Tench captured in Bay of Quinte

Tench (tinca tinca) are native to Europe and western Asia, and were introduced to North America in the late 19th century for use as a food and sport fish.

In eastern Canada, Tench were illegally imported from Germany to a Quebec fish farm in the late 1980s and had escaped into the Richelieu River by the early 1990s, a tributary of the St. Lawrence River. In 2016, Tench first appeared in Ontario waters of Lake St. Francis near Cornwall, downstream of the Moses-Saunders Dam, a barrier to natural upstream dispersal.

In the October of 2018, a commercial fisherman captured a Tench in the Bay of Quinte near the Belleville water treatment plant. The fish measured 46.5 cm TL and weighed 1.39 kg. It is possible that the fish was introduced via “bait bucket transfer” as juveniles could easily be mistaken as species of baitfish.

View the Tench distribution at EDDMapS.