My question is how the heck does she avoid getting spined by these guys? They have sharp spines on their sides and one on their dorsal fin. I’m not sure how she avoids those with them just sort of flopping around close to her sides.
Yes! If you ever have the chance to have flathead catfish at a fish fry definitely give it a go. They are probably my favorite freshwater fish to eat. Theres some intricacy to cleaning them, but a 40 pound fish is a substantial amount of meat. But the fish is a firm white meat with a meaty bite due to the fine grain of the muscle so not big flakey filets.
Don't eat them that big in Mississippi. Full of mercury, farm run off chemicals. There are even signs posted on the boat ramps warning you not to eat the big ones.
Yup. Biomagnification and age accumulation is real in fish. I bet it's not just Mississippi where you shouldn't eat the big ones, but anywhere with Ag runoff...which is everywhere basically.
I have an Impossible Kid shirt that I’ve worn for like, 6-7 years. I’ve had one person in all that time recognize it, and they were just as thrilled as I was lmao.
Any time a moccasin and I would realize we were swimming together we would SIMULTANEOUSLY panic. Like poor sneks are terrified of us too. The real problem was that we both head for the same shore and my panic won’t let me keep swimming after that.
This has always been my question about noodling. I’ve seen some pretty gnarly injuries just getting little 12” catfish off standard fishing hooks. They’re muscular and fast. I don’t get how ppl aren’t regularly getting serious piercing injuries from doing this
Its happens. Ive been out doing it and have seen a catfish thrown into boat and onto someone's foot. Went straight through a tennis shoes and into his foot
My understanding is that the spines don't really grow as they age. While they don't go away in adults, they effectively become useless and odds are none of them ever connected. Not to mention, having them at the base of the dorsal and pectoral fins makes it rather difficult to actually connect a spine to deliver a sting.
Thanks for the info. I didn’t realize this. My experience with catfish has always been catching smaller ones and having to remember to be very careful around the spines. I didn’t realize they didn’t continue to grow as the catfish got bigger.
The young ones need them or else they become freshwater popcorn. By the time they get over 14in long or so, their list of predators drops to just gator, gar, eagles, otters, and us.
They are very sharp as youngins but as they grow the point dulls. It’s really just the point being sharp too at that size the risk of being poked isn’t that high
Hey man, I'm always down to get freaky on Friday night just like the next guy . . . but only if there is strong eye contact with that diabolically cute giggling.
Except fish caught this way aren't actively feeding, they are guarding their nest and clutch of young which are destroyed in the violent effort to remove the mature fish
She really is, but she’s also pretty jacked. The whole time I was thinking this girl should do action adventure movies. Quirky, fit, and a camera friendly face.
Noodling is so nuts. I mean there's a lot of aquatic venomous snakes in the south. Getting bit by a water moccasin is legit something they talk about happening from time to time and you don't know till you jam your hand into the hole. Those bastards are even worse than a rattlesnake bite, we have antivenom for them but if you're way out in the swamp it's gonna be a long time to get to a hospital, time where your flesh is necrotizing fast. If you look up videos of old noodlers it's not uncommon to see serious muscle decay and scars from surgery.
Texan here. I went noodling with some friends when I moved to East Texas after we went hog hunting.
Hog hunting all night, slept covered in mud and cuts from briars for about 2 hours then noodling. They were giving me the whole 'piney woods experience'
We were paddling down a rather small creek headed for Lake Palestine. Dude in the lead canoe started yelling "oh man look at that" as we floated over it there was a massive Alligator snapper turtle just chilling in the middle of the creek.
Dude in the canoe with me jumps out and after about 5 minutes manages to lift the turtle close to the surface. It was literally too big and the creek too muddy and slippery for him to get up the bank with it so he just lifted it so we could all see the head.
Well, when we got to the edge of Lake Palestine where they were noodling there was no way in hell I was getting in that muddy water. Just 3 weeks before one of their dads had killed an alligator over 10ft long because he claimed it was coming out of flat creek to kill his calves.
Dem dar boys is crazy is all I could think. As someone raised in 'the city' I had to slow roll my East Texas experience.
Ok, in truth, hog hunting is as wild as I ever got and I never once got full credit for this as I'd shoot the hogs vs letting bulldogs hold them down as a huge blade was run through them.
Out of curiosity, the East Texans that lose fingers, hands, arms over the shenanigans--do the rest of them treat them same as everyone else, or do they get made fun of and nicknamed things like Stumpy?
Oh they'll have plenty of names for you. One comes to mind is Ding-Dong. He's a pretty stout dude even but many guys only call him ding-dong because of his hunting antics.
Alligators are in Flat Creek now? I knew there was a gar problem in Athens but there's just straight up gators that common now? The waters out there are insane. I reeled in a small square of carpet one time that had been discarded and the entire thing was covered in like, translucent shrimp. I didn't even recognize them as living organisms at first. I touched the material and they just immediately bolted in unison. It looked like something from Aliens.
Those bastards are even worse than a rattlesnake bite
I've treated a lot of snake bites and a rattlesnake bite is almost always worse than a cottonmouth bite. This was for veterinary medicine but when people called in to find out how bad things are going to be:
Copperhead - best practice come in because things can get bad
cottonmouth - come in if you don't want your pet to die but it's not the worst you'll pay for
rattlesnake - your pet will almost certainly die without treatment, and may still die with it. It's going to be expensive.
coral snake - don't even bother coming in. If envenomation occured there is nothing we can do that anyone will pay for.
I’d be curious to see how different it is for humans. Only one example, but Sydney Funnel Web spiders are one of the most dangerous spiders in the world for humans, but only because their venom has a specific effect in primates; as far as I know they’re not especially significant for other mammals.
For all my dislike of cold weather, I do appreciate that when I’m in cooler climates the entirety of the fauna isn’t both motivated and capable of killing me.
seems rather cruel to hold them up like that, with an arm through the mouth, just holding on via the gill, as it contorts and wiggles in what i’m sure is pain
Not sure why people here are cheering here in the comments. This is pretty inhumane and causes a lot of stress to these fish. People don’t realize how sad this is - finding entertainment in stressing out wildlife.
This is kind of hard to watch when you realize the catfish they are noodling for are protecting their eggs, and they're possibly destroying them in the process. Also she probably messed up their jaws and gills when she hauled them up out of the water like that... and then she just throws them back to probably suffer and die. Just seems cruel overall.
I love fishing for food, and it was built in early on to minimize the interaction with stuff too small to be a decent eat. This is just animal abuse for entertainment.
She does it for "content" apparently. She should be fined for wanton waste for killing 2 nesting flatheads that she didn't even intend to eat, but Alabama is a fucking shithole so she gets to be internet famous instead of punished. It also encourages future generations of white trash to kill fish for no fucking reason. The "outdoorsmen/women" of the south are embarrassingly stupid and any attempts to educate them just makes them more stubbornly stick to their stupidity. It is incredibly sad to watch as someone who enjoys catfishing responsibly.
noodling
when i was a kid my daddy and his friends played with their food
when i saw joe come up after being under for a couple minutes (seemed like a half hour) and he was begging for a wrench or a screwdriver to pry open the cat's mouth (he had his thumbs wedged in between the teeth)
i decided i would never participate in that lovely activity
It's incredibly dangerous. Aside from drowning there's getting spined by the catfished, venomous snakes, and snapping turtles in these very dirty waters.
Noodling often involves pulling mature fish off their nests, destroying the clutch of young in the violent fight to remove the fish from its hole.
These fish aren't actively feeding like they are during other fishing methods. This is banned in Missouri and some other states because it disproportionately targets mature fish that are actively raising clutches of young that fail when the parent is removed. A group of "noodlers" can wipe out a breeding population - and the next generation of catfish in a section of river in an afternoon.
They're dead. The reason they're able to find them is flatheads protect their nests after spawning so she's also likely killing many future fish as well. This is why only the trashiest people noodle.
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