PlanetCatfish.com

My cousin manages the property of a very wealthy land developer in this area and there are two ponds on the property that are stocked with trophy bass and bream. They take very good care of these ponds on every level to grow monster fish. in the last 2-3 years, blue cats have managed to wiggle their way in somehow and are destroying the original population. They caught one last week weighing 19#. I know there are aquarium meds and additives that are harmful to scaless fish but is there anything he can add to the water to kill the catfish populationwithout harming the others?-

Why are the cats a problem?

Is it the channel cat?

http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/huntwild/wild/species/blc/

Yeah why kill them? A site said it was a popular sport fish? Isn't that like the fish that are in there already? For sport?

the ponds were built to grow trophy bass and bream. The blue cats are taking over. the bream population has dropped 28% and the bass have dropped 31%. The last monster blue cat weighted 19 pounds and when they cut him open bream and bass poured out. I agree with ya'll, if it were my pond, it would be a catfish pond and the bass and bream would feed my cats.
The owner wants the cats out and it's my cousins job to make that happen. I'm just trying to find a solution. Being that we are the redneck side, we have been called on to catch them out but in the past 3 years, we havent even made a dent!

referring to your original question - catfish are sensitive to methyuleen bleu, more than other species, but i would not want to risk the other fishes

I would rather drain the ponds, select the fishes and preferably reuse the water to refill the pond again. Reuse not to safe costs, or for any envirionmentla reason, but to keep problems with waterchemistry away

Perhaps you can get a few inflatable children's swimmingpools? These should not cost much

again, these are BIG ponds like a few hundered thousand gallons

Whilst your pond is more of an artificial lake, I would not expect the that there's no good poison that is lethal to catfish but not sufficiently harmful to both other fish and also other waterlife to cause a problem some way or another. So poisoning the catfish only would be rather tricky to achieve. Probably better to do some night-fishing with "catfish friendly" bait. If it gets really desperate, some electric fishing may also be the thing to do.

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Mats

Could these ponds/lakes be netted to catch the fish & then simply remove the cats?

How did the cats get there in the first place cos if they can get in once you need to stop re-entry.

Also how did you ascertain the bass & bream population drops?

they shock the ponds about once a month to see how things are going. They noticed the averages were lower and lower, the smaller fish numbers dropped and the larger fish looked thinner. They later found that they had a ctafish problem

Is trapping an option?

I would imagine that netting would be tough, as a bass/bream lake would have lots of weeds. Scuba diving/spearing would be fun, but probably not cost-effective.

Are the cats not surfacing with electrofishing? Is there a way to target them with the shock? (placing the electrode deeper?)

why not go about it in a more environmental friendy way?

poison will not just kill the catfishes, it'll screw up the entire pond beginning with benificial bacteria and protozoa, right up to ending up in birds, amphibians, name it

it's like nuking the town, cause there's too many streetcriminals.....

catfish are quite ebible. invite everyone with a rod and tempt them to go after the biggest cats. and make em take their catches to the nearest BBQ.

enter the catfish on your trophy list!

To be honest, I don't think you'd get them all out without draining the pond.
There isn't a poison that will affect just catfishes and anyway you'd need a lot of it.

So, it's build another pond (or temporary water holding - hire half a dozen skips...), drain the current pond and split up the fish. Make sure you don't do it when the catfish are breeding, you'll never find all the young in the mud. If you build another pond make sure it could not be reached by catfish wriggling over wet grass...

What might actually be easier is to build another pond and every time a fish you want to catch is caught, return it to the new lake...

Jools