Can You Name Your Fish? Many Can’t

As avid bass anglers, about all we have to figure out is the difference between largemouth, smallmouth and spotted bass every now and then – everything else we catch doesn’t matter. However, when you look at fish identification from a research standpoint, especially when you are talking about DNR angler surveys and asking people what fish they caught during a given trip, if they can’t correctly identify a particular fish, there’s a good chance their data is going to be biased. How good (or bad) are your everyday anglers at identifying common fish species? That’s what Ohio researchers wanted to find out.

Nearly 3,000 Ohio anglers, both lake and river fishermen, were asked to identify 18 artist-rendered images of different sport fishes common to their waters. On average, anglers correctly identified sport fishes only 42% of the time, but accuracy varied widely among species, with greater accuracy exhibited for the most common species such as largemouth bass. However, by grouping angler responses into categories, for example, referring to any bass (LMB, SMB, SB) caught as “black bass”, or any of the various sunfish species as just “sunfish”, angler identification of sport fishes was more reliable, nearly doubling in accuracy to about 83% correct.

When using these results to model out how much error there might be in past surveys where exact fish ID was used, the error margin was estimated to be pretty significant. However, the good news is that a majority of the surveys looked at used the grouping approach, and so error margins were much better. And the number one reason cited for using this approach in the surveys – many anglers simply don’t know what in the heck they’re catching…