Big Fish in the Heartland: The Story of Sturgeon in the Missouri River

The warm, spring air sizzled with electricity in central Kansas. Thunderstorms echoed in the distance as intimidating clouds rolled across the prairie. Suddenly, rain poured down, swelling the small creeks that fed the Kansas River. At Kaw Point in Kansas City, those drops joined trillions of others from across the Missouri River basin. Ordinary storms like that have occurred on North America’s grand interior grasslands for millennia, fueling rivers we know as the Kansas, Platte, Red, Missouri, and many more.

Water supported the sea of grasses stretching as far as the eye could see. During the Pleistocene, there were lions, hyenas, mammoths and giant beavers. North America even had its own camel species. Great Plains mammals are famous in North America. Bison, elk, wolves, grizzly bears, mountain lions, pronghorn, mule deer, white-tail deer, black-footed ferrets, and many more loom large in the national animal consensuses. Everyone knows bison. They are the national mammal of the United States after all.[1] But what about the fish? Pallid and shovelnose sturgeon, paddlefish, the blue sucker, and many more are all just as interesting as the plains mammals, but they are harder to observe. I’ve already written about paddlefish so let’s talk about sturgeons! Lake, pallid, and shovelnose sturgeons already called the Missouri home when the modern river was born.

Sturgeon look otherworldly for good reason. It’s almost like they don’t belong in the same river as modern fishes. They are large, armor coated animals that evolved in a different era. Their bodies are covered in large diamond shaped boney ganoid scales called scutes. They are similar to scales of other ancient fish in the gar family. For the modern world, they are overkill. But, the earliest known (at least to me) sturgeon fossil in what would become the Missouri River drainage dates back to roughly 78 million years ago (their family Acipenseridae dates back to about 200ish million years).[2] At the time, much of the Missouri River basin was a great inland marine sea. Those scales were armor against massive marine predators like the reptile Tylosaurus Proriger. From fossil evidence, it grew over 45 feet long. Its mouth was full of razor sharp teeth. If you’re ever in Wichita, KS you can visit Logan the Tylosaur at the Museum of World Treasures. About 70 million years ago, the sea began retreating and the land dried out. The threats slowly vanished but sturgeon and paddlefish were the lone survivors from a bygone era.

Before ice enveloped North America, the ancestral Missouri flowed north into Hudson Bay. About two and a half million years ago Earth decided it needed to cool off for a bit and the Ice Age kicked into gear. Ice blocked the historic Missouri and over the course of a couple of million years the river moved into its current valley. The river started off as a series of smaller streams until they coalesced into what we call the Missouri about 100 thousand years ago. At that point, sturgeon were the oldest fish on the block. They ruled over flathead catfish who’d been around for about 20 million years and various bass species which showed up about eight to two million years ago. The historic Missouri looked much different than the river we know today.

The modern Missouri River in downtown KCMO. Taken by me

The Missouri begins its journey at Three Forks, Montana where the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers meet. From there, it breaks free from the Missouri Breaks and spills out onto the Great Plains. It then flows 2,500 miles to St. Louis, Missouri where it joins the Mississippi. Before dams, dikes, and levees it was a wide, meandering river. In the spring, it swelled with snow pact runoff and rain. Over generations, the main channel shifted as the river consumed and created its own banks. All three sturgeon species are benthic fish who hang out in the lower third of the water column. They’ll eat all kinds of small creatures including the stray cicada nymph.[3] They need slower moving water and the Missouri was prime sturgeon habitat. Wayne Nelson-Stastny with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service said it best “if you were going to design a fish in an engineering program to adapt to the Missouri River, where you can’t see but you can smell, you can hear, and you have to be able to handle the currents, a pallid sturgeon is what you would design.”[4] Shovelnose, pallid, and lake sturgeon all faced the tidal wave of over consummation in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Land based protein in almost any big box grocery store in America nowadays is limited to pork, chicken, and beef with a side of lamb and turkey thrown in. In previous centuries, local markets included everything from pork, beef, chicken, and deer to buffalo (the fish), carp, paddlefish, and even sturgeon. People ate a lot of sturgeon back in the day. The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers supplied most of the nation’s supply. In 1912, The Quad-City Times reported that in just one day of fishing commercial fisherman on the Mississippi caught several thousand pounds of sturgeon. The roe was salted and shipped east and the fish was salted and smoked. The paper reported that “the small hackleback sturgeon [shovelnose], formerly considered worthless by fisherman, now is in especial demand, retailing at 15 and 18 cents a pound.”[5] As I’m writing this article in May, 2026 that’d be about 5 to 6 dollars a pound. No wonder sturgeon were popular. That’s cheap! I wish we didn’t overfish and pollute the Missouri so I could take advantage of that cheap, local, and organic meat. Unfortunately the next couple of decades ensured that isn’t possible.

