Blue Catfish Caught with Shocking Last Meal

By Cheryl Costello

You may have heard of a “turducken” at Thanksgiving: a chicken stuffed into a duck, stuffed into a turkey. Well, you could call what researches at Salisbury University discovered a “fishducken”.

Scientists caught a blue catfish in order to analyze the contents of its stomach. What they found inside surprised them: the remains of an entire wood duck. This discovery sheds light on just what these invasive fish are willing to eat.

Blue catfish are increasingly prevalent in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Because this non-native population is growing, researchers want to learn more about their eating habits. The Applied Biology program at Salisbury University studies blue cat diets by electrofishing with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, then dissecting the fish in the lab.

“It temporarily stuns these fish and they kind of float to the surface,” explains Salisbury graduate student Zach Crum. “And then we have the crew on the electrofishing boat scoop them up with nets.”

Their stomachs are then frozen and analyzed. That’s when Crum got a major shock. “It was kind of just a big surprise in the lab one night while I was in there late, working by myself.”

Crum’s professor, Dr. Noah Bressman, says he got a text from Zach at 7pm that night. “I said, ‘I gotta run over there cause that’s crazy’,” Bressman recalls.

Inside the catfish, Crum had found a wood duck. How did he know? “What I saw was the little fuzzy-looking black things. I saw just one or two right at first. Immediately I thought that was out of the ordinary for sure. I’d opened 50-100 fish before this one.”

Crum believes it’s the first documented and identified duck found in the stomach of a catfish as part of a formal diet study. He says there’s no way of knowing how it was eaten, whether on the surface of the water or just below. But he says the fish could have swallowed the duck whole, as blue cats are known to eat large meals.

“It’s indicative of how aggressive these fish are and how willing they are to just scoop anything up they can get their mouths on,” Crum says.

“They start eating things that perhaps didn’t have predators before,” Bressman says. “Or they start overeating or eating too many things or competing with the striped bass or other fish. There will be less food for them to eat.”

The researchers are looking closely at the diets of blue catfish to see what impact the species may have on native Bay life like blue crabs and rockfish.

“If they can eat an adult duck, they can really eat anything,” says Bressman.

The Salisbury lab work is focused specifically on blue cats on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “Our goal is to provide fisheries managers some insight into what these fish are eating on the Eastern Shore,” Crum says. He plans to collect fish for about a year. The researchers are hearty supporters of commercial and recreational blue cat fisheries on the Bay.

“The best thing you can do as someone who is interested in helping out those invasives is to go out, go fishing for blue catfish, and eat ‘em,” says Crum.

Bressman jokes, “Let’s eat them all to death!”