Armored catfish are decimating Texas waterways
Updated 12:42 am, Monday, September 19, 2011
The only positive thing to possibly come from the continuing spread of non-native armored catfish in Texas waterways is that one of them will help put Andrew Cumberland through college.
Cumberland, a New Braunfels High School sophomore, was fishing in the Guadalupe River near his home on July 12 when he saw what he said he thought was a carp in the shallows.
The young angler fished out some doughbait he was packing in his kayak, baited up and pitched the gooey gob to the fish, which immediately obliged him by gobbling the offering.
He landed the fish, which turned out not to be a carp.
"I had never seen a fish that looked like it - it seemed prehistoric," Cumberland told Texas Parks and Wildlife Department staff.
The 21-inch, 3.45-pound fish was an armored catfish, as Cumberland discovered when he took the fish to TPWD's A.E. Wood Fish Hatchery in San Marcos, and staff there identified it.
Armored catfish look like the aliens they are. Native to South America, they look more like natives of another planet. They have a flat, wide, bony head with tiny, black eyes and an underslung mouth. Their body - blue/black with white spots - is covered with thick, interlocking scales and sports huge, colorful fins and a wide tail.
Sometimes called "suckermouth catfish," armored catfish are more properly called by their species name, plecostomus. And most people know them by the shortened version, pleco.
A growing problem
These are the same fish, in juvenile stage, folks buy from pet stores and live-fish dealers, then plop into their freshwater aquariums. Small plecos are quite efficient at grubbing the algae that grows on aquarium walls, producing yet another name for the fish: "cleaner catfish."
Over the past few decades, irresponsible aquarium owners illegally released plecos into Texas waterways. The non-native fish, first noticed in the San Antonio River in the 1950s, have started thriving, reproducing populations in dozens of waterways in southeast, central and southern Texas, added by continued illegal releases.
This is a problem. A growing problem.
Houston's Buffalo Bayou system seethes with untold numbers of armored catfish, as does several river systems in central Texas and springs and waterways in south Texas.
A recent study on a stretch of the San Marcos River found 51 percent of the fish "biomass" - the total weight of all fish - in the surveyed section of the river was armored catfish.
Nominally omnivores, armored catfish feed mostly on algae and other plant material they gather by rooting along the bottom. This reduces habitat for some base-of-the-food-chain creatures as well as destroys eggs of native fish. But mostly, they simply out-compete and overwhelm native species.
The fish also do considerable damage to the streams through their habit of building their nests by burrowing into the banks of waterways. These burrows, most often built at or just below the water line and often found in heavy concentrations, weaken the banks, resulting in severe sloughing and erosion, which also can lead to siltation of the waterways and further damage to native fisheries.
No redeeming value
"These fish are the most destructive exotic fish in Texas," Gary Garrett, veteran TPWD fisheries scientist and the agency's director of watershed conservation, said of armored catfish. "They take over important habitats such as springs, push out and replace native species, decimate native vegetation and undermine and destabilize banks.
"In no way do they have any redeeming qualities."
They aren't even edible; even in Mexico, where the armored catfish have established rogue populations in some lakes, efforts to find a way to make the fish palatable and create a market for them have failed horribly.
Texas law prohibits releasing armored catfish into public water and also mandates anglers immediately eviscerate any armored catfish caught from public water.
So it proved a good thing that Andrew Cumberland killed the strange catfish he caught from the Guadalupe River back in July.
It also proved quite profitable for the young angler.
Turns out, the armored catfish Cumberland landed is the largest rod-and-reel-caught specimen submitted to TPWD's fish records program. His 3.45-pounder recently was certified as the state record.
Cumberland is a member of Federation of Student Anglers, an international organization of anglers from elementary school through college.
FSA, based in Bulverde, offers a $5,000 college scholarship to any member who catches a Texas record fish of any species.
Also, the organization awards a $5,000 scholarship to any member who catches a Texas record fish during an officially sanctioned FSA event. And Cumberland caught his record pleco while fishing an FSA Tuesday Night Fishing Series Tournament.
So his catch landed him $10,000 in scholarships as well as a state-record fish.
The Guadalupe River has the questionable honor of having produced the three current state-record "suckermouth catfish." In addition to Cumberland's rod-and-reel record, the Guadalupe River yielded the record armored catfish taken by bowfishing (a 6.34-pounder arrowed from the river's Lake Dunlap in 2006) and the 5.25-pounder (caught on a trotline in 2009) that holds the Texas record in the "unrestricted" category.