It took Francisco Mendoza Clavería more than an hour to get one of the largest catfish (Silurus glanis) sighted to date in the Ebro out of the water. At 2.34 meters long and weighing almost 80 kilos, the specimen of this invasive species was fish in the Paseo Padro de Tudela, in Navarra.
Mendoza has explained to the press that at first he thought he had caught a carpín. When the fish began to pull the line “non-stop”, he realized that he had caught something much bigger. To record his achievement, he uploaded a photo of himself with the copy to his social networks.
As it is considered an exotic species, Francisco Mendoza had to sacrifice the catfish to comply with the order issued by the Navarra administration in 2015. The species, native to central Europe, was introduced by a German who dumped several specimens at the mouth of the river Segre in Mequinenza. Since then, in the absence of predators, the sirulos have spread throughout the Ebro basin.
The catfish caught in Tudela is not the largest caught in the Ebro. There is evidence of one that weighed 112 kilos and measured 2.60 meters in 2021. The feat was at the hands of the Aragonese fisherwoman Paula Garín, who went fishing in the Mequinenza reservoir with his colleagues Javier, Julio and Israel. The record is held, as far as is known, by Sergio Rodríguez, who took a specimen of 2.67 meters and approximately 120 kilos of weight from the Ebro after “a huge fight” in 2022.
The gigantic dimensions of this species make many amateur fishermen enjoy their capture. For this reason, there is concern that its extension will consolidate beyond the Ebro basin. Its presence was already verified in the Guadalquivir river at the end of the 2000s. Given that it is getting closer and closer to Doñana, the Participation Council of the Espacio Natural Doñana asked the Andalusian government to take measures in this regard after a specimen weighing more than 100 kilos was caught in 2021.
Ecologists in Action joined this request. In a statement, he explained that the catfish joins the long list of exotic fish illegally introduced into the Andalusian river such as bleak, shrimp, percasol, catfish, pike, black bass and others, “that have brought our catfish to the brink of extinction.” native fish such as tusk, vogue, gypsy barbel and saltfish”. That is why they think that the only way to stop its progress is to “implement drastic control measures, which include preventing access and sport fishing even if it is in competition areas.” They emphasize that only by isolating the specimens to act selectively, “their colonization and the threat it poses to the rest of all fishable species typical of Andalusian freshwaters can be stopped.”
The Ministry of Ecological Transition has currently cataloged 22 species of invasive fish.