Black Friday set the stage for sturgeon and the Missouri in the 20th-century. Sturgeon were declining already, but after 1929 they faced an even hungrier, more desperate population. In 1939, Missouri adapted new fishing regulations that legalized gigging sturgeons and paddlefish.[6] Gigs are multi-pronged spears people normally use for frogs. I wouldn’t call any gig that could pierce sturgeon scales a gig. That’s a spear like they use up north to get sturgeon through the ice. Between commercial harvest and individual fisherman, sturgeon never stood a chance. The country also needed work and the Missouri provided jobs.

In 1937, Fort Peck dam changed everything for the Missouri river and its sturgeon. After decades of lobbying; farmers, small town residents, urbanities, and titans of industry in the American heartland finally convinced the federal government to dam the Missouri. People needed jobs and the cities along the Missouri’s banks needed flood protection. President Roosevelt came to the rescue when he authorized the project in 1933. Construction started the same year. It was a perfect pairing of opportunity and need. It took a couple of more decades and five other dams but America’s longest river was restrained.

Between the dams and overfishing sturgeon populations tumbled. Writing for the Washington Citizen Izaak Walton Scribe reported in 1948 that on the Missouri “Some forty years ago, it was no trick at all to catch more sturgeons than you knew what to do with on two or three small throw-lines. One line with six or seven hooks, raised four to five times a day, produced all the sturgeons the family could eat in several days.” Scribe noted that many fisherman correctly blamed the changes to the Missouri for the decline.[7] Apparently no one thought fisherman catching upwards of 21 sturgeon per day played any role in the drop. Either way, over the next few decades their population went into free fall. By 1959, pallid sturgeon were nearly gone from the Missouri in Iowa. Roy and Harold Pratt caught two pallids from the river. Delmar Robinson, a fisheries biologist with the state of Iowa, had to identify the fish for the Pratts. At the time, the Iowa Conservation Commission stated that the fish was “quiet rare” and illegal to catch. They kindly asked any anglers to return them safely to the water.[8] Today, only the shovelnose is abundant enough to be legally harvested in the Missouri River watershed. The only states where it is illegal to keep them are North and South Dakota. In Iowa, it’s even still legal to commercially harvest shovelnose![9]

Pallid and lake sturgeons are in worse shape but there are signs of hope. Pallid sturgeon were listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 are still listed despite ongoing restoration efforts. They’ll probably never fully recovery but in 2025 biologist in Montana observed pallid sturgeon spawning in the upper Missouri River. According to Pat Braaten, a fisheries biologist with the Columbia Environmental Research Center’s Fort Peck Field Research Station, the pallids introduced in the 1990s and early 2000s are starting to reach sexual maturity.[10] With all the changes on the river, I don’t imagine they’ll ever fully recovery but there is still hope! Lake sturgeon recovery is ongoing as well. The Missouri Department of Conservation started its lake sturgeon recovery program in 1984. It’s a slow road to recovery, but just this year (2026) biologist in Kansas and Nebraska sampled lake sturgeons. The Kansas fish was caught in the Kansas River just west of the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers at Kaw Point in Kansas City, Kansas. I can’t find any official measurements but it looks small (for lake sturgeons!) in the photograph.[11] In 2022, an angler on the Kaw caught a lake sturgeon and Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks said it was only the 16th lake sturgeon they recorded in the past 25 years.[12] So, this new fish joined an exclusive club. The Nebraska laker was sampled just downstream of Gavin’s Point Dam on the main channel of the Missouri.

A rare lake sturegon caught in sampling by biologists with the Kansas Wildlife and Parks Service. Photo from the KWPS

The Nebraska sturgeon was caught on April 14, 2026 by a team of fisheries biologist. It measured 59.6 inches and weighed 70 pounds. It’s big by freshwater standards but lake sturgeon can get upwards of 200 pounds so even this fellow is small for its species. We know more about this fish thanks to a PIT (passive integrated transponder) tag that biologists in Missouri fitted to it back in 2017 in central Missouri. In 2017, it weighed 29 pounds and measured 47 inches long. It swam 681 miles upstream (at least once)! Like pallids, lake sturgeon take a very long time to reach sexual maturity so this fish could be one of the first classes of baby fish released into the Missouri back in the early 2000s.[13] It will likely be a few decades before we know for sure, but hopefully these fish are a positive sign on the road to sturgeon recovery. There is a long way to go and it will take a lot more time, money, and effort but these fish are worth it. If we’re able to bring their populations back to within reach of their historic levels it will be yet another cap in the feather of the North American conservation model.

