Anglers hope to unlock the mysteries of Minnesota's oddest, oldest fish

Corey Geving stood up on a picnic table a few seconds before noon on Saturday, took a breath and looked at the crowd around him. More than 50 people stood, ready, fishing poles in hand. A bald eagle circled overhead. The tree-lined bluffs of southeastern Minnesota towered in the distance.

"All right, go," Geving said.

The crowd raced down the steep banks of the campground to the muddy Root River. Their goal: to catch rough fish — the rarely talked-about species with oddly shaped heads, long noses and horse-like lips.

Rough fish, which include 23 native species, have been largely overlooked for more than a century. At times, they've been treated like pests and killed en masse, their bodies piled up and left to rot in ditches or thrown on farm fields as fertilizer. They have no protections from the state and there are no limits on how many can be killed or kept.

But the anglers at the rough fish derby on the Root River are trying to change that. Organizers and many of the participants have been pushing the state to set regulations and define seasons. They want other Minnesotans to love the fish, too, and learn how to catch, filet and cook them so that more people will have a stake in keeping them around.

The problem is, so little is known about most of the species, Geving said.

"We need studies," he said. "A lot more studies. Because, especially in some of these smaller rivers, if you're consistently taking an unlimited amount of fish, they're not going to last."

Most of the anglers at the derby ended up on the same few banks of the Root River, fishing along the shore within an arm's length or two of each other. The river was high, and they concentrated around the fastest-moving water.

"They have a smaller mouth than most people expect and they live in faster water," said Tyler Winter, as he cast directly into the rapids. He used a big sinker and a small hook that was baited with a little piece of night crawler.

The simplicity of the tackle is a big part of the appeal, he said.

No boat is needed. No electronics or fish finders. No lures. He keeps a light tackle box with a few varieties of sinkers and small hooks, leaving plenty of room for snacks for his kids.

"Without boat ramps and without hatcheries, we can just appreciate what we have right here," he said.

These native fish are some of the most nuanced and longest-living animals in Minnesota, said Alec Lackmann, biologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth, who has been leading studies on rough fish.

In 2019, Lackmann led a study on bigmouth buffalo that found they live to more than 100 years old. It had previously been thought they lived just 20 years. Newer research from his team's lab found that they're not just surviving to old age, but thriving, and that their immune systems show no signs of slowing down into their 80s and 90s.

"What is it they have that allows them to do that?" he said. "Is it efficient DNA repair or is there something else that allows them to defy the aging process?"

Much more research is needed on how often the fish are able to successfully reproduce and how quickly they can replenish their populations. Researchers have found decades-long gaps between successful bigmouth buffalo generations.

"We have to make sure we're not messing with things we don't understand to the point they can't be brought back," Lackmann said.

Dexter Wallis started fishing for a type of rough fish — silver redhorse — during the pandemic. He lived in Milwaukee and he and his wife would walk to one of the city's beer gardens on the Milwaukee River and saw people throwing the fish away. He started targeting them and would fill his bucket, and fell in love with catching and cooking them.

He fished Saturday from a high point on the bank, casting a worm out a few feet from shore. A quick tug on the line and he began to reel.

"Oh, is that a shorthead?" he said as he reeled. "A real pretty one."

A few people gathered around and one brought a net.

"Look at those colors," Wallis said as he pulled up a shorthead redhorse. It had bright orange and pink fins. He pulled the hook from the fish's small mouth at the bottom of a long nose. Its large head, when you squint, looks like a horse.

"What other fish looks like this or has colors like this?" he said.

Wallis said he understands why people don't target them. They're bony, they can be hard to clean and take a little effort to cook. But when they're ground up into fish cakes, or scoured and fried in oil until the bones dissolve, they taste better than any walleye or bluegill, he said.