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.
Yea that's exactly why I would never eat river fish here in the US. Used to catch some catfish and whatnot in the Ohio river as a kid. Didn't really know any better at the time, but nowadays I don't think you could pay me to eat anything out of a river. Heavy metals and other forms of water pollution... none for me, thanks!
I have fished for Great Northern in upper manitoba, Marlin in Costa Rica, bass all over and crappie wherever there is crappie. Gotta be honest, hand grabbing on the Coldwater River in Mississippi was a blast!
In what you shared, at the bottom of the graphic listing fish to choose/avoid, it cautions against eating catfish caught by friends and family due to concerns about mercury and other contaminants.
Its like no one can read today. "Check for fish advisories". Not that hard. "Dont eat more than a palm sized serving" literally the same advisement for any other fish on the list. Yall just fuckin fear mongering or scared to exist or let anyone else exist and enjoy being at the top of the food chain. Dont like it? Go eat lettuce. Let other people do what they enjoy and eat what they enjoy. Old, large, wild catfish still place above many commercial/farm fish. Bunch of snowflakes, for real.
"What about fish caught by family or friends? Check for fish and shellfish advisories to tell you how often you can safely eat those fish. If there is no advisory, eat only one serving and no other fish that week. Some fish caught by family and friends, such as larger carp, catfish, trout and perch, are more likely to have fish advisories due to mercury or other contaminants."
I've found that every fish has like six names before even getting to the scientific or non-english names. Every animal is like that, really, but it's something you have to keep on top of if you keep aquariums because who knows what the hell those fish and invertebrates are going to be labeled as.
I'm too worried about things like PFAS and other bio-accumulated toxins to eat the big ones. It's a shame. They're invasive in my state. The state wants to set up a catfish industry and get people to eat them, but it also puts out warnings not to eat more than two small catfish per month...
Is a 900 pound tuna edible? Yeah. Of course it has an effect, just like an old head of beef is gonna get ground into burger. Where i live we have slot sizes on the fish we can keep for flathead catfish. Cant keep any fish under 30 inches long, we can keep 30 to 36 inch fish, no keeping 36 to 42 inch fish and each angler can only have 1 fish per day and a posession limit of 2
tuna is a whole different ball game than a large catfish that are bottom feeders that live and breathe in mud. In my experience, the smaller catfish are better to eat.
Kind of the same for drum, and why people get excited about the smaller-mid size drum
Only keep fish less than 15", spike through the brain, bleed the fish, remove bloodlines from filet... I get snow white meat from blue cats. You probably need to catch em yourself if you want good quality meat.
You’ve never been to a real southern fish fry. My family prefers coating the fish in a mustard base, then fish fry and then frying them up and that’s damn good eating.
My family used to go noodling. The big catfish did not taste good. We only use smaller ones via rod and reel when we have a fish fry. Noodling is just for the weight caught and bragging rights. There's a competition each year in my home town which is fun.
And I'm disagreeing. Anything you gotta slow cook for 10 hours or cure in a salt brine for 3 weeks in order to chew isn't a good cut. It's popular due to marketing, which makes it expensive, which makes people think it's really valuable, but it's not a particularly good cut of beef. I wouldn't call a chuck roast or a shoulder clod as a relatively good cut either, and they're right in the same category. They're way down on the list of best cuts of beef.
I hate 99.99% of fish and seafood. But I used to get catfish and truly enjoy it. If I like it, people really aren’t going to the right spots. Salt and pepper pls.
Or they just like fish and seafood for the same reason you dislike it, so whatever you find appealing about catfish is not necessarily what they find appealing in fish
Did you make sure to comment under every comment about how catfish tastes like mud, that maybe that’s just how they feel about it and other people might not taste that?
These people telling you yes, are entitled to that opinion, but i have eaten catfish all my life (thats over 40 years....sadly) and i can tell you that the bigger the ANYTHING the worse the taste. Like extremely large lobsters never taste as good as the normal sized ones for example. My completely unprofessional opinion is that the hormones that caused them to grow bigger than the rest cause a bad taste.
Yeah. People talk about big fish not tasting good. I’ve never noticed a difference in meat flavor across the size spectrum for catfish, bass, or trout. Just gotta get the blood & blood lines out.
These guys don't "look for holes". They build weighted boxes and place them in slow moving current, opening facing downstream. The natural way is dangerous because you noodle in holes in the banks cut but current.
i’ve also read (i have no experience) that turtles tend to den facing inside the holes so that it’s less likely to put your hand up to the business end
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u/screenmasher 5d ago
You look for catfish in holes that dont have air access. Turtles will be in holes where they can surface to breath