[1] If you want to read more about those animals, I’d recommend anything by Dan Flores. Coyote America and American Serengeti are personal favorites.

[2] Grande, Lance, and Eric J. Hilton. “An Exquisitely Preserved Skeleton Representing a Primitive Sturgeon from the Upper Cretaceous Judith River Formation of Montana (Acipenseriformes: Acipenseridae: N. Gen. and Sp.).” Memoir (The Paleontological Society) 65 (2006): 1–39. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4095815.

[3] Harrison, Audrey B., Steven G. George, and William T. Slack. “Nymphal Cicadas (Hemiptera: Cicadidae) as a Prey Item of Shovelnose Sturgeon (Scaphirhynchus Platorynchus) in the Lower Mississippi River.” Southeastern Naturalist 10, no. 2 (2011): 371–73. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41263018.

[4] Ancient Fish, Modern Problem: How the Pallid Sturgeon could be a Warning for the Missouri River, Elizabeth Rembert, KCUR 6/12/2023, https://www.kcur.org/2023-06-06/pallid-sturgeon-problems-on-the-missouri-river accessed 6/1/2026.

[5] Caught in Nets, Quad-City Times, 03/12/1912.

[6] New regulations for Fish and Game, Butler Daily Democrat, 10/06/1939.

[7] Fishing Season Starts, Izaak Walton Scribe, Washington Citizen, 2/27/1948.

[8] Outdoors With Ole, The Tribune, 07/15/195

[9] State regulations in MT, ND, SD, IA, NE, MO, and KS. I said the Missouri watershed because I’m not sure what the exact regulations are for the Missouri itself in each state. Fishing regulations can be complicated. Make sure you know the rules on your body of water.

[10] Endangered Palid Sturgeon Successfully Spawn in the Missouri River, Brett French, Billings Gazette 09/12/2025, https://billingsgazette.com/outdoors/article_eb4e60d2-85fd-4a1d-b704-21170c73071b.html accessed 6/7/2026.

[11] Kansas River Yields Rare Lake Sturgeon. Wil Day, KSN, 05/19/2026. https://www.ksn.com/news/state-regional/kdwp-sturgeon-conservation-efforts/. Accessed 5/20/2026.

[12] Rare Fish Caught out of Kansas river, KDWP Confirms. Matthew Self, Fox 4 KC, 12/06/2022. https://fox4kc.com/news/rare-fish-caught-out-of-kansas-river-kdwp-confirms/ accessed 5/23/2026

[13] Rare Lake Sturgeon made 681-mile Swim. Rural Radio Media Release, 6/5/2026. https://ruralradio.com/krvn/news/rare-lake-sturgeon-made-681-mile-swim/ accessed 6/6/2026.

A History of Man-eating Catfish... Or Maybe Not?

Aaahoooo! Aaahhooo!

Ribbit…ribbit

Slurp

No one heard the group of kids slipping into The Big Muddy River near Murphysboro, Illinois. It was past midnight on August 6th, 1886. Thick air hung over the water. The river didn’t offer much relief from the hot, muggy Midwest night. The kids were just trying to enjoy the last days of summer before school and harvest took over their time. The Reynolds brothers were splashing around in a deep pool when something grabbed 12 year old Marshal. The catfish took off like it was struck by lightning. It pulled Marshal 30 or 40 yards before someone killed the 51 pound fish and took it to market.[1]

A Flathead Catfish from the USFWS

I, like the original reporter of this story, am doubtful this event actually happened. Catfish here in the United States don’t generally attack people. So, why did stories like this even get told in the first place? Like land based predators, half-truths obscure true facts about an animal. As an example, people accused coyotes for declining deer herds because they found deer in coyote scat. In the 1930s and 40s, ecologist Adolph Murie discovered most of the deer that coyotes ate were carrion.[2] For catfish, people had scary experiences in the water and blamed catfish. The myth of a man-attacking catfish were reinforced by real widely reported stories of catfish eating dead bodies.

On the Mississippi River, a catfish solved a murder mystery. The story was reported in the Cincinnati Enquire (reprinted in the KC Star) on June, 1885. The article started by establishing the “man eater” size of catfish. The writer claimed they routinely saw cats over 400 pound and nine plus feet long. No catfish in North America gets that large, but the rest of the story is believable. At some point in the 1840s and 50s, the owner of a large plantation woke up and discovered a slave disappeared overnight. A month or so later, another person vanished. He didn’t know what was happening, but, it turns out, a catfish swallowed the evidence.

