The Easy-Going Comical Monster

The paddlefish is a big, easy-going, comical monster that looks like a cross between a sawbilled shark and a channel catfish. The scientists named it Polyodon spathula. The Mississippi fishermen call it paddlefish, spoonbill, shovelfish, duckbilled cat, or spade fish, depending upon the locality. When the commercial fisheries' agents sell it, they frequently pass it off as the shovelnosed sturgeon. Smart New Yorkers, when they buy it smoked, cannot tell the difference. Everybody seems to be happy about it except the United States fisheries' statisticians. There are a lot of peculiar things about the paddlefish's life story that scientists and curious fishermen would like to know. Many of America's greatest field naturalists have been on the trail of the big fish for years, but even to this day, the place, the time and the method of its breeding and spawning habits are still unknown. Nobody has ever found the early developmental stages of its eggs; nobody has ever seen a newly hatched Polyodon larva. Every time someone catches a paddlefish less than ten inches in length it becomes a newsworthy item.

It is not that paddlefishes of average size are rare. Actually those weighing twelve pounds and about two feet long are commonplace. The records of about a dozen states drained by the waters of the Mississippi show that every year, since 1894, more than a million pounds of spoonbills are taken by commercial anglers. The fishes are taken by hoop nets, floating trammel nets, and huge seines pulled by barges equipped with power winch. In some years the catch has run as high as 2,473,250 pounds. In spite of the many radical and injurious changes wrought by man in the Mississippi, the paddlefish has managed to maintain itself in these modern times, although it belongs to an ancient group of fishes most of which have long been extinct.

Miraculously it has survived all the prehistoric geologic upheavals, as well as the recent land-water disturbances. Today Polyodon is the only one of its kind left in the western hemisphere. There is but one other living fish like it in the world and it inhabits the great rivers of China that flow into the Yellow Sea.
The Asiatic paddlefish, Psephurus gradius, or the fighting pebbletailed fish, lives in the Yangtze Kiang and the Hoang Ho, and looks much like the American species on the whole, but it has a much narrower paddle. College professors of comparative anatomy, a generation ago, used to delight in lecturing on the structural details of Polyodon.