Man-Eating Catfish: Does This Happen or Are These Tales of Merry Fishermen? (11 photos)

Someone will tell you - yes. And what's more, he will confirm this with a convincing story about how a friend of a friend personally saw a huge fish the size of a boat drag an adult man under water and swallow him right there. And what does science say?





Spit out Seryoga, monster!

Catfish is one of the largest freshwater fish in the world. According to unconfirmed data, there are monsters 5 meters long and weighing over 400 kilograms. The real figures are two or three times more modest, but no less impressive: confirmed length is 2-2.5 meters, confirmed weight is about 150 kilos. In comparison, such a big guy will be a head taller and twice as heavy



Want me to show you a trick with a hand disappearing?

the average man. The catfish is powerful, strong and very voracious - is that not enough to hunt a person? Of course not! At least a certain motivation is needed. And even better - the physical ability not only to drag a person under water, but also to eat him. Let's figure it out in order.





Even huge catfish are absolutely helpless on the shore. Their body mass is too great to put up active resistance.

The main motivation of well-known man-eating animals: lions, leopards, tigers - is hunger. Weakened and old individuals cannot catch any other prey, so they switch to an easier bipedal target. But for a catfish, even a child is a mission almost impossible.



Swim, birdie, swim!

The diet of the fish is very diverse. Amphibians, fish, small aquatic mammals and birds, carrion - the catfish will gobble it all up with pleasure. But all of the above have one common characteristic - all of the catfish's live prey is tens of times smaller than a human. And if hunger forces big cats to "lower the bar" to human flesh, then even the hungriest catfish will not be able to "raise" its bar so much as to hunt people. It doesn't work that way - a hungry animal, or fish, looks for simpler prey, and does not immediately aim for a hippopotamus.



Fish squared.

Not only does the catfish have no reason to attack a person, it is physically incapable of eating us. The palisade of small sharp teeth resembles sandpaper. That is why the catfish cannot gut its prey - it simply has nothing to do with it. It swallows it whole. That is why everything that the fish eats is several times smaller than itself.



You certainly won't bite off a leg with those teeth. You'll just scratch it.

As you've already figured out, catfish are no more interested in us than any other fish in the river. Where do all these stories about giant underwater monsters come from then? It's all about the explosive mixture of human imagination and Photoshop magic!



By turning up the contrasts, you can even make a real monster out of an ordinary fish!

For example, in 2007, the media trumpeted that a 3-meter-long catfish had been found in China. Not only was the fish huge, but human remains were also found inside it. Scary? Very! Really? No! Not only was the story itself a total fabrication, but the fish in the photo turned out to be not a catfish, but a whale shark!



Another "giant catfish weighing under 400 kg", which is actually a whale shark.

The veracity of the tales about killer catfish was also checked in the program "River Monsters". The authors went to India and Wales, where locals blamed huge catfish for human deaths. There were indeed some fairly large fish swimming in the rivers. But no real evidence was ever found that they could attack, drown, and eat a person. Most stories about man-eating fish are based on what someone saw, nothing more. No serious investigations have been conducted, and there is no scientific evidence for such claims.



If in our area the common catfish is accused of cannibalism, then in India there is its own river monster — the goonch catfish. In size, it is in no way inferior to our giants.

You might say, “But wait! After all, catfish stomachs often contain jewelry, badges, boots, and even... parts of human bodies! Isn’t that direct evidence?” Actually, it’s not. As we wrote earlier, catfish are not only predators, but also scavengers. And here they don’t care what size the carcass is. That’s how all sorts of unusual things end up in the fish’s stomach. That doesn’t prove anything at all.



If catfish were that strong, it’s unlikely that a person would be able to get them out of the water so easily, right?

Catfish attack a person only in two cases: defending territory and making a mistake. In the first, there is no goal to eat - only to scare away something big and incomprehensible from its offspring. After spawning, the male remains to look after the eggs. He fans them with his fins and carefully watches that no one eats them. And if a person is in the wrong place at the wrong time, then the caring daddy can easily attack. Biologists assume that this is exactly what happened in Germany, where an evil catfish bit people. He was simply protecting the eggs.



An angry parent is capable of much more!

Well, no one is immune from mistakes. Fish have poor vision and are guided only by the vibrations of the water and its taste. And sometimes such navigation fails - then the catfish can mistake your hand or leg for a fish and grab it. But most likely, when the mistake is understood, you will simply be released.