Sucker

Blue - A specialist to large flowing rivers, blue suckers travel long distances to spawn.

Buffalo - Bigmouth, black and smallmouth buffalo live in Alabama.

Carpsucker - Quillback, highfin carpsucker, and river carpsucker live in Alabama.

Chubsucker - Creek, highfin, lake and sharpfin chubsuckers live in Alabama.

Harelip - The harelip sucker, once found in north alabama, is extinct.

Hog Sucker - Alabama and northern hog suckers live in Alabama.

Redhorse - Some Alabama suckers have the common name redhorse or jumprock; they are in the genus Moxostoma.

Spotted - Common throughout Alabama, spotted suckers are easily distinguished from other catostomid species by several longitudinal rows of black or brown spots (one per scale) along the sides of the body.

White - The white sucker has 55 to 85 lateral line scales, more than any other sucker in Alabama.

The sucker family includes 3 subfamilies, 14 genera and about 80 species in the family. The subfamily Ictiobinae includes 2 genera, including the Ictiobus spp. (buffalo) and the Carpiodes spp. (carpsuckers, quillback). All are somewhat carp-looking, none more so than bigmouth buffalo, Ictiobus cyprinellus. (Carp and sucker families are found in the same order, Cypriniformes.)

There are 5 species of buffalo in the genus Ictiobus, including three found in Alabama: the bigmouth buffalo, the smallmouth buffalo (I. bubalus) and the black buffalo (I. niger), and 3 species of carpsuckers, including the quillback (Carpiodes cyprinus). The family also includes the white sucker (Catostomus commersonii). Buffalo, quillback and white sucker represent the major species of suckers commercially landed in the USA and Canada.

In 2008, 1,645 tonnes of buffalo, valued at $815,000, were landed in the US. Most of the catches came from Louisiana, but landings were also recorded in Michigan and Ohio. In the same year, 130 tonnes of quillback was landed, valued at $63,000; mostly in Michigan and Ohio. The gear used was mostly hoop nets, fyke nets and gill nets. Suckers make up a small component of the commercial fisheries in Alabama. There is no reported Canadian commercial fishery for these fishes.