Less than four miles from the Atlantic Ocean lies North Carolina’s largest natural lake, Lake Mattamuskeet. It measures 18 by 7 miles (29 by 11 km), but has an average depth of only around 3 ft (0.9 m), with a maximum depth of 5 ft (1.5 m). While this may seem small compared to many other lakes, Lake Mattamuskeet is an important part of the increasingly rare wetland coastal ecosystem.
From a wildlife standpoint, Lake Mattamuskeet is known primarily as a wintering site for migrating birds, especially Anatids (ducks, geese, and swans), and it is maintained as a National Wildlife Refuge for these populations. Like most coastal lowlands, the lake is also home to an abundance of macro-invertebrates, particularly crustaceans, and crabbing is a common pastime in the region.
Lake Mattamuskeet has its share of fish as well, mostly freshwater, but sometimes brackish or saltwater specimens. Sources differ on the number of species that can be found there, likely because the composition seems to vary over time. There are usually around 40 different fish species, with around a dozen making up the majority of the biomass, and most of them prefer the murky, stained waters found in shallow lakes with high nutrient input.
Fish Species in Lake Mattamuskeet
1) Channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus)
Named after their whiskers (or barbels), catfish are benthic feeders which rely on their exceptional senses of taste and smell to find food along lake and river bottoms. As omnivores, catfish consume most edible matter found in the lake, including fish, mollusks, crustaceans, plants, algae, and even decaying matter. The channel catfish, however, prefers crayfish and small fish and is the most abundant catfish species in the United States.
Channel catfish are slender, smooth, and have an olive-colored body and white belly, a highly forked caudal fin (tail), and black spots along their sides– punctatus being the Latin word for ‘spotted’. Like many fish species, they often have a pronounced lateral line – a line of sensory organs from gill to tail that detects changes in water pressure, and often shows where a fish’s color changes from back to belly. In Lake Mattamuskeet, channel catfish, along with several other species, prefer to spawn and congregate in and around the canals connecting the lake to nearby estuaries, due to the canals being deeper than the lake itself.
2) Largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides)
The largemouth bass is an agile and voracious predator and is a popular game fish due to its size and fighting spirit on the line. They are the largest member of their genus of black basses, and their olive-colored bodies can grow to up to 30 in (75 cm). They prefer slow or still waters with lots of structure, such as vegetation, docks, or dropoffs.
The largemouth bass has pharyngeal jaws, which allow it to open its mouth abnormally wide, and with a quick, powerful inhalation it can swallow prey up to 50% its size. As an adult, it is typically an apex predator but is sometimes preyed upon by raptors – birds of prey. Ospreys, for example, which are abundant on Lake Mattamuskeet, are piscivores – obligate fish-eaters.
Conservation efforts in Lake Mattamuskeet have led to a healthy largemouth bass population in recent years, with the average sampled length increasing to 16 in (40 cm) in 2019. Large carnivorous fish tend to have long lifespans and grow continuously (the largemouth bass can live 25 years), and increasing average sizes indicates an improving population.
3) Black crappie (Pomoxis nigromaculatus)
Black crappies are medium-sized schooling fish that eat insects, crustaceans, and other fish. Their body is covered in spots, and like all crappies, their dorsal fin and operculum (gill cover) are highly spiked, which reduces its palatability to predators (the genus’ name Pomoxis means spiked operculum in Latin). Like bass, the crappie’s mouth is folded and protrudes past its eyes, and can rapidly open to suck up other fish, which are particularly slippery prey.
Black crappies are of least concern for conservation. They are found in most freshwater lakes in the eastern United States and have a high reproductive rate. If anything, they themselves may overwhelm an ecosystem if not kept in check by other predators.
4) Warmouth (Lepomis gulosus)
The warmouth, along with bass, crappie, bluegill, and pumpkinseed – all found in Lake Mattamuskeet – are sunfish (Centrarchidae), a family of freshwater fish native to eastern North America, with rayed fins and laterally compressed bodies. The warmouth has a pronounced jaw and large eyes that are surrounded by distinct purple to red streaks, which become mottled through the rest of the body. Another name for the warmouth is strawberry perch.
Warmouth can grow to be up to 12 in (30 cm) and 2 lbs (0.9 kg) but are usually only around half that size. They tend to be hardier than other sunfish and can tolerate muddier waters than bass or bluegill. Like catfish, they can be bottom feeders, and cleaner tasting fish come from cleaner waters.
5) Bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus)
Bluegill is another medium-sized omnivorous sunfish, though it can grow to be larger than crappie and warmouth, due to its dorsal-ventral elongation. Like crappie, they have a high reproductive rate and are important as secondary consumers. They feed heavily on insects and smaller fish but they themselves are also readily eaten by larger fish. Species at this trophic level tend to have hardy populations, however the bluegill is more vulnerable than other sunfish to overfishing, since males tend to congregate at and guard nesting sites, and can be caught at these times by anglers en masse.
In Lake Mattamuskeet, the bluegill is periodically stocked by the tens of thousands, as they eat the eggs of the common carp, an invasive species responsible for recently disrupting the lake’s ecosystem.
6) Common carp (Cyprinus carpio)
The common carp is one of the world’s worst invasive species. Domesticated in Europe hundreds of years ago, they were deliberately introduced to rivers and lakes around the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as food stock. However, their lack of natural predators, high reproductive rate, and omnivorous diet has led them to outcompete many native species.
The size of the common carp can vary widely depending on age and the size of the water body. The largest one caught in North Carolina was 48 lbs (22 kg), while the largest one ever recorded was 100 lbs (45 kg), from a sportfishing lake in France.
In Lake Mattamuskeet, the common carp is responsible for decreased water quality due to its appetite for aquatic vegetation, the absence of which results in disturbed sediment. Efforts to reduce the carp population have been present since the 1950s, and in the fall of 2021, the county unveiled a plan to isolate and remove most of the around 1 million carp that inhabit the lake. While they can’t be completely eliminated, a severe reduction in population will improve the overall health of the ecosystem.
7) Bowfin (Amia calva)
The bowfin, also known as the mudfish or mud pike, is a long, bottom-feeding bony fish. They can grow up to 43 in (109 cm) and are named after their dorsal fin, which runs the length of their back like a bow. Like much of Lake Mattamuskeet’s fish, they prefer marshes, slow-moving water, and particularly lake bottoms. They can survive in lower oxygen environments than most other fish due to their ability to surface and breathe air, similar to lungfish.
Bowfin are often called living fossils, being the only surviving member of the order Amiiformes. They possess a number of primitive traits, such as a high proportion of cartilage in their skeleton, an oddity among bony fish. They are rarely fished intentionally, as their meat tends to be pasty and tasteless.
8) White perch (Morone americana)
The white perch is not a true perch, but instead a type of temperate bass of the Morinidae family. They are around 10 in (25 cm) long with laterally compressed bodies, and like many lake fish, are varying shades of brown, green, and gray, in order to blend in to murky water. The white perch prefers brackish water – estuaries where fresh and saltwater mix, however it can also live in freshwater, and its tolerance to saltwater has allowed it to move along the Atlantic coast, penetrating any waterway it comes across.
The completion of the Erie canal famously allowed the white perch to colonize the Great Lakes, to the detriment of native fish species in the region. It has also been introduced, accidentally or intentionally, to a number of river systems in the interior United States. In many states, such as Kansas, it is illegal to possess live white perch, in an attempt to curtail its spread. Lake Mattamuskeet, however, is an important site for native white perch populations, and one of the few places in North Carolina where you can find them.
9) Bay anchovy (Anchoa mitchilli)
Also known as the common anchovy, this small schooling fish is common along the entire East Coast of the United States. Despite being a saltwater fish, it, along with other ocean fish, can occasionally be found in Lake Mattamuskeet, due to the canals that connect it to nearby bays.
While they appear to have no significant impact on the lake’s ecosystem, bay anchovies are an important part of the Atlantic Ocean’s food web. Growing to an average length of only around 2 in (6 cm), they feed on suspended microbiota such as algae, copepods, and crustacean larvae, and are then themselves eaten by numerous other fish and marine species. This species is sometimes used as baitfish, or ground into a paste for its oil.
10) Alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus)
The alewife is an anadromous fish, meaning that it spends most of its life in saltwater, but migrates to freshwater to spawn. The alewife and its sister species, the blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis), are known as river herring, and both seasonally swim the canals into Lake Mattamuskeet to spawn.
They are around 12 in (30 cm) long, silver with a slightly green back, and have a black ‘eye’ spot near their gill. They are at risk of becoming endangered, due to the proliferation of dams and other waterworks reducing the number of spawning locations along the Atlantic Coast. In Lake Mattamuskeet, the canal gates have underdone several redesigns in order to allow certain species such as the alewife and blue crabs to come and go as they please, while keeping other species out.
