On the importance and practical conservation of nongame fishes

ABSTRACT Fisheries management has historically focused conservation efforts on game or sport species. However, most species are nongame—those not traditionally captured for sport or harvest in countries where recreational fisheries predominate. Greater conservation of nongame species could help ensure that population declines do not go unnoticed. Unfortunately, fisheries managers already manage complex ecosystems with limited resources, and they frequently are directed to focus on game fishes. However, game fish populations can also be tightly coupled to nongame fishes, so nongame management can sometimes also benefit game species. We reviewed functional roles of freshwater nongame fishes and suggest categories that may be especially important for conservation. Of note, nongame fishes are more imperiled than game fishes and fill largely distinct functional roles. These roles include food-web impacts, ecosystem engineering, and mussel hosting. Management priorities could include nongame piscivores and species with high biomass, especially herbivores, nest builders, and imperiled mussel hosts. We provide practical options for including nongame fishes in current management, many of which require little additional funding. These include recognizing when sport fish funding and conservation can also benefit nongame species, whole-community sampling at some monitoring locations, collecting catch data for select species observed during game fish surveys, embracing environmental DNA sampling, and making presence–absence record keeping the default option.