Blue catfish are monsters — in more ways than one.
They grow to gargantuan sizes, reeling in anglers who live for the thrill of catching a giant trophy fish that can weigh more than a small child.
But they’re also an invasive species that can wreak havoc on the Chesapeake Bay’s food chain, gobbling up small fish and leaving little for other big fish to eat.
Regulators in Maryland and Virginia are trying to control these whiskery invaders, and federal officials who work on the bay have officially declared blue catfish as a problem that needs fixing.
“They’re showing up pretty much everywhere,” said Don Cosden, chief of inland fisheries for Maryland. “We’ve documented them in the Patuxent River, the Nanticoke, the Choptank, the Upper Bay. We have reports of blue cats being caught in the Upper Bay.”
The trouble with blue catfish turning up around the bay is that they are not native to the bay. Blue catfish are native to the Mississippi River system.
It’s believed that blue catfish were stocked in Virginia in the 1970s to provide a good fishing opportunity for recreational anglers — before officials realized the problems blue catfish could cause. It’s possible that rogue introductions have caused the population to spread further.
‘No getting rid of them’
Blue catfish (Ictalurus furcatas) have gray-blue backs and silver or white bellies, as well as barbels on the chin that look like whiskers.
And they can grow large. Very large.
Angler Shawn Wetzel of Pennsylvania set a Maryland state record for blue catfish in February with an 80 pound, 12 ounce blue cat he caught on the Potomac River. He beat the old record by 13 pounds.
But that’s nothing compared to Virginia’s blue catfish. The world record of 143 pounds was set in Virginia’s Buggs Island Lake near the North Carolina border last summer.
Blue catfish get so big because they are not picky eaters. Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources has done a few stomach surveys — they see what’s inside a dead fish — and found all sorts of fish, including at least one northern snakehead, a fellow problematic invader.
Blue catfish, normally a freshwater species, have adapted to some slightly salty areas in the bay.
“If they can adapt to a new environment and they can find a niche, there’s no getting rid of them,” Cosden said.
It’s not known exactly how much blue catfish might be displacing native predator fish or nonnative predator fish that aren’t causing problems, such as channel catfish.
Maryland officials are sort of lumping blue catfish into the same category as the toothy northern snakeheads, asking anglers to catch them and kill them as frequently as possible. Even eat them, if you like.
While there’s an official kill-on-sight rule for snakeheads, there’s no such death sentence for blue cats. Still, “we prefer that you kill it and eat it,” Cosden said.
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