Tonight I saw some credulously talking about a dam in Waco where a diver saw catfish the size of a car and became scared of ever diving again. As a kid in the 80s I was told the same story about the nearest big dam here, and I believed it (not having a reason not to). It seems that the same story used to be told everywhere (in the US, at least).
So were you raised on stories on local giant dam diver-scaring catfish? Did you believe them?
I’m not sure about car-sized. But I’ve seen really big catfish.
The guy who Monster fishes on TV. Jeffrey?? has had big catfish from the Amazon. Easily big human sized ones.
It wouldn’t surprize me if one from around a dam was very big. If they have constant food source and clean enough water. It only stands to reason.
I just looked the biggest caught on record was 650 pounds.
A giant sturgeon could be mistaken for a catfish if only viewed underwater by a diver. They can grow to 20 feet and 1500 pounds in North America.
Fun fact, the Amazon is not in the United States.
If a catfish gets that big, wouldn’t it be a lionfish?
That was a Mekong catfish caught in Thailand. The U.S. record was a 143-lb blue catfish. So nope, they don’t get near car-sized in the U.S., unless this is your idea of a car.
I’ve seen the famous Herman at the Bonneville Hatchery. At 10+ feet and over 500 lbs, that’s big enough for me!
Sorry missed the paragraphed(in the US).
My bad.
I’m sure the records for US are available. Some mat have short bios where exactly they were caught. If a dam was nearby
I’m sure they are. And are irrelevant to the well-known, widespread urban legend that you appear to swallow hook, line and sinker. I didn’t think it needed to be explicitly stated, but here we are: those giant catdish do not actually exist.
Here’s a Reddit thread about the urban legend
And an article about the urban legend
I know of no urban legend.
I’ve seen, with my eyes, catfish. Big ones. River catfish grow really big.
My husband has fished every day of his adult life. Mainly for catfish.
I seen hanging on the pole they have for deer skinning a fish that weighed 80lbs.
So I know Know, there are big ones.
I just don’t think carsize would be something that could sustain itself in the rivers I know of.
The Mississippi is pretty dang big, and I don’t think they haul out 50-60 up to 100 lb fish everyday. Some? Sure.
They ain’t no account for eating past about 7-8 lbs. I know this to be a fact.
That is because they don’t exist. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that my question was not phrased clearly but I was not asking if catfish that size existed, I was asking if people had that particular URBAN LEGEND in their area. So to make it perfectly clear, that’s what I’m asking for: stories of car-sized catfish frightening divers. Discussion of the size of real catfish in US rivers is completely off the topic I wanted this thread to be about.
Ok. I understand. I don’t believe the urban legend you speak of any more than I believe in Bigfoot.
My mistake totally.
We have no sizable dams or dam-created basins around here in Chicago suburbia that I know of, hence no places to claim you saw a Buick sized catfish for reals.
Edit: Well, lakes naturally (and “The Lake”) but this legend seems to mainly be about them growing in man-created bodies of water as a testament to our own hubris or something.
Yeah, I definitely remember hearing stories about 9-foot catfish lurking around dams—caught by good ol’ boys who’d hitch a rope and an oversized hook baited with a whole chicken to their pickup truck, then haul the monster cats out of the water. I actually believed it back then. To be fair, this was the ’70s, I was a gullible teen…and sometimes I smoked too much weed.
Some catfish really do grow impressively large. Blue catfish and flathead catfish can hit 5 to 6 feet long and tip the scales at over 100 pounds. But as for verified 9-foot giants? Nope, no credible evidence there—just one heck of a fish story.
Yes, there was a time I believed in giant dam catfish. When he was in high school, my brother worked for a boat repair shop that supposedly had the contract to do engine work for the boats at a local Army Corps of Engineers reservoir. This particular impoundment had two dams. The first one was constructed in the 1930s, and about 30 years later a larger dam was built, increasing the size of the reservoir and flooding the original dam. The story that Ron (brother’s boss) told was that the CoE needed somebody to dive down to the original dam and turn the cranks to open the floodgates on it. Suppposedly, they sent down either Navy divers or ex-Navy divers to do the job. While they were underwater, they saw catfish big enough to eat them, described as “bigger than a VW bug!” They surfaced and refused to go down again to complete the job. I believed that story for decades.
Yep. When I was a kid in the early 1970s, my uncle told me a similar thing that divers at a local dam had encountered an extremely large fish.
Ten years later a wildlife biologist took up temporary residence a mile or so from our home, and he was assigned to an area near the lake formed by the dam. I related the story to him, and he said that he’s heard that story pretty much everywhere he’s worked.
In the 1950’s I first heard this story and I have been hearing it ever since. The first time I heard the story I believed it.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure when I was a kid I believed “car sized” catfish near the dam was a possibility.
I first heard of this UL here. So no. OTOH, I grew up where there are neither nearby rivers worthy of the term, nor catfish.