Flat head catfish
| Flat head catfish | ||||||||||||
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Flat head catfish ( Pylodictis olivaris ) |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name of the genus | ||||||||||||
| Pylodictis | ||||||||||||
| Rafinesque , 1819 | ||||||||||||
| Scientific name of the species | ||||||||||||
| Pylodictis olivaris | ||||||||||||
| (Rafinesque, 1818) |
The flathead catfish ( Pylodictis olivaris ) also flat-headed catfish (English flathead catfish ), is one of the largest North American catfish . The genus Pylodictis is monotypic , that is, it includes only one species.
features
The flat-headed catfish can reach a length of more than 1.5 m and a weight of 55.8 kg. A flathead catfish this size was caught on May 19, 1998 in the Elk City Reservoir in Kansas .
The flat-headed catfish is gray to brown in color on the back and sides and speckled black-brown, so that when viewed from above it resembles the stones in its habitat . The underside of the head and belly are light, white to yellowish. The barbels on the upper jaw and the nasal barbels are dark in color, the chin barbels light. In older fish the four chin barbels can be darker, but they are never black. The adipose fin is dark or speckled and has a light border in young fish. The pectoral and pelvic fins and the dorsal fin are densely covered with melanophores in the lower half , the upper third is unpigmented . The anal fin is dark and bordered by a black band. In young fish, the upper lobe of the otherwise dark caudal fin has a light spot on its tip, which gradually disappears in sexually mature animals.
The flat-headed catfish can live up to 20 years. The males are sexually mature from a length of around 38 centimeters, which corresponds to an age between three and five years. The females usually reach sexual maturity with a length of 46 centimeters, at the age of four to six years.
distribution
The distribution area ranges from the southern Great Lakes to waters in northern Mexico .
Their natural habitat covers a large part of the central North American continent west of the Appalachians . These include the Mississippi , Missouri and Ohio river systems between the US states of North Dakota in the north, Arizona in the west and to the Gulf of Mexico and northeastern Mexico in the south.
Because of their size, they were used in many waters as part of the fishing industry , but also illegally. However, the large predatory fish damages the stocks of autochthonous fish species enormously, so that it had to be removed again in some river systems.
Way of life
The flat-headed catfish is a predator and feeds on smaller fish, worms and crustaceans, which it finds near the bottom of the water. His scientific name Pylodictis , which could be translated from ancient Greek as "mud fish" , also indicates this way of life .
The spawning season is from late spring to early summer, in the months of June and July.
Individual evidence
- ↑ LM Page & B. M Burr: A field guide to freshwater fishes of North America north of Mexico. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1991
- ↑ Flathead Catfish IGFA 2001 Database of IGFA angling records, International Game Fish Association, Fort Lauderdale, USA
- ^ ST Ross: The Inland Fishes of Mississippi. University Press of Mississippi, 2001
- ↑ KD Carlander: Handbook of Freshwater Fishery Biology. Volume 1, Iowa State University Press, 1969
- ^ Zell Miller & Sarah Eby-Ebersole: Signed, sealed, and delivered: highlights of the Miller record. Mercer University Press, 1999, pp. 340-341 ISBN 0-86554-648-7
- ↑ Chad Thomas, Timothy H. Bonner and Bobby G. Whiteside: Freshwater Fishes of Texas. A field guide. Texas A&M University Press, 2007 ( Online ( Memento of the original from June 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. )
literature
- LM Page & B. M Burr: A field guide to freshwater fishes of North America north of Mexico. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1991
Web links
- Flat-headed catfish on Fishbase.org (English)
- Flat-headed catfish as an invasive species