Tag Archives: invasive blue catfish

Maryland Catfish Trail hopes to control invasive species

It’s early afternoon on a comfortable Sunday when Keith Bradfield and his brother Ray pull up to the Smallwood State Park dock after a long day of fishing. And they’ve been successful. Very successful. The Fairfax, Va., resident pulls up the lid of the cooler to reveal it stuffed with invasive blue catfish up to about 30 pounds each. Bradfield, who shows an image of his sonar lit up like a Christmas tree signifying the invasive species, said he looks for the fish in the deepest holes of the river, “but they’re pretty much everywhere.” And the blue catfish’s population has become such a problem that the state recently initiated a Maryland Catfish Trail where anglers can target fellow invasive flathead catfish and snakeheads in an attempt to help lower their numbers. Photos, more, >>CLICK TO READ<< 06:39

New Blue Catfish Regulation Threatening Health of Chesapeake Bay and Business

The blue catfish is putting up quite the fight and it’s making Delmarva crabbers like Ryan Crouch frustrated. A new federal regulation will make it harder for those who catch blue catfish to sell them. The more catfish caught – the better off the crab population and the livelihoods of the watermen who catch them. The regulation, which goes into effect in September, requires watermen to hire an inspector before the fish can be sold. Watermen like Crouch and business owners like Joe Spurry Jr. of Bay Hundred Seafood are fighting this new regulation. They say the more catfish out of the bay, the more crabs there are to catch. click here to read the story 10:02

Maryland fishermen fight federal catfish regulations

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s administration has joined the cause and also sent a letter to UDSA Secretary Perdue, asking for “immediate regulatory relief” from the mandