Mucus-covered walking catfish are army-crawling on Florida roads after Hurricane Debby. What to know about the species.
Hurricane Debby didn't just wash up $1 million worth of cocaine into Florida — it's also sending nonnative creatures that move "like an infantry-man scooting under barbed wire," as the state's wildlife commission describes it, right onto residents' doorsteps.
Several videos have come out this week of catfish squirming around on land after inches of Debby's rain flooded roads and driveways. Debby, now a tropical storm, just made a second landfall in South Carolina, where it's expected to bring more flooding across the East Coast.
"Very weird catfish, I guess, on our driveway during a tropical storm," Luis Bardach said in one video taken in Gulfport on Sunday, hours before Debby made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane. "Very much alive."
After another person in the video poked the fish, it was seen squirming away with not even an inch of water beneath it, or as the boys in the video said, "it's walking away."
These aren't just any catfish — they're walking catfish, a species native to southeast Asia first reported in Florida in the late 1960s.
According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, these animals can be identified by their "elongated, gray, and scaleless catfish-type body with a large mouth, sharp pectoral spines and four pairs of barbels." Unlike the catfish people will catch by noodling — or using their hands to wrestle a catfish out of the water – this species isn't often seen in large populations in large lakes and is known for being able to breathe air and squirm across land with their pectoral fins "much like an infantry-man scooting under barbed wire," the agency said.
In Florida, they are most commonly found in the Everglades and in canals that connect to it, although they are seen throughout most of the state's central and south areas. Officials say they "can live and even thrive in water with little to no oxygen" and have been found in storm drainage systems along roads, from which they emerge during floods.
While the animals aren't native to Florida, they are considered a conditional, rather than invasive, species. It was originally thought that they would eliminate native fishes, but the commission said that those assumptions were erroneous. While the species has not had major detrimental effects on native wildlife, they are "still considered undesirable."
Catching them isn't easy, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History. That's because rather than being covered in typical fish scales, they are "covered in a slippery mucus that protects their skin when out of the water."
That ability to avoid capture doesn't just help the species flourish, but helps ensure that the dads of the walking catfish society are able to maintain their roles as "good parents," the museum states.
"It's the males who build nests in underwater vegetation, and they protect the eggs and then the young babies," the museum says. "This added protection from the males at an early stage helps make walking catfish more successful as an invasive species."
Owning and transporting live walking catfish is illegal without state and federal permits.
"[They] can only be posssessed dead, so anglers who want to try eating them should immediately put them on ice," the commission says.
