On the Nose
CADDO LAKE STATE PARK
245 Park Road 2, Karnack.
903-679-3351;
One morning in early September 2020, a tanker truck from the National Fish Hatchery in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, rumbled down US 271 toward Caddo Lake in East Texas. Normally, the truck carries bass and other sport fish in its tank, ready to replenish one of Texas’ many reservoirs. That day, however, the tank was filled with something curious: 6,500 baby paddlefish, velvet-skinned beasts with long oar-like noses, called “rostrums,” and faintly shocked expressions.
The American paddlefish is the last surviving species of a 125-million-year-old family, according to Timothy Bister, a district fisheries biologist at Texas Parks and Wildlife. (Its last remaining relative, the Chinese paddlefish, was driven extinct between 2005 and 2010.) Growing up to 5 feet long and weighing around 100 pounds, paddlefish once swam the length and breadth of the Mississippi River drainage, including the Sabine, Neches, and
