Hello,
I recently caught this sucker species in the Pascagoula River in Southern Mississippi and I am having trouble identifying it.
Here are a few pics:
https://imgur.com/JxPrDCs
https://imgur.com/RTWKk8F
Any help would be appreciated,
Thanks!
Spotted sucker. Nice catch!
Awesome! What characteristics confirmed it for you?
If you go into the species tab on this site you can pretty much identify any fish in question by comparing it to what you suspect your fish might be. Tons of useful range data, information and photos. As far as how I know it's a spotted sucker, I've caught one before myself. And seen a few others. They were on my radar for a very long time.
Some redhorse species have a dark area at the base of the scales, but this doesn't creat an obvious pattern. See a couple of the photos on the Greater Redhorse page (https://www.roughfish.com/greater-redhorse) for what I mean. On a spotted sucker like yours, the scales have a very distinct, sharp-edged black mark, and it ends up looking like long, thin black stripes when you see the whole fish. I could be wrong on this, because I've spent way too much time combing old books for sucker names, but I think some people actually called them striped suckers once upon a time.
Redhorse ID cheatsheets, gars, suckers: moxostoma.com
2020: 10 days fishing 11 species 0 lifers. 2019: 34/45/13 2018: 39/40/5
The rows of distinct spots, mouth shape/angle and as far as I can see a lack of lateral line pores all point to Spotted Sucker over any kind of Redhorse. As far as I can tell, the only Redhorse likely to be in that river would be Blacktail Redhorse, which (in addition to the traits above) can be distinguished by their unique bicolored caudal fin.