![]() ![]() The same is true if a tail moves more strongly to one side. This also happens if one canoeist is paddling much more forcefully than her partner. Imagine if you just canoed on one side of your watercraft. And this does not seem a method really for getting, well, anywhere.īressman offers the comparison of canoeing. ![]() To move, they fling their tail more sharply to one side than the other. Because plecos have that armor, they can’t move like a more flexible species, say a walking catfish or a snakehead. But for fish it’s downright speedy.īut here things get weirder. That would be a pretty slow human walking pace. They moved in bursts of 1 meter per second, which translates to about 2.3 miles per hour. Bressman has a walking fish arena.Īnd the plecos can move on land. After gaining the necessary research permission, he placed neotropical armoured catfish in his arena built for filming fish on land. So Bressman decided to test pleco locomotion capacity for himself. “Thick armor is known to reduce flexibility and maneuverability in other fishes,” the journal article states.īut the pleco has other tricks up its, umm, fins. That armor, though, is also somewhat inflexible, which could lead one to believe they couldn’t move on land. They are also a hardy species, able to breathe in low-oxygen environments and protected by armor. There are even reports that they stress out wintering manatees, because they try to eat the algae off the big mammals.” “They churn up the river bottom, reducing water visibility. “They burrow into riverbanks, causing erosion,” says Bressman. They live by scraping algae off rocks and other hard surfaces. They are also found in Arizona, Texas, North Carolina and pretty much anywhere the water stays warm enough year round. ![]() Two species of neotropical suckermouth catfish are now abundant and widespread in Florida. This has led to invasive fish around North America, particularly in warm-water environments. Unfortunately, irresponsible aquarium keepers often dump their tanks. If you’ve ever seen a sucker-mouthed catfish clinging to the glass walls of your friend’s aquarium, you know the pleco. Fish enthusiasts often keep them to clear algae from their tanks. You are probably familiar with these catfish, commonly called plecos. © Brian Magnier / TNC Photo Contest 2019 Pets Gone Wild It also got me thinking, and I conceived of a research project to see if these catfish could locomote terrestrially.” An anhinga eating an invasive armoured catfish at Circle B Bar Reserve in Florida. “It was an armoured catfish, 50 feet from the nearest pond. “It wasn’t one of my walking catfish,” says Bressman. They thought he had allowed one of his highly invasive research subjects to escape. In a separate incident, officials approached him after finding a dead catfish outside his walking catfish research facility. But he filed the reports for future reference. Two citizen scientists sent him reports of armoured catfish, which he thought might be errors. Bressman had utilized crowdsourcing to gather incidents of walking catfish behavior in Florida. While studying other amphibious fishes, he came to describe the locomotion of plecos. He described how snakeheads can move over a variety of surfaces. He has published on the very strange behaviors of walking catfish, including their habit of emerging from drains to hunt earthworms in Florida parking lots. “We needed to make a new word.”īressman, now an assistant professor of physiology at Salisbury University, is my go-to expert for fishes that can move on land. “It was so unlike any form of terrestrial locomotion seen in any animal,” says Noah Bressman, lead author of a new paper describing the behavior in the journal Ichthyology and Herpetology. ![]() The way they move is so unusual that researchers had to invent a new word to describe it: reffling. But they can and they do so surprisingly well. Neotropical armoured catfish – also frequently called “plecos” – are not often thought of as fish that can move around on land. ![]()
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