Dace: What Fish It Is, How to Identify It, Eating

A dace is a small, slim freshwater fish, usually a member of the carp and minnow family (Cyprinidae). The word has two main uses, according to Wiktionary:

• In Britain and Europe: the common dace, Leuciscus leuciscus, a shoaling fish of swift rivers.
• In American English: any of several small native North American fish of the family Cyprinidae, such as the blacknose, finescale and redbelly daces.

Wikipedia's list of fish called dace runs to more than twenty names, including the fallfish, the Moapa dace, the desert dace and the spikedace, plus one fish outside the carp order: the European seabass. So when someone says dace, the region usually tells you which fish they mean.

Check these marks on a European dace:

• Body: slender and silvery, covered in large scales (Wikipedia; The Wildlife Trusts).
• Eye: a yellowish iris (Wikipedia).
• Mouth: set slightly underneath, with the upper jaw a little longer and no obvious snout (Wikipedia).
• Anal fin: the lower edge curves inward (concave) (Wikipedia).
• Tail: forked (Wikipedia).
• Fins: brownish and dull (The Wildlife Trusts).

The Wildlife Trusts separate it from its two usual look-alikes this way: the dace is more slender than the roach and smaller than the chub, with duller fins. Photograph the fish side-on with the anal fin spread, and add a close shot of the head so the eye colour and mouth position show.

North American daces are smaller than the European fish. Two examples:

• Eastern blacknose dace (Rhinichthys atratulus): slightly over 100 mm (3.9 in) at most; a dark band along the side separates the darker back from the silvery-white belly, and the snout is black. Breeding males show orange-red. It lives in rocky, swift streams from Manitoba to the Atlantic and south to Georgia, lives two or three years, and is food for trout and bass (Wikipedia).
• Finescale dace (Chrosomus neogaeus): 60 to 70 mm (2.4 to 2.8 in), bronze and black with dark stripes along the body and more than 80 small scales along the lateral line, which gives it its name. It lives in cool, acidic bogs, slow creeks and beaver ponds, native to northern Minnesota with smaller populations in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. It breeds with the northern redbelly dace, and the hybrids are all female (Wikipedia).

If you use small daces as bait, check your state's live-bait rules before moving any live fish between waters.

The common dace lives in rivers and streams, sometimes in lakes or brackish river mouths, across the North Sea, Baltic, White Sea and Barents Sea basins and the Caspian and Black Sea drainages (Wikipedia). It swims near the surface and often gathers in large shoals in shady spots (Wikipedia; The Wildlife Trusts). In Britain it is widespread in lowland England but rarer in Wales and Scotland (The Wildlife Trusts). It has been established in Ireland since the early 1900s, after being brought in as bait for pike (Wikipedia).

Food: mainly small invertebrates (Wikipedia); The Wildlife Trusts add fish eggs, plants and seeds.

Not especially. Wikipedia says the common dace is fished for sport and used as bait, but is not highly regarded as a food fish; it reached Ireland as bait for pike. If you do keep fish from a river, check your local fishing rules and any fish-consumption advice for that water.

Yes, dace is a standard English noun. Wiktionary gives the pronunciation /deɪs/, plurals dace or daces, and an origin in Late Middle English darse, from Old French darz, meaning a dart or spear. It also notes the word's use in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). We could not open the Oxford dictionary site to confirm its entry directly, so we cite Wiktionary here.

Research and drafting for this page were assisted by AI and checked line by line against the sources listed below. Every number names the organisation it comes from, and where sources disagree we say so instead of picking one silently. Prices and rules are given with the date we checked them (25 September 2026); they change, so confirm before you rely on them. If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it.