Hurricane Debbie didn’t just roll in. $1 million worth of cocaine They are being introduced into Florida, and they are moving, as the state wildlife commission puts it, “like infantry moving down a wire fence,” right up to our front doors.
This week, several videos emerged of catfish squirming on land after roads and driveways were flooded by Debbie’s rains. Now a tropical storm, Debbie Just landed for the second time In South Carolina, more flooding is expected along the east coast.
“It looks like there was a strange catfish in our driveway during a tropical storm,” Louis Bardach said in a video taken Sunday in Gulfport, hours before Debbie made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane. “It’s very much alive.”
When another person in the video stabbed the fish, the fish was seen flailing around and running away without even entering the water, or as the boys in the video put it, “backing away and running away.”
These are not just any catfish. They are walking catfish. This species is native to Southeast Asia and was first discovered in Florida in the late 1960s.
According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, the animal is identifiable by its “elongated, gray, scaleless catfish-type body, large mouth, sharp pectoral spines, and four pairs of barbels.” Unlike catfish, which people catch by nodding (pulling the fish out of the water with their hands), the species is not often seen in large populations in large lakes and has been known to gulp air and wiggle across land with its pectoral fins “much like infantrymen moving down barbed wire,” the agency said.
In Florida, they are most commonly found in the Everglades and the canals that connect them, but they have been found throughout much of the central and southern parts of the state. Officials say they can “live and thrive in waters with little or no oxygen,” and have been found in storm drainage systems along roads during floods.
These animals are not native to Florida, but are considered conditional species, not invasive. Originally, it was thought they would eliminate native fish, but the commission said that assumption was wrong. The species has not had a significant detrimental effect on native wildlife, but “is still considered undesirable.”
According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, catching them is not easy because, instead of being covered with typical fish scales, these fish are “covered in a slippery mucus that protects their skin when they emerge from the water.”
The museum says this ability to avoid capture not only helps the species thrive, but also ensures that the fathers in the walking catfish community maintain their role as “good parents.”
“It is the males who build the nests in the aquatic vegetation and protect the eggs and young,” the museum says. “This early protection from the males helps the walking catfish to be more successful as an invasive species.”
It is illegal to possess or transport live catfish without a state or federal permit.
“(They) can only be caught dead, so anglers intending to eat them must immediately place them on the ice,” the commission said.
