Blue Catfish in Chesapeake Bay
I hope you like catfish.
They’re the new fish du jour on the Chesapeke menu. Tasty is the rating they usually get — especially when the taste and words are on the lips of people responsible for making lemonade out of these piscatorial lemons. “Tastes good,” Gov. Larry Hogan pronounced blue catfish as served at his annual Buy Local Cookoff last month.
I can’t disagree. I like the taste of catfish. It’s our local fish in the St. Louis and central Illinois region where I spent much of my early life. It’s what my mother, an avid angler, grew up catching in Southern Illinois ponds, until fate dropped her in Key West for a few years. She was skilled at catching, skinning and cooking a catfish. A natural-born cook and a restaurateur, she cooked catfish a little more delicately than the heavily breaded and deep-fried standard. But I’ll still order that in a central Illinois restaurant, like the Ozark House in Bloomington-Normal.
Still, I thought in moving to Chesapeake Country I’d made my escape from the culture and cuisine of sluggish feeders on the bottoms of Midwestern rivers and ponds locked by heavily farmed land. (Little did I know how well that description suited our estuary.)
Happier still was husband Bill Lambrecht, who brings us this week’s special report, Blue Cat Invasion.
Bill, like my mother, just about lives to fish.
We arrived in Chesapeake Country just in time for Maryland’s species-reviving five-year moratorium on catching rockfish. Rockfish, known as striped bass in most of their range but Maryland, is the most celebrated species of the northeast seaboard. Dennis Doyle uses that phrase in his Sporting Life column this week, and it’s acknowledged truth.
So Bill spent his early Chesapeake fishing career catching bluefish — if he was lucky. Despite its lower reputation as an oily fish, we got fond of that toothy species. Smoked bluefish is — you know the word — tasty.
With the rockfish moratorium now a distant memory in another century, Bill has joined the rest of the Chesapeake fishing community in seeking (and sometimes catching) rockfish. Like everybody else’s, his catch was filled out with perch, croaker, spot and, about this time of year, Spanish mackerel. Lucky or species-targeting anglers now and again got flounder or red or black drum or some oddity like the record Florida pompano just caught in our waters. Never catfish.
Until now. This year catfish is the big catch.
Rockfish are biting now. But for a couple of weeks early in the summer rockfish season, blue catfish and snakeheads were leading Doyle’s fishing report. That’s about when our new neighbor and avid fisher Jack Dowd started catching assorted catfish at our local bridge, a fishing locale Bill knows well. Newshound that Bill is, he went sniffing around. His report this week on our new Chesapeake species is the result.
As you’ll read in his story, blue catfish are an alien species, deposited in regional waters the way so many oddities arrive: released by humans, in this case to build a new fishery. How it succeeded!
These fast-growing aquatic goats can multiply into a dominant species, “representing up to 75 percent of total fish biomass,” Bill learned.
Don’t take my word for it. Read his story.
Will the fish prevail? Or can we outmaneuver them?
Getting rid of a species has proved difficult, our history with carp, snakeheads and zebra muscles tells us. As our great estuary becomes more like midland rivers — burdened by silt and nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from farms and homes — it will feel ever more like home to blue catfish.
So far, the chief weapon we’ve arrayed against the fish is catch and eat. But there might be more of them than there are of us. Plus, eating them — at least as a regular diet — might be self-defeating because of the mercury and toxic chemicals they pick up in abundance while bottom-feeding.
That, of course, is a problem with any fish in our Bay. But that’s an issue for another time.
Perhaps we ought to take the fight to the fish?
Perhaps that will happen. A reconstituted Invasive Catfish Workgroup holds its first meeting August 27. We’ll let you know what comes out of it.
Meanwhile, have a bite. And share your stories of catching, cooking and eating blue catfish: [email protected].