PlanetCatfish.com

We catch these in our net when collecting bait to fish with.

This one was caught in Calaveras Lake San Antonio, TX on 05/11/06.



Here is a link to a video I made of the fishing trip.

http://lonestarsharkers.com/Videos/Wall ... 051106.wmv

Thanks for any help in IDing.

This might be of interest to the OP:
http://el.erdc.usace.army.mil/elpubs/pd ... -v04-1.pdf

Thanks for the info!

Would taking better pictures of the ones I come across here in San Antonio be of any use to this forum?

If so what is the most important thing on the fish that need to be in the picture for a proper I.D.?

I believe it would be very useful as there is not a lot of information with regards to which spp. have gone feral.
Good general body shots are important with the dorsal rays held erect as are close ups of the mouth and dentition.
-Shane

I wonder if you should be destroying those as you catch them. I'm not sure what kind of population they have there and what the DNR people advise but I would think the less of them in TX water the better.

Also, do all of them seem to have the deformaties like the video shows?

Shane, will take pics as you indicated next time. Should I post them here or e-mail them to someone and what other info should I make note of?

CEfire, It is illegal to kill fin fish unless they are going to be consumed or used for bait even alien / exotics in Texas. There is a lot of them in the San Antonio river and the two power plant lakes (Calaveras lake and Braunig Lake) that take water from the river. I donâ??t know why more is not being done to control them.

Also, a good many that we have caught do have deformities. Any ideas on why this is so?

Here would be great. The deformities could be from several issues ranging from pollution, developing at colder temps than they were meant to, and suriving attacks from Bass and predators much more frequently than other fishes due to their armor and other defenses (locking pectorals, dorsal spines, etc).
-Shane

Shane wrote:Here would be great. The deformities could be from several issues ranging from pollution, developing at colder temps than they were meant to, and suriving attacks from Bass and predators much more frequently than other fishes due to their armor and other defenses (locking pectorals, dorsal spines, etc).
-Shane

No to mention inbreeding due to a very small original population, if the story I read is correct - that they escaped from a burst tank in San Antonio Zoo... Probably only two or three fish in that case. Could of course be that some tank-busters have been released too...

--
Mats

Does anybody know if the Army Corp. is still following this situation? Whether the numbers are increasing or decreasing?
Amanda

Also, a good many that we have caught do have deformities. Any ideas on why this is so?

two sources spring to mind:
is there an outlet from a nuclear plant upstream? maybe radiation leaks in the cooling water and it causes mutations, cancer and deformities in the fish.

Also I recently studied a paper on mercury pollution in the US, it didn't exactly made me happy; there's a lot of heavy metal pollution going on an d stuff like that causes a lot of bad growths on fish.

another cause might be pesticides getting in the water from nearby veggie-farming or PCB, Bromides; you name it.
A pleco is a fish that eats a LOT of stuff during its' life, so it accumulates loads of bad stuff, in fact its' liver works a bit like a coalfilter.

hope you don't plan on eating them; deformed fish might be quite toxic.

Sorry about the late reply, but I was waiting for a response from a fishing buddy who is "in the know" when it come to the water/air quality of Calaveras Lake.

Here is his reply to my question about the water quality and fish deformities in Calaveras Lake.

******************************************************************

From: Electric Water Boy

The water in Braunig and Calaveras is clean. I have a report on the mercury somewhere in my computer, but the levels are like a zillion times lower than the EPA standard. Nature is the big mercury producer, not coal plants. Medical incinerators put mercury out at a lot higher rate than coal plants, but they haven't been targeted... yet that is.

The fish deformities come from injuries.

******************************************************************

Iâ??m also sorry about dragging this thread up, I just wanted to set things straight about the conditions of the water in this lake.

Regarding the deformations...
For what it's worth, and bear in mind that I have no knowledge of the local situation wrt pollution in your area...
It is known that stationary bottom-dwelling fish - like loricarids - develop spine deformations as a result of various toxins, notably organohalogens (like ddt or creosote) or heavy metals (like tin, copper, arsenic or mercury). Apparently what happens is that the poison interferes with the formation of bone, and when the fish swims, it snaps its own back. The broken spine heals, but remains deformed. Usually the fish snap their own backs multiple times.

I don't know if anyone's looked specifically at loricarids, but I've seen a study which found that 10 - 54% of fourhorn sculpins living close to Swedish paper mills or ore smelteries had deformed spines, much like the one on your picture.

If I saw deformations like these on a regular basis, that would to me be a very strong indication that there was some pollution, from, say, a paper mill or a lumber yard or oil refinery or metalworks, present in the sediment, although the factory itself might be long since gone.