PlanetCatfish.com

I was reading a sporting magazine about cat fishing ,they reported that a Red tailed cat about 50lbs was caught in a canal in SW Florida. Very interesting!

If it was an online publication would you mind posting a link? Invasive red-tails would be interesting/horrifying, so I'm interested to know if this is a one-off "I dumped my fish because it got huge and I'm a moron who didn't read up on the fish before I bought it" or a breeding population.

I am guessing this was an illegal release of a pet.

Florida Wildlife Commission did attempt to establish a sustainable population of SA RTCs in southern FL about a decade ago or earlier. It failed. Only very few localized populations survived and apparently even those survived only until the first occasional rare long dip in winter temps.

IIRC, I read about this on the US geographical survey website.

I did find a USGS report that said there were some Phractocephalus introductions into Florida, but I didn't find much detail. Odd that they would deliberately introduced a non-native generalist carnivore.

Lycosid wrote: ↑01 Aug 2017, 00:11 Odd that they would deliberately introduced a non-native generalist carnivore.

Not really. Many state's fish and wildlife departments will set up control locations to check the viability of non-native species, such as the red-tail cat, to see if they can survive winters.

Did you know there is atleast 1 lake in wisconsin with a breeding population of the following: piranha & oscars? You can go fishing there in the middle of winter when its -20 degrees outside and fish for tropical fish.

I'm not surprised that FWS does small controlled trials - I was surprised because I didn't see the word "controlled trial" and it sounded like a deliberate multi-site introduction.

How on earth do piranha and oscars survive that cold? Is this a warm spring lake?

We used to have a population of guppy in the Netherlands, even though it is far too cold here to sustain them. They did survive because of warm waste water returned to the river. However, the environment restrictions became fiercer, and lass heat is allowed to flow into rivers, ending the guppies rapidly.

Still, other options might be possible. But I don´t see Oscars surviving in 10 C water after a few generations

We've got a population of Pterygoplichthys sp. in North Carolina. Oddly, it's not in the Piedmont or coast, but in the mountains where it gets quite cold. It's the same situation you mention - a power plant is releasing the water it uses to cool itself into the lake and the plecos are restricted to that end of the lake. These guys also hit about 18" which is a nice reminder for people buying them at 1" for their twenty-gallon tank.