Word: catfishing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) is a repulsive-looking creature, a spiny, bewhiskered bottom scavenger that will eat nearly anything and thrives in some of the most polluted U.S. rivers. Northern fishermen usually throw catfish away in disgust, but tens of thousands of Americans, mostly in the South, consider its sweet white flesh a delicacy. This is especially so when it comes from catfish raised in the comparatively clean waters of a commercial pond...
Bamboo Beginnings. In response to this appetite, a growing number of farmers are flooding their acreage and raising fish instead of conventional crops. Last year the nation's 4,000 catfish farmers sold some 12 million lbs. of their product, and the 1972 harvest is projected at 52 million lbs. by the Interior Department's Bureau of Commercial Fisheries...
Pugnacious Forager. After studying five mature walking catfish, Biologists Vernon Ogilvie and Robert Goodrick issued an alarming report. The fish can jump 4 ft. out of water and move overland at will. It sleeps during daylight hours but becomes "very active" at night or when it is disturbed. It is so strong and slippery that it is virtually impossible to handle. One specimen, placed in a 70-gal. tank with other fish, promptly attacked and killed a fish of equal size. "All other fish in the tank gave the Clarias a wide berth," the scientists noted, "a piranha being...
...some isolated ponds where the biologists found the walking catfish, it had already become the dominant species; in canals, it was fast gaining the upper hand over such native species as bass, brim and ordinary catfish. It seems to thrive in brackish as well as fresh water, and eats shrimp, crayfish, small minnows-practically anything that happens along. When biologists poison its ponds, it indignantly leaps from the water and starts across country during the daytime, sometimes dying of sunburn in the process. On land, where it forages nocturnally for snails and pine needles, the catfish is at its most...
These prodigious feats have Floridians worried that the walking catfish will turn out to be the most formidable immigrant of them all. Other pests can often be controlled or eliminated. But, as Ogilvie and Goodrick note in their report: "A fish with the ability and inclination to leave the water and walk around is, to the best of our knowledge, unmanageable...