have tremendous ecological value that is only now being discovered. Until even five years ago, leading peer-reviewed journals had published negligible research on rough fishes’ role in freshwater ecosystems across North America. We are only now learning how important these species are—even as they are increasingly at risk.

The scientific tide began turning against the rough fish label in 1992, with the publication of a paper in the journal Fisheries arguing for a reappraisal of two often-maligned native species: “Gars and bowfins are among North America’s most ancient, most distinctive, and most disliked fish,” wrote University of Idaho fisheries biologist Dennis Scarnecchia. Indeed, until not long before the paper’s publication, it had been illegal in Iowa to release a live gar back into the wild, Scarnecchia wrote. Fishermen were expected to “destroy” the gar, which was sometimes done by breaking the fishes’ spines before returning them to the water.

Scarnecchia argued for a new way of thinking about these species. Gar and bowfin “probably do not harm sport fishing and may in fact improve it,” he wrote, since as apex predators they stabilize the ecosystem and may prevent game fish from becoming stunted, which can happen when there’s overpopulation.

A new awareness of the value of rough fish began to take root. In 1998, a group of native-fish enthusiasts created the website roughfish.com to help fishermen identify local species and share native-fish tales. But the movement didn’t get serious traction until the 2021 video of the ice fishermen killing gar. Then a few months later, in May of the same year, another rough-fish video went viral: Three Oklahoma bowfishermen (who fish with a bow and arrow attached to a line) shot more than 1,000 gar near the Red River and recorded themselves throwing the dead fish back in the water, using a clicker to count each one. Because Oklahoma has no limits on how many gar a fisherman can kill, the men were fined only for “improper disposal” of the fish.

At the end of 2021, Fisheries again published a landmark defense of these maligned species, entitled “Goodbye to ‘Rough Fish’: Paradigm Shift in the Conservation of Native Fishes.” Rough fish, wrote the paper’s dozen co-authors, “is a derogatory term that lumps together diverse fishes and life-history strategies perceived as having low-to-zero value.”

The study examined protections for rough fish across the country and found them either lacking or nonexistent. No U.S. state had any meaningful rough fish bag limits—the maximum number of fish a person can catch and keep in a day. In the three states that had established rough fish “possession limits” (the maximum number of fish a person can have in their possession at any time), the numbers were so high as to be meaningless. Missouri fishermen, for instance, could keep 100 fish at a time. More often, rough fish were simply absent from state fisheries regulations.

The authors noted that the current state of knowledge about the ecology and conservation status of rough fish was equally deficient: In a review of all journals and papers published by the American Fisheries Society, the paper found only 149 scientific studies per species in the rough fish category, compared to 1,698 on more highly prized gamefish.

But recent research indicates that these fish are anything but worthless. In 2017, scientists discovered that two native rough fishes known as the mooneye and the goldeye are crucial hosts to federally endangered spectaclecase mussels, which can only survive by attaching themselves to other aquatic species in their larval phase. A 2022 study in Ecology of Freshwater Fish also found that spawning smallmouth buffalo bring a pulse of nutrients to waterways in Tennessee, similar to that of Pacific Northwest salmon when they return to their natal rivers to spawn and die. Another study found the same effect for white and longnose suckers on the northern (Canadian) shore of Lake Superior. Some researchers now argue that certain species of suckers have such a big influence on their habitat that they should be considered “ecosystem engineers,” playing a foundational role in local biodiversity and ecosystem health.

Of course, native fish have always been important to Indigenous people. In the Ojibwe language, February is called the “sucker moon,” a time of scarcity when Ojibwe communities caught suckers through the ice to feed themselves. In fact, sucker-head soup is a traditional Ojibwe delicacy. Likewise, many minority, Black, and immigrant communities have long valued rough fish as a food source.

