Ohio Names Official State Fish

Most of the states in this great country of ours have an official state fish.

It’s not something that is ever really going to affect much in the way of public policy, it’s more or less one of those “hey look at this cool thing about our state” type things.

Now, I have done a great deal of fishing in the state of Ohio.

Having grown up in Michigan and having family that lived on the other side of the Toledo Strip, it never really occurred to me in all my years that Ohio did not actually have an official state fish.

Believe it or not, it has actually been a multi-year long battle to name a state fish. You would think that it wouldn’t take that long to do something like that; but I guess that’s the world we live in when it comes to dealing with government officials.

Anyway, it seems that the fight to name the official state fish of Ohio has finally come to a head.

Ohio State Representatives this past week passed a bill naming the walleye as the official fish of the state of Ohio.

The walleye are extremely abundant in Lake Erie and can be found all over the lake. As someone that has come down to fish from Michigan on Lake Erie I can definitely tell you that this is the case.

There were so many walleye caught on one fishing trip with my dad several years ago when I went back home for a visit that it felt like you could just clap your hands and a walleye would magically appear on the other end of your hook.

As of 2023, it was estimated by the Ohio DNR that the population of walleye in Lake Erie alone was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-three million.

Walleye fishing brings countless people to the state of Ohio to fish every year. For the Lake Erie shore towns, this is a boon to the local ecnonomy.

If there’s one thing that fisherman do when they get to a spot that they are going to be for a couple of days of fishing, it’s spend money.

Naming an official state fish, as silly as it might sound, is going to do wonders for the economy of Ohio.