After a party at the plantation, some gentlemen decided to get out and have some fun on the river. They were ready to head in for dinner when one of the men hooked an “enormous catfish that was so game that it towed the boat about for an hour or so before they finally killed and got it ashore.” The paper claimed the fish was nearly 10 feet long and “bulky as a big steer.” Like all fisherman at one time or another, they wanted to know what the giant was eating and cut into the belly. They were horrified at what they found. As the Enquire told it, “Nothing more or less than the head of the girl that had disappeared the day before, and further investigation showed that the fish contained the entire body, that had been cut into four pieces.” Upon examination, investigators discovered the owner’s wife poisoned the girls.[3] Sadly, another catfish swallowed a child just a month after the previous report.

In Alabama, a child lived along the Alabama River with his mother. He enjoyed playing in the river. In September 1885, he went missing. A few days later, some men found a very large catfish in the river. According to the local paper, the men needed small boats and a seine to land the “monster” fish weighing 187 pounds. They took it a butcher in Burton, AL. The unsuspecting man started cleaning the fish and made a gruesome discovery. He found “a pair of small shoes, a hat, and what appeared to have been a pair of pants and shirt.” The boy’s mother identified the clothing. He drowned and the catfish ate the body.[4]

A Yellow Bullhead Catfish just peaking out to say hi from the USFWS

These stories even reached an avid angler named President Grover Cleveland. He was on a trip to the Adirondacks with an unknown doctor friend of his when the President caught a surprising fish. A bullhead! As an aside, I know bullheads aren’t man eaters but we’ll get back to larger catfish in a moment. I guess bullheads weren’t common in New Jersey and upstate New York because the President claimed the bullhead “felt a little like a bass” and the newspaper article described the catch as follows the President caught the fish “with a sweep which nearly broke his road he landed on the beach a fish about eight inches long and with a head big enough for a young shark.” As a Midwesterner who’s caught to many bullheads to count, I don’t think I’ve ever come close to breaking a rod catching one. It must have been a different bullhead species then I’m familiar with because it had “a pair of horns, the eyes of demon, and a mouth with an expression about it which suggested murder in cold blood.” Personally, the only murderous thing about a bullhead is their freaking spines. Any who, I’m writing about much larger catfishes.

After Cleveland caught his monster, the doctor regaled the president with a catfish story. The doctor visited St. Louis, Missouri where he had the pleasure of experiencing Midwest catfish culture. St. Louis lies at the juncture between a small regional river named the Mississippi and the mighty Missouri River. Catfish abounded there as the doc found out. At the Union market he could “fairly feel catfish in the air” and he saw catfish over seven feet long. Cleveland didn’t believe him and told the good doctor “when you lie why don’t you lie reasonably and artistically?” The other man went on to list everything a butcher pulled out of one giant fish. The fish ate a “gold bracelet, a setter dog, a pair of buckskin gloves, a baby, and seven copies of the city ordinances.” It was six feet nine inches and weighed 210 pounds. It’s steaks sold for nine dollars each. The whole story sounded so ridicules to Cleveland he thought the doctor was drunk.[5]

The doctor was in fact telling a plausible story. Catfish that size do exist and they do eat anything they can fit in their mouths. Go on Youtube and search catfish eating stuff for confirmation. Between the huge stomach and unusual looks, it’s easy to see why people’s imaginations ran wild. In his book Beautifully Grotesque Fish of the American West author Mark Spitzer described flathead cat (the likely culprit behind the Murphysboro “attack”) as “truly the most grotesque catfish in the American West, or anywhere on this continent. With those beady little eyes and those large, flat, extraterrestrial-looking heads equipped with heavy-duty lower jaws, these top predators have been reported to reach weights of over 150 pounds.”[6] Even I, a lover of unique animals, have to admit President Cleveland was on to something. My biggest catfish was a relatively small 15 or so pound channel cat in a small neighbor hood pond behind my old house. That fish was pretty wild to haul on land. You can’t really blame the people of Murphysboro, Illinois for believing a big cat dragged a kid through a river.

[1] A Doubtful Fish Story, Kansas City Star, 08/10/1886.

[2] Ecology of the Coyote in the Yellowstone, Adolp Murie, US National Parks Service, 1940.

[3] The Giant Cat Fish. Kansas City Star, 06/15/1885.

[4] A Black Jonah Reasons for the Belief that a Boy Was Swallowed by a Catfish. Kansas City Star, 10/3/1885.

