# Huge catfish



## FishWalton (Jul 22, 2010)

We don't have them like this in the U S

http://tinyurl.com/oupxeh8


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## -WiRtH- (Feb 24, 2009)

One of my life goals is to catch a a giant Wels catfish. They get huge!


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## JD7.62 (Feb 13, 2008)

I can get anyone some Wels catfish if you want. They are under $100 a pop at about 10" in size. They make great pets! You can feed your neighbors stupid little yappy ankle biters to them.


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## FishWalton (Jul 22, 2010)

127 kg = 280 lbs. I can only image how much other fish one that size would eat. From the looks of the belly it looks like lifting it from the water would damage internal organs.


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## CatHunter (Dec 31, 2008)

Heres a photo for the people that don't follow links. Exotics are starting to show up frequently here in Florida. Here are a few photos of some redtails being caught in south Florida.


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## CatHunter (Dec 31, 2008)

JD7.62 said:


> I can get anyone some Wels catfish if you want. They are under $100 a pop at about 10" in size. They make great pets! You can feed your neighbors stupid little yappy ankle biters to them.


I have never seen a wels for sale in the US. Im pretty sure Wels are listed under the Prohibition of Keeping or Release of Live Fish (Specified Species) Order 1998 and you need to hold a special licence to keep one, although you're extremely unlikely to get a licence if you apply, so they're effectively illegal inside the United States.


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## FishWalton (Jul 22, 2010)

Looked up the 'redtail'. Beautiful fish from the Amazon area. Black meat so even the natives don't eat them. There is no telling how many exotics in south Florida we don't know about up here. They eat meat, fish, etc...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redtail_catfish


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## CatHunter (Dec 31, 2008)

This puts in to perspective how big the cats were in the early days of North America. Before commercial fishing wiped them out monster cats roamed North Americas major rivers. Blues and flatheads were record in the Mississippi and Missouri river in the early 1800s weighing from 300-400lbs. 150-200 pounders were fairly common to see at the markets. Nearly all of these fish were slaughtered in less than 100 years. During the 1900s it took almost 100 years to break the 100lb world record barrier. But cats rebounded and are coming back. Today with more people releasing their big cats 100 pound blue cats are being caught monthly, soon we will see 200 pound blue cats swimming in American waters again. Flatheads have a much darker future. Flatheads are still being killed faster than fish can reach adult hood. A 50 pound flathead is still but a juvenile. Catsfish are much more wide spread today than ever before. But their true potential for sher size has not been seen in over 150 years.


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## CatHunter (Dec 31, 2008)

I spend hours and hours each day digging through libraries and archives of information as deep as I can dig on anything catfish related. I began a quest about 3 years ago to see how far back in time I can go to date when the big cats in North American began to vanish. The last true giant that my research came up with was from about 1914 caught from the Tennessee River system. The flathead dwarfed that wels catfish by nearly 200lbs.

The flathead was caught and sold on the market and weighed on commercial scales. The flathead weighed 498lbs and was also accompanied by two blue cats over 300 pounds each. Photos of these cats are worth their weigh in gold. 

These days with so much computer stuff going on any old photo of a giant cat is labeled a fake. That photo above of the wels catfish started a uproar from the public yelling PHOTOSHOP. Only after they aired it on TV did many accept that mans new world record catch.

The moral of the story is America had big cats. And we lost them. Now we just have lots and lots of juvenile cats.

The same story happened to our truly giant sturgeon. Before the 1900s sturgeons were slaughtered weighing over 3000lbs. Today there are more sturgeon than ever because of transplantation and stocking programs. However the true dinosaurs may be gone forever. Now a 1000 pound fish is a remarkable catch.


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## TxMx (Jun 15, 2018)

CatHunter said:


> The last true giant that my research came up with was from about 1914 caught from the Tennessee River system. The flathead dwarfed that wels catfish by nearly 200lbs.
> 
> These days with so much computer stuff going on any old photo of a giant cat is labeled a fake. That photo above of the wels catfish started a uproar from the public yelling PHOTOSHOP. Only after they aired it on TV did many accept that mans new world record catch.


Just to offer a counterpoint to CatHunter's foolish assertion that "computer stuff" and "yelling PHOTOSHOP" is just a symptom of "these days". This is the actual story:

"A member of the photographer’s family dismisses the matter as a prank. 'My daddy had a little wagon that looked like a log wagon,' said Joe Brownlow Pitts of Savannah, Tennessee. 'He put the fish — which weighed, I recall, about 85 lbs. — on it. Then, my uncle Frank, who was good at photography, cut out a cardboard man that was being used in a clothing advertisement and stuck it on the wagon, along with the fish. He took the picture.' Explanation to the contrary, many still prefer to accept the evidence their eyes perceive over what they hear."

So much for research if you are going to let your fishing legends fly in the face of evidence and common sense.

Judge for yourself: http://www.csicop.org/uploads/images/si/nickell-monster-1.gif

If you are gullible enough try this one: https://www.csicop.org/uploads/images/si/nickell-monster-2.gif


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## JoeyWelch (Sep 25, 2009)

It’ll take a lot of crab boil to cook that ear of corn!


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