Montana Has a New Fish! Found in Clark River

MISSOULA — Western Montana has a new fish.

The cedar sculpin won’t be showing up in anglers’ creels any time soon, except perhaps in the form of some bigger trout’s lunch. But biologists at the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula consider it a significant step in understanding how our river systems work.

Fisheries biologist Michael Young said the cedar sculpin looks similar to the well-known shorthead sculpin, but has clear genetic differences. It lives in the Clark Fork River basin, as well as the drainages feeding the Coeur d’Alene and St. Joe rivers in Idaho. They are often the only fish to inhabit the upper headwater streams of those rivers and provide a food source for larger fish.

“Recognizing species of sculpins is a challenge because even distantly related species look very much alike,” Young said in an email. “So rather than taking a morphological approach to identification, we used genetic methods to delineate the species. It’s really exciting to find a new species of fish. It’s something you might expect in more remote parts of the world, but not in the U.S.”

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