[5] A Catfish Story. How the Doctor Tries to Impose on President Cleveland’s Credulity – A Sample Story, Kansas City Star, 09/04/1885.

[6] Spitzer, Mark, Beautifully Grotesque Fish of the American West, pg 111.

A Catfish’s Journey to the Dinner Plate

I pulled up to the Big Blue River at dusk. It was a hot Kansas summer night. I had fishing rods in hand. Drinks and worms filled the cooler. It was going to be a good night. I sat down in my old trusty fold up chair and cast both lines into the eddy next to the bank. One rod had a basic bobber, split shot, and j hook set up. The other had a slide weight with a circle hook on the end. Both were baited with worms. I sat back and admired the river. It wasn’t anything particularly pretty, most plains rivers aren’t, but, there was a subtle beauty. The water burbled away while an owl hooted off in the distance. Was that a coyote singing over the next hill? I thought so but couldn’t confirm. The sun had almost set when the bobber sank. I set the hook and reeled in a nice two or three pound channel catfish. That fish became four and those four became five. All of them became dinner.

A channel catfish. Photo from the USFWS

Hunters and fisherman love talking about connecting to their ancestors through the outdoors. Consume any outdoor media based here in the United States and you’ll hear on repeat that we need to preserve America’s hunting and fishing heritage. I don’t think there’s a better example than a simple fishing trip to the local river. My life in 21st-century Kansas is very different then some Native American fisherman thousands of years ago but we both sat in the same bank catching the same fish on a muggy evening. That’s one of the beautiful things about fish. They connect people together across time and space. Often times through the catching and eating of said fish.

In the channel cat’s case, they’ve been a key source of food for people in North America from the very beginning. The earliest known channel cat fossils date back approximately 20 million years ago. By the time people got to North America around 20 or so thousand years ago channels were well established in rivers and lakes in the middle of the continent. The meat is mild and tender which makes it perfect for a variety of cuisines. I don’t remember how I cooked those fish but the how doesn’t matter. I caught, cleaned, cooked, and ate them. Just like so many others before me.

Editor’s note: Thanks for the support in the first month! I opened up paid subscribtions for five bucks a month. Everything will always remain free and open to the public but wanted to give readers an option to support me monetarily. See you all in a couple of weeks for some in-depth history of catfishes!

Ancient Giants of the Missouri River

On clear, dark nights the Kansas City skyline bounces off the Missouri River. On the surface, the Big Muddy is boring. It’s not wide like the Mississippi and it’s not wild like the Yukon. Underwater is a different story. Ancient giants swim here.

A paddlefish in all its glory. Photo from the US Fish and Wildlife Service

The first time I saw a paddlefish in person I thought the fish was smiling at me. It wasn’t happy to see me. It was happily gorging on plankton just like every other paddlefish for the last 165 million years. In proper biological terms, paddlefish are filter feeders. That means they swim forward forcing water over its gills. They breathe through their gills and collect food via gill rakers. It’s an effective digestive system for microorganisms and inspired German researchers to create a potential new waste water filtration system. https://www.sciencealert.com/fish-mouth-filter-removes-99-of-microplastics-from-laundry-waste#

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These fish can grow over seven feet long and weigh about 200 pounds. The fish look like grey ships floating through the water column. For us humans, they are like a pleasant sail ship. For microorganisms, paddlefish are like aircraft carriers armed to the teeth. From above, their rostrum, the “paddle” part of paddlefish you can see in front of their faces, even looks like a runway. The rostrum helps them navigate the dark water and find food. It has millions of tiny sensors called ampullae of Lorenzini that detect electric signals from the plankton. Shovelnose Catfish as they’re sometimes called swing the rostrum around like a radar in search of the next meal.

Paddlefish swim up and down the Missouri drawing attention like carriers on the open ocean. The river was always big and slow-flowing. It was notorious with sailors in the 19th century for being different every single day. It was as inconsistently consistent as the weather in Kansas City. That river was perfect for paddlefish. The silty water was loaded with food. Paddlefish had all the tasty plankton (the freshwater kind not the krabbie patty stealing kind).

The Mighty Mo has significantly changed over the millennia but paddlefish don’t care. They can be neighbors with us and the Sinclaires. Spoonbills are witnesses to every stage of the Missouri River’s eras. From its humble origins carrying water from the baby Rocky Mountains to the ocean to the 21st-century these fish have seen it all. They dodged other fish, people, and the occasional bison to be here today. A paddlefish won’t even blink at a soccer ball falling from the sky.