Catfish That Eat Birds Whole Seriously

This brings a whole new meaning to a fish out of water. You’ve seen it plenty of times on Nat Geo. The bird swoops down menacingly and snatches a helpless little fishy out of the water. He carries his newly captured dinner off to his nest and rips its head off, followed by the morbid images of him feeding it to his young.

Well I’ve got news for you Mr. Bird, payback’s a mother!

It seems the tables have turned for the helpless little fishy. At least, that’s the case for Catfish in the Tarn River in Southwest France. They’ve been spotted pouncing from the shore of the river to grab the unsuspecting birds, before wiggling back under the water to finish them off.

According to Daily Mail, for the last five months, researchers have been studiously watching these catfish from a bridge over a small gravel island. It’s located above a stretch of the Tarn that meanders through the city center of Albi, an ancient town about 50 miles north-east of Toulouse.

Over the course of the last few months they’ve observed 54 different beaching incidents, in which the catfish managed to snatch up a bird 28 percent of the time, dragging them back into the water to gobble them up. My, oh my, how the tables have turned.

The beachings were very brief – the shortest, lasting from less than one second to the longest, lasting a little more than three seconds. Now, that’s what I call fast food.

In about 40 percent of cases the fish sprung so far from the water that more than half of their bodies were exposed.

Catfish are a diverse group of ray-finned, usually bottom-feeding fish, that are spread all across the globe. They’re named for their prominent barbels, which resemble a cat’s whiskers. Catfish range in size and behavior from the heaviest and longest, the Mekong giant catfish from Southeast Asia and the second longest, the Wels catfish of Eurasia, to detritivores (species that eat dead material on the bottom), and even to a tiny parasitic species commonly called the candiru. Catfish are of considerable commercial importance; many of the larger species are farmed or fished for food.

Something tells me these guys aren’t getting eaten by anyone any time soon.

This phenomenon has led researchers at the University of Toulouse to dub them ‘freshwater killer whales’, and rightfully so, “Between 1m and 1.5m long, European catfish are the largest freshwater fish on the continent and third largest in the world.”

These catfish were reportedly introduced to the Tarn in the eighties. Since then they’ve flourished along with making some “small” adaptations to ensure their survival, like jumping out of the water to eat pigeons whole. Their ever-growing numbers leads researchers to speculate that this abnormal behavior may be due, in part, to reduced marine prey.

The numbers and research also showed that the catfish only attacked birds that were moving. This suggests that they used vibrations rather than any other senses.

Moving or not, this still sounds like a boss fish if I’ve ever seen one. We’ll probably be hearing about fisherman coming up missing in Southwest France some time soon.

This article originally appeared in : Catfish That Eat Birds Whole Seriously