10/20/2026
Stop taking Bigmouth Buffalo fish - https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19kxqZBd65/
Across the Midwest, state game agencies spent decades writing off the bigmouth buffalo as a trash fish. Regulators lumped them into the same bucket as invasive carp, slapped them with the "rough fish" label, and left them completely unregulated. In 19 of the 22 states where bigmouth buffalo are native, an angler can kill as many as they want, year-round, including running shallow bays at night with bright halogen spotlights while the fish stack up to spawn. Biologists assumed they were short-lived bottom feeders that topped out around 20 years old, so nobody bothered tracking their numbers.
That assumption collapsed in 2019 when Alec Lackmann, then a graduate student at North Dakota State University, published a study in *Communications Biology*. Lackmann pulled nearly 400 bigmouth buffalo out of west-central Minnesota lakes to examine their otoliths: tiny calcium carbonate ear stones that lay down annual growth rings like the trunk of a tree. To verify the ring counts, he turned to bomb radiocarbon dating, testing the inner rings against the spike in carbon-14 left behind by Cold War nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s and 60s.
Five of the fish had survived past a century. The oldest, pulled from Crystal Lake in Otter Tail County, was a 112-year-old female that hatched in 1906, back when Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House. The previous textbook maximum lifespan for the species sat at 26 years. Overnight, the bigmouth buffalo became the oldest verified freshwater bony fish known to science, outlasting roughly 12,000 other freshwater species on Earth.
The extreme ages pointed to a much worse problem: the total absence of young fish. The first 16 fish Lackmann checked were already past 80. Across the study, nearly half the sample sat in their 80s and 90s. In several lakes, almost no young fish had survived since the 1930s. The adults were still migrating and laying eggs every spring, but predatory fish like northern pike were wiping out the fingerlings before they could hit the five- or six-year mark where they get too big to swallow.
A 2023 follow-up across Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle River system pushed the record further, turning up fish older than 125 years that hatched around 1894. Across that entire 127-year span, the population showed evidence of only 13 successful spawning years. Only a single spawn had succeeded since 1948, and water control dams had dropped reservoir levels so fast that the eggs dried out on the banks. Then, in 2024, Lackmann sampled Rice Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Minnesota: 99.7 percent of the 390 fish sampled had hatched before 1972, with a median age of 79. For half a century, the annual spawn had produced almost zero surviving offspring.
Now a researcher at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Lackmann is pushing state wildlife departments to kill off the unlimited harvest. The species has no federal protections. Over the past decade, modern bowfishing rigs, outfitted with elevated shooting platforms and high-powered generator lights, have boomed in popularity. Shooters regularly target bigmouth buffalo in knee-deep water during the spring spawn, filling truck beds with fish that hatched before the First World War and dumping the carcasses in the weeds.
A native fish that can outlive three human generations and remain fertile at 120 years old is an extraordinary evolutionary survivor. But surviving a century in cold water does not protect an animal from regulations that still treat it like garbage.
Image is for illustration purposes only.
Source: Lackmann et al. (2019), Communications Biology / Lackmann et al. (2023), Qu’Appelle study / Lackmann et al. (2024), Scientific Reports / National Geographic / Star Tribune / Agate Magazine. See less
