Dinosaur Fish

If you fish on the Wisconsin River long enough you’ll be surprised one day when a huge fish jumps out of the water and does a summersault near your boat. I mean a BIG fish most likely 5 feet long or bigger.

What the heck am I talking about? I’m talking about a Paddlefish. The American Paddlefish is common in the Wisconsin and Mississippi and the other rivers that drain into the Mississippi. They are a primitive fish that date back to the time of the dinosaurs and are in the same general category as sturgeon. They have a skeleton made up of cartilage like the sturgeon and even sharks.

These giant fish are filter feeders. They have a huge mouth and a long flat snout that looks like a canoe paddle and swim throughout the river and filter zooplankton from the water. They also will eat snails and clams.

In the spring you will find many of them below the Sauk City dam. Often when jigging for walleyes one of these giants will swim into your line and then the race is on. Unless you can catch up to them and get them to the surface to get your jig out of their hide, they’ll strip off all of your line from your reel.

They commonly attain about 5 feet of length but the record for a fish caught on a rod and reel was a 144# monster. The largest ever recorded was a whopping 206#. There is no open season on them in Wisconsin.

So if you see a huge fish do a flip next to your boat, now you know it’s a paddlefish. Why do they do it? No one knows for sure but I’ve always thought they were just having fun. Who knows?

by: Dan Bomkamp - author and host of the radio show "How's Fishing?"