10-18 SS About Catfish

 Catfish. What do we know about catfish? Is that of interest to anybody? You better believe it is. Something that amazed me here in fly fishing country is late interest that people have been catching catfishhere in the Northwest. But as we are about to hear from Mark Liter who is head of the Idaho catfish survey project that Idaho Fish and Game is conducting, there is a lot to learn about catfish and Mark is trying. “In the 80s there were 17 different water bodies that we were stocking with catfish and over the years it has been reduced to 6 lakes that we still stocked catfish. In the older days, Fish were coming directly from Oklahoma and now our catfish come from Leo Rays private fish hatchery down in southern Idaho. We are spending almost $.90 apiece on these catfish. We are putting them in these lakes and we know very little about them. We do not know a lot about their life histories, we do not know a lot about their mortality rates or their growth rates  and we know very little about what percentage of them are being harvested by anglers. We do not have a good feel for that because when we do a creel surveys on lakes that have catfish our creel surveys are usually done during daylight hours and most catfish are caught at night. So most of the young folks that do our creel surveys our college kids and we cannot send them out there at 2 o’clock in the morning because it isn’t safe.