Posted on 07/20/2026 8:48:50 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Amongst Americans, there's a common view that river monsters live elsewhere – in deep, wide rivers zig-zagging across foreign, untamed lands. Think vast Eurasia.
And it's true, the supercontinent is home to some seriously ginormous freshwater fish. Beluga sturgeons, which live primarily in the Caspian and Black Seas but sometimes swim up their adjoining rivers, can extend over twenty feet in length and weigh more than 2,000 pounds! The species rivals the great white shark for the title of largest actively predatory fish. Further south and east, the Mekong River is home to stingrays and catfish that regularly tip the scales at over a quarter-ton.
But in the United States, where our homes, vehicles, meals, and more are super-sized, we have resident river giants, too. Meet the three largest fish to inhabit America's winding waters.
White sturgeon grown for caviar at Willow Creek Ranch, Likely, California, USA, south of Alturas.
1. White Sturgeon. Many a child exclaims in awe at the sizable sharks they see at aquariums across the country. They'd be even more amazed to see a fifteen-foot-long, thousand-pound prehistoric fish prowl the rivers of the Pacific Northwest. Such an encounter would almost certainly be with an older white sturgeon, which can live in excess of 100 years. Expanded sport-fishing means that these specimens are far rarer than they used to be, but it's not unheard of to see individuals close to ten-feet-long, weighing over 400 pounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearscience.com ...
Silver Springs Florida.
Well in Florida they’re a nuisance fish. They take over.
Ah! Just for you!
Thanks for posting MtnClimber!
There you be! You got here first!
Also Georgia here.
Springtime in the creek behind our house
“sucker-mouths” would be running upstream.
As 12 year old fishermen, we tried to catch them
on every bait imaginable with no luck.
(what did we know?)
They were carp.
We took dads pitchfork and managed to get a few.
So boney they were not worth the effort.
Many catfish and bream came out of that creek.
Growing up in Michigan, we lived on land where Carl Creek entered the Tittabawassee River just upstream from Midland. Every spring, white and common suckers and carp would make the run up the creek to spawn and we caught tons of both. The suckers had very firm and sweet meat and the bones were easily found and removed. The carp, on the other hand, were only fit to be buried in our vegetable garden as organic fertilizer.
How did you catch them?
What bait did you use?
In a lot of lakes, not all, those bigger catfish are needed for predation anyway. The water quality of the waterbody I’m fishing at makes a difference too. Some places I wouldn’t keep anything over a few pounds. Granted that marinating with club soda can zap a lot of fishy or muddy taste. If my cooked catfish has been in the fridge over a day or so, I re-cook it with a little lemon juice and a bit of jalapeno pepper — the latter just enough to perk it up a bit - not really “hot”. (I’m not a “hot pepper” person - even straight jalapenos are much too hot for me.) Cooked catfish seems to revert to a “fishy” taste faster in the fridge than some other fish - I don’t know why.
I keep hoping Saugeye get stocked in a lake near me...
Just good ol’ dug-out-of-the-ground worms or nightcrawlers picked up from the local golf course ...
We caught Carp at Lake Blackshear in SW GA when my grandparents owned a house there. They are bottom feeders and we used dough balls to catch them. Then we gave them to poor black folks living along the highway back to Albany. My granddad told them they were black bass. It was a very different time. (The bream and catfish we caught stayed in our freezer until we could eat them, delicious!)
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