The Fishes of North Carolina
Luke Etchison, Dylan Owensby, and Chantelle Rondel North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, Aquatic Wildlife Diversity Program, Waynesville, NC The French Broad River (Map 1) is one of the oldest rivers in the world. From its headwaters in North Carolina to where it joins the Holston River to create the Tennessee River in east Tennessee, the … Read more
Fritz Rohde1, Bryn H. Tracy2, and Michael Fisk3 1Wilmington, NC; 2Apex, NC; 3North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, Aquatic Wildlife Diversity Program, Mebane, NC The American Brook Lamprey, Lethenteron appendix (Dekay, 1842) (Figure 1), was first discovered in August 1977 in the French Broad River at the mouth of Spring Creek in Hot Springs (Madison County) … Read more
By the NCFishes.com Team How did this fish, the smallest member of the Stickleback family, get here? And when? As written in our previous blog on sticklebacks (https://ncfishes.com/is-north-carolina-too-far-south-for-sticklebacks/), Dr. Hugh M. Smith, U.S. Commissioner of Fisheries, in 1907 made no mention of Fourspine Stickleback (Figure 1) in the Albemarle or Pamlico sounds (Smith 1907). In … Read more
By the NCFishes.comTeam In eastern North America, the family Gasterosteidae, known as sticklebacks, is a small family of five species commonly found in shallow brackish inlets, calm, heavily vegetated marshes and estuaries, tidal creeks, lagoons, and in the nearshore and offshore open ocean (Kells and Carpenter 2014; Rohde et al. 1994). Along the Atlantic coast, … Read more
By the NCFishes.com Team The recognition by ichthyologists of Koi , Cyprinus rubrofuscus, as a separate species from Common Carp, Cyprinus carpio, its distribution across North Carolina, and the posting of the blog on Koi (https://ncfishes.com/koi-cyprinus-rubrofuscus-lacepede-in-north-carolina/) necessitated an update to the Identification Key to the Barbs and Carps, Asian Carps, and Minnows (Families Cyprinidae, Leuciscidae, … Read more
By the NCFishes.com Team On May 10, 2021, we posted a blog on the American Sole (Family Achiridae) diversity in North Carolina (https://ncfishes.com/american-sole-family-achiridae-diversity-in-north-carolina/). Since then, we re-examined all of the material from North Carolina and South Carolina at the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Sciences and discovered that all vouchered specimens of Lined Sole, … Read more
By the NCFishes.com Team Common Carp, Cyprinus carpio (Figure 1), has swum in North Carolina’s waters since 1879 (Smith 1907). A long-held belief was that ornamental Koi (Figure 2) was merely a much-varied color morph of Common Carp. However, during post-processing of a photograph taken by the NCFishes team, we discovered that Koi are now … Read more
By the NCFishes.com Team Two new identification keys to the freshwater fishes of North Carolina have been recently published by the North American Native Fishes Association (http://www.nanfa.org/) in their journal American Currents: Tracy, B.H., S.A. Smith, J.L. Bissette, and F.C. Rohde. 2021. Ahead by a whisker: freshwater catfish (Family Ictaluridae) diversity in North Carolina. American … Read more
By the NCFishes.com Team This is the last blog in the series focusing on the freshwater fishes of North Carolina, which was launched on June 17, 2020 (https://ncfishes.com/identification-of-north-carolina-freshwater-fishes/). In some respects, this last blog should have been the first, but learning about fishes is never along a straight stream, unless it is in a channelized … Read more
By the NCFishes.com Team Engraulidae is a small family comprising six species in North Carolina (Table 1). Their common name, anchovy, is possibly from the Spanish word anchova, but the term’s ultimate origin is unclear (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anchovy, accessed December 18, 2020). North Carolina’s anchovies range in size from about 100 mm Total Length for Bay Anchovy … Read more