June 25, 2025 — Louisiana’s coastline is a river delta, formed by the Mississippi over millennia as its current slowed and relinquished its mud into a calm and sheltered gulf. In the back-and-forth contest between the river’s flow and the incoming waves, then, the power of the Mississippi River won out. There’s nowhere else quite like Louisiana, with its intricate landscape of bays, bayous and inlets that wind, maze-like, through a seemingly endless expanse of marsh.

Sitting on a boat, the results can seem empty and monotonous—nothing but cordgrass as far as the horizon. That’s because the real action lies beneath the surface. Nutrients carried by the river and the ocean meet here, in this estuary, feeding plant life, which in turn feeds an abundant food chain of fish. This abundance has long shaped local culture. Fifteen hundred years ago, when Indigenous corn farmers began to clear and plant the Mississippi’s banks upstream, Louisiana was marked as a place apart: Agriculture did not really take hold here, not when there were so many fish to catch. The first European colonists, too, marveled at the bounty. “The rivers are full of monstrous fish,” a nun stationed in New Orleans in 1727 wrote to her French father. She noted an “infinity” of species not then known in Europe.

Archaeological records from the era show that drum species were among the most popular, and today one drum species—red drum, better known as redfish—has become a symbol of the region. Delta fishermen eventually learned to smell redfish from a hundred yards off, and to distinguish the clouds of mud kicked up by their tails from those made by mullet or sheepshead. By the 19th century, anglers were chasing redfish for more than just sustenance. One of the first guidebooks for American anglers, published in 1865, declared that redfish in the Gulf of Mexico (now Gulf of America) “afford fine sport”: They hit bait hard and could run off 40 feet of line in a quick and angry dash. When a New York aristocrat launched Forest and Stream a few years later, the magazine described the Gulf as a “sportsman’s paradise,” a phrase that became a Louisiana motto, now appearing on the state’s license plates. By the late 1980s, amid concerns that the species was being overfished, it was declared a game fish. That meant it was set aside for anglers alone—no commercial harvest allowed.

Even a fairly young redfish is a taut torpedo of muscle—a beast of an animal, which after a few years can reach as much as nine pounds, almost too big for the shallow waters that have been its nursery. That size is key to their appeal: A charging redfish will send a wave rolling atop the surface. While wade-fishing off a barrier island, you can feel the water beating from their presence. Some fishermen have compared the sound of a school to a passing freight train. Although redfish range as far north as Massachusetts, they love marshlands—which makes the great labyrinth of Louisiana’s delta a particular redfish hot spot. Today, the fish is among the foremost targets of the state’s billion-dollar sport-fishing industry.

Read the full article at Smithsonian Magazine