Invasives

[tjm]

Both are used as catfish bait, you ever see anyone just dump a bait bucket?

[Al Agnew]

7 hours ago, tjm said:

Both are used as catfish bait, you ever see anyone just dump a bait bucket?

Yeah, but I've seen ponds full of them that nobody would have been fishing for catfish.  

[fishinwrench]

2 hours ago, Al Agnew said:

Yeah, but I've seen ponds full of them that nobody would have been fishing for catfish.  

Heck I've seen little shallow puddles built for nothing but holding water for cattle....and they'll have green sunfish and bullheads in them.   

I don't believe anybody ever put them in there, they just somehow got in there, as if blown in by the wind.

[tjm]

You can find web pages that say fish eggs can survive on the feet of birds and mammals as well as pass through the digestive system and hatch from the feces. I'd be more apt to think a human used a bucket to introduce bait to those ponds not knowing there were no fish present to eat the bait. 

[fishinwrench]

46 minutes ago, tjm said:

You can find web pages that say fish eggs can survive on the feet of birds and mammals as well as pass through the digestive system and hatch from the feces. I'd be more apt to think a human used a bucket to introduce bait to those ponds not knowing there were no fish present to eat the bait. 

Well anyone who believes the bible could potentially believe anything.   Why even complicate it to THAT degree?   Just claim that God put them there....and consider the issue solved 👍

[MrGiggles]

I'd suspect floods have a lot to do with transplanting fish. All bodies of water are connected one way or another. 

[bfishn]

We had a bullhead pond on my childhood farm in NoMo. Like Wrench said, it was just cattle water, Dad had no idea how they got there. I liked it, you could catch bullheads there anytime it wasn't froze over, unlike our stocked ponds where the fish were balanced, well-fed, and not particularly interested in being caught. 

Point of the story is this.... if you got a gulleywasher, you could go to any of the ponds when they started overflowing and net/grab lots of fish. Dad had us do this all the time on the stocked ponds, we put 'em in a cattle tank by the overflow and back in the pond when it quit. Fish definitely wash out of ponds regularly. If there's another pond in the outflow, some will stick there.

In our case, the bullhead pond was high on a ridge, nothing drained to it but pasture & sky, so origin remains unknown. Sometimes though, they just come from up the hill.

[Quillback]

10 hours ago, bfishn said:

 

In our case, the bullhead pond was high on a ridge, nothing drained to it but pasture & sky, so origin remains unknown. Sometimes though, they just come from up the hill.

Did you check to see if they were walking catfish?  😄

I remember years ago the walking catfish were on the march in Florida and everyone was afraid they would take over all the lakes and rivers there.  Haven't heard one word about those things in years.  I assume they are still there,

[bfishn]

1 hour ago, Quillback said:

Did you check to see if they were walking catfish?  😄

I remember years ago the walking catfish were on the march in Florida and everyone was afraid they would take over all the lakes and rivers there.  Haven't heard one word about those things in years.  I assume they are still there,

Don't think they could walk, but they were some finger-stabbin' little dudes. When the grasshoppers were thick all you needed was a hook & hopper. They maxed out around 3/4lb, but Mom would clean the bigger ones and they made a pretty good meal.

A few years later Mom had to go to Mayo Clinic and I was left to wander (Rochester?) while she was there. There was a concrete-banked stream with several folks fishing, they were catching some really big bullheads and just tossing them up the bank. I asked a guy if he didn't know they were good eating and got a look like I was a walking catfish. 😵

[Quillback]

1 hour ago, bfishn said:

Don't think they could walk, but they were some finger-stabbin' little dudes. When the grasshoppers were thick all you needed was a hook & hopper. They maxed out around 3/4lb, but Mom would clean the bigger ones and they made a pretty good meal.

A few years later Mom had to go to Mayo Clinic and I was left to wander (Rochester?) while she was there. There was a concrete-banked stream with several folks fishing, they were catching some really big bullheads and just tossing them up the bank. I asked a guy if he didn't know they were good eating and got a look like I was a walking catfish. 😵

When living in Mass. as a kid, you could go to any of the local lakes or ponds in the late evening, toss a crawler out, and it may make it a minute or two before a bullhead would eat it.  And you could keep doing that until you got tired of catching them.  No one fished for them, and I didn't know anyone that ate them, I certainly did not.  Rumor had it they were good to eat.