Common Local Suckers

      One day in the middle of May a few years ago I saw a swarm of foot-long, and longer, fish in a clear stream in western Chester County, Pennsylvania.  Using binoculars, I could see they were gray on top with silver flanks and a broad, pink stripe on each side.  Males had the pink flanks to show their breeding readiness to females in that group of fish about to spawn. 
     Those fish were white suckers, a kind of common fish that ranges from southern Canada to northern Florida and west to the Mississippi River.  They, and northern hog suckers that have much the same range, commonly live and spawn in streams, creeks and impoundments large and smaller in the Middle Atlantic States, as elsewhere. 
     These related suckers that can grow up to 20 inches long have much in common, including having down-turned mouths to suck plants and animals off the bottoms of waterways and impoundments.  Some of the items they eat are aquatic insect larvae, snails, small, freshwater clams, small fish and algae.  Both species are most likely to live in schools in the rocky-bottomed, slow-moving pools of clear streams and creeks.  And both kinds fall prey to other kinds of fish, herons, ospreys, bald eagles, mink, snapping turtles, northern water snakes and other types of predators around waterways and impoundments.        
     Both these suckers spawn from about mid-May to the middle of June on the stony bottoms of small, tributary streams.  Amid much thrashing and splashing as they compete for a favorable position, two or more males of each respective species attend each female of their kind while she is laying her eggs to cover those eggs with their sperm.  The more than 20,000 eggs per female sucker are spread randomly among the stones, and many stick to those stones.  The eggs and young are on their own from the beginning and minnows and other kinds of fish consume many of those tiny eggs: Few grow to maturity.  Some of those eggs slip down between the pebbles on the water bottoms where some of them are better protected from being consumed.  Newly-hatched suckers feed on zooplankton and algae.       
     There are some differences between white suckers and northern hog suckers, which is why they are two distinct species.  While white suckers can tolerate some pollution, siltation and low oxygen in the water, hog suckers can not.  Therefore, hog suckers are more likely to live in better quality water than white suckers do, which reduces competition for space and food between these related fishes.  The presence of hog suckers indicate good quality water. 
     Hog suckers have some physical differences from their local cousins.  They have longer snouts they use to turn over stones in their search for food, hence their common name.  Hogs are light brown all over with darker brown markings across their backs which camouflages them on the stream and lake bottoms.  They also have reduced swim bladders that better allow them to lie on their pectoral and ventral fins on the bottom to feed, using their down-turned mouths to suck up food from the stony bottoms of bodies of water. 
     Suckers are interesting fish.  And they demonstrate how the body of any animal is uniquely shaped to live successfully in a certain niche.  During spring and the rest of the year, look for these finny creatures of waterways and impoundments.