One day last spring I drove from Minneapolis north to the Rice Lake National Wildlife Refuge to meet Alec Lackmann, a young ichthyologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth who studies bigmouth buffalo, an enormous, dark-colored, slow-moving fish in the sucker family. Lackmann grew up in northwestern Minnesota and still recalls his introduction to the fish. It was in the summer of his 10th year and his family was visiting a lake where he saw an old man at a dock with a metal stringer. On it was a massive fish.

“I remember sitting there for a long time just looking at it,” Lackmann says. “And I was like, ‘What is this huge fish?’ I was immediately fascinated. I’d never seen anything like that before.” It was a bigmouth buffalo.

A few years later, Lackmann was at the Minnesota State Fair, where the Department of Natural Resources maintains a popular pool stocked with large specimens of the state’s fish, including bigmouth buffalo. Lackmann asked one of the DNR staff about the small, odd, black and orange spots some buffalo sport. The staffer didn’t know anything about them. In fact, no one did. Lackmann started researching the fish on his own, recreationally at first, then as an undergrad, and finally in graduate school at North Dakota State University, where in 2016 he embarked on a study that would make headlines around the world.

Working with professors Mark Clark and Malcolm Butler, Lackmann figured out how to dissect the “otoliths,” or ear stones, of the bigmouth buffalo. These tiny, fragile structures have annual growth rings and are the gold-standard for ascertaining a fish’s age. Determining that age involves cutting a thin section, then using a compound microscope to see the light transmitted through the layers.

At the time, the accepted wisdom held that buffalo might live to 26 years at most, but that their average life span was probably more like 10 to 20 years. On his first otolith, however, Lackmann counted 87 growth rings. “We just couldn’t believe it at first because it was so off the charts,” he says. In fact, most fish they aged appeared to have lived longer than 75 years. The oldest individual had 112 rings—meaning it had hatched around 1906.

To verify the ages, Lackmann applied for a grant to send 20 otoliths to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for bomb radiocarbon age validation, which examines organisms that lived through the “bomb pulse” of the late 1950s, when the atmosphere was high in radiation from nuclear tests. If the fish had truly lived through the early atomic era, otolith layers from those years should contain elevated levels of carbon-14.

The results confirmed Lackmann’s findings: otolith rings were indeed annual, and bigmouth buffalo are among the oldest living freshwater fish on the planet.

I rolled down the gravel road into the Rice Lake National Wildlife Refuge, where I found Lackmann—tall, with a long beard—standing at a railing looking into the dark waters of the Rice River, wearing polarized sunglasses to better see fish under the water’s surface. We stood for a while, watching for movement in the river.

“Ooh, there’s one right there!” he said in a whisper. Lackmann is a soft-spoken man, but in his voice I could hear the excitement of the 10-year-old on the dock. “That one has a big orange mark on its fin. That’s one of the age marks. That’s really cool! That’s a really good example of the orange pigmentation they get with age. That one’s definitely old…probably 80 to 90.”

Every spring, buffalo migrate to Rice Lake to spawn, swimming up the Rice from the Mississippi River, or from lakes along the way—no one is quite sure where—and then through the water control gates where Lackmann stood, looking for fish. Built in 1953, the concrete structure has a set of doors that can be closed to maintain water levels in Rice Lake. The doors form a kind of bottleneck that the buffalo must pass through, making it a good place to see, or to shoot, fish swimming upstream to spawn. “Normally this place would be filled with bowfishermen,” Lackmann said, “and they’d all be firing in here,” shooting their arrows at passing fish. On this day, however, it was unusually quiet.

Lackmann has studied the fish at this spot for several years. He calls them the “whale sharks of freshwater lakes” because they’re very passive, and feed mainly on plankton. Most bowfisherman shoot buffalo purely for sport, impaling and discarding the carcasses, so Lackmann collects these for research. He extracts the otoliths, weighs the reproductive organs, and records the fish’s length and weight. Between 2021 and 2023, Lackmann gathered data from 390 buffalo carcasses. The published results were striking: Most of the buffalo migrating to Rice Lake were born in the 1940s (62 in 1942 alone), at the same time World War II was roiling the globe. Some were born in the 1930s, before the wildlife refuge was established. The oldest was a 96-year-old male born in 1926. Only 45 fish from the study had hatched after the water control structure went in. He collected only one buffalo born after 1971—a young fish that had hatched in 2012.

The study was a major contribution to the scientific understanding of bigmouth buffalo, our knowledge of which is so sparse that we aren’t even sure how long they can live—in 2023, Lackmann and his colleagues found a specimen in Canada that was 127 years old—or if they even have “intrinsic mortality.” Indeed, recent research has found that extremely old buffalo have better immune and stress responses than younger ones. “At 100 years old, bigmouth buffalo are still advancing into their prime,” Lackmann says.

That extreme old age can be used to gauge the overall health of the habitat. “They’re a ‘sentinel species,’” Lackmann says. “They can tell us more about the ecosystem than any other species can because they live so long. And it’s the last place you’d expect: In a fish that was treated as trash for 100 years.”

Another of Lackmann’s discoveries is that buffalo exhibit “episodic recruitment,” with infrequent successful spawning years separated by long periods in which few buffalo survive to adulthood—a survival strategy that he calls “playing the long game.” With successfully spawned “classes” separated by gaps of three, four, or even five decades, the species endures by living long enough to spawn during a banner year when large numbers of hatchlings survive. Lackmann and his colleagues suspect that the species’ reproductive success could depend on fluctuations of water levels, though they don’t yet understand exactly which conditions favor spawning and recruitment. Nor do they know why it’s been more than 60 years since buffalo have successfully reproduced in large numbers at Rice Lake.

Eventually, a car rolled up. A fisherman climbed out. His name was John Belden and unlike many bowfisherman, who simply discard their buffalo carcasses, he was planning to keep his catch to smoke and store for the year. Lackmann chatted with Belden, who agreed to let the scientist measure the eggs and gonad tissue and extract the otoliths from the fish he shot, then return the meat to Belden.

Within an hour Belden had four decent-sized buffalo—by today’s standards. While old-timers describe catching fish that weighed 40 or 50 pounds a few decades ago, Belden’s fish averaged 25 pounds. Belden came over to watch as Lackmann dissected a male. “What are these bumps?” Belden asked, pointing to the fish’s flank.

“These are called tubercles,” Lackmann explained. “They use that to stimulate the females to release her eggs.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen a female today.”

“Actually,” Lackmann said, “the first one you got was a female, just on the smaller side. But she had three pounds of eggs in her.”

Belden recounted how in earlier years, he would keep the buffalo meat to smoke and trade the eggs with local members of the nearby Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe at East Lake. “I would meet them at the gas station,” he said, “and they’d go home and get walleye fillets. They fry the eggs in flour and butter. They were like, ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’”

Unfortunately, most buffalo—or their eggs—never end up on anyone’s dinner table.

Native fish face many challenges, from the shifting climate to habitat fragmentation. But the rise of bowfishing—which has exploded in popularity over the last two decades—has lent a new urgency to the race to understand and protect rough fish.

Aided by a raft of new technologies, including boats equipped with light bars for night fishing, lighted arrow shafts, and fishing arrowheads with retractable blades, bowfishermen—like the ones in the Oklahoma gar video—can now shoot and kill hundreds, if not thousands, of fish in a matter of hours. Bowfishing tournaments are increasingly popular and are often held in spring as fish move into shallow water to spawn. These can take a staggering toll on fish populations. At the 2019 Bowfishing Association of America’s World Championships, for instance, 104 teams shot at least 6,500 fish on the Mississippi River—three-quarters of them native, the rest invasive carp. The haul weighed in at nearly 40,000 pounds. After such tournaments, these “trash fish” carcasses are hauled away in dumpsters.

Some bowfishermen, however, have begun to question the impact of their sport. For years, Bubba Bedre was a successful guide in Texas, leading groups fishing for alligator gar in rivers around the state. But by 2010, as bowfishing was becoming more popular, Bedre had already started having second thoughts.

“The population was going down, and it was getting harder to find the big ones,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Well, the river will flood and they’ll come back.’ But that didn’t happen. They never really came back. So finally I was like, ‘I can’t be killing these things if I want to make a living on these fish.’ Eventually I just put the bow down.”

Quietly, a growing number of bowfisherman agree with Bedre, and know the current course has to change. “I work with a lot of [bowfishers],” Lackmann says, “and most of them understand why this research is important.”

In early 2023, the Minnesota DNR placed its first-ever gar possession limit of 10 fish. Later that year, the state’s “No Junk Fish” bill passed the legislature, requiring the DNR to research the conservation status of all native rough fish. Then in April 2024, the Native Fish Bill became law, paving the way for several key protections for rough fish: First, it moves common carp out of the “rough fish” category, so that any new restrictions enacted to protect native species won’t apply to the invasive species. It also allows for the establishment of “restitution values” to place dollar amounts on fish that were previously considered worthless. Once those restitution values are established, the law will also include native fish under the state’s “Wanton Waste” law, which forbids hunters and fishermen from destroying or tossing away “a usable part of a protected wild animal.” Walleyes and bass, for example, have a base restitution value of $30 per fish wasted or taken over the limit. If the DNR assigns a restitution value of even $10 to buffalo and gar, the gar-video fisherman would have been looking at a $820 fine, while teams at the 2019 bowfishing championships would have been on the hook for a combined $50,000.

There was much discussion, in crafting the law, about what to call this new category of formerly maligned and neglected fish. “Native fish” was considered too broad, because that also includes game fish like walleye and bass; “non-game” wasn’t exactly accurate either, since many rough fish species are caught for fun or food. The name they settled on in the end—the least bad alternative, says Winter—was “native rough fish.”

Names notwithstanding, the bill was a landmark in the history of freshwater fisheries conservation, finally acknowledging the ecological importance of these species and paving the way for crucial research funding, so we can learn more about these embattled fish before it’s too late.

On a cool, overcast day, I met Tyler Winter on the Mississippi River where it flows between Minneapolis and St. Paul. He wore a shirt covered in fishing lures and a “Gar Lab” hat, and the back of his car was plastered with fish stickers. Standing on the rocky shore, just downstream from the concrete walls of the hundred-year-old Lock and Dam No. 1, Winter, who has a wiry energy, set up four fishing poles on forked sticks pushed into the sand. Some 90 species of fish have been recorded here, including the several native suckers known as redhorse. I’d been told that Winter had “mastered” the technique for redhorse fishing in these waters.

“So how many redhorse species are in here?” I asked.

“In this section, there are five,” he said. “The golden, the river, the silver, the shorthead, and the greater. The black redhorse is only found in a few drainages in southeastern Minnesota.”

Winter’s worms sank to the bottom. We chatted for a while before one of his reels started to whirr.

“Grab that rod,” he said. I took the rod and flipped the drag.

“You can put a little more bend in it,” he said.

I turned the crank and reeled the fish to shore. It was smallish, with a golden hue and bright red fins. It looked almost tropical. “Oh, you got a shorthead redhorse!” Winter said “Congratulations!”

Soon another rod began to bend, arcing toward the water. Winter grabbed it as the fish ran upstream. “This one’s a fighter!” he said, landing a 22-inch silver redhorse. “Now that’s a whole ‘nother class of fish right there.”

Winter and I pulled in more fish—two silver redhorse, a golden, and another shorthead. I never would have thought to fish for native species in this urban stretch of river.

“You know,” Winter said between casts, “I have this crazy, long-term vision that, by inspiring some curiosity and showing the value of these fish, it will raise people’s appreciation for all these neglected waterways. I mean, what if every stream and river in Minnesota was protected like trout streams are? If we could just bring that same mindset to the Mississippi, and every other river and stream, we’d all be better off for it.”

Then he cast his line into the river again, and together we watched as it sank into the waters below.