Field guide
Explore 30 Ontario fish guides, from habitat and seasonal patterns to lakes where each species has been recorded.
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Ontario's most sought-after eating fish, known for its reflective, light-gathering eyes and firm, mild white fillets.
A slimmer, more streamlined cousin of the walleye built for life in current, marked with dark saddle-shaped blotches instead of a solid dark tail tip.
A long, toothy ambush predator with a duck-bill snout, easy to identify by the light bean-shaped spots scattered on its dark green body.
Ontario's apex freshwater predator, similar in shape to pike but with light markings on a lighter background and a nearly fully-scaled cheek.
A bronze-backed, hard-fighting gamefish that favours clean rocky water over the vegetation its largemouth cousin prefers.
A big-mouthed, aggressive predator identified by a jaw extending past the eye and a dark horizontal stripe along its side.
A silvery, schooling open-water fish with faint horizontal stripes, known for surface feeding frenzies on baitfish.
A small, golden-yellow panfish with dark vertical bars, prized for sweet, flaky fillets and found in huge schools.
A deep-bodied, silvery panfish with irregular dark speckling, suspending in loose schools around cover.
Similar to black crappie but with faint vertical bars instead of speckling, more tolerant of murky water.
A round, flat-bodied sunfish with a dark ear flap and a small mouth, a staple panfish for anglers of every age.
A dazzlingly colourful sunfish with an orange-red spot on its ear flap, common in the same shallow weedy water as bluegill.
A stocky, red-eyed panfish related to the sunfish, abundant and aggressive — often the first fish a young angler catches.
A native char, not a true trout, with distinctive worm-like markings on its back and white-edged fins.
A deep-bodied char of cold northern lakes, pale-spotted and built to cruise the thermocline all summer.
A wary, golden-brown trout with black and red spots, equally at home in cool rivers and the Great Lakes.
A silvery trout with a pink lateral stripe, known in its Great Lakes migratory form as steelhead.
A stocked hybrid of brook and lake trout, combining brookie markings with a laker's deeper-water habits.
A restoration species in Lake Ontario's watershed, silvery at lake stage with an X-shaped spot pattern along its sides.
The largest Pacific salmon stocked in the Great Lakes, black-gummed and heavily spotted on both lobes of the tail.
A smaller, brighter Pacific salmon than chinook, spotted only on the upper tail lobe and with white gums.
The smallest Pacific salmon, an incidental Great Lakes population that runs strongest in odd-numbered years.
A silvery, small-mouthed member of the trout family that feeds tight to bottom in deep, cold water.
A slender, silvery pelagic forage fish (also called lake herring) that schools in open, cold water.
A whiskered scavenger with a deeply forked tail and scattered dark spots, hunting mainly by smell after dark.
A small, stocky catfish with a rounded tail and dark barbels, tolerant of warm, low-oxygen water most fish avoid.
Ontario's only freshwater cod, an eel-like bottom-dweller most active in the dead of winter.
A large, heavy-bodied bottom feeder with barbels at the corners of its mouth, introduced but widespread and hard-fighting.
Ontario's only freshwater member of the drum family, deep-bodied with a humped back, known for the croaking sound it makes.
A prehistoric-looking armoured giant with bony plates instead of scales and a shark-like tail — protected across most of Ontario.
Fish illustrations: original artwork © Ontario Fish Finder. All rights reserved. This is a selection of Ontario fishing guides, not a complete provincial species checklist. Lake records come from MNRF surveys; a recorded species does not guarantee a catch. Open the map and tap any highlighted species chip for its full guide, or search for a lake by name to see its own species list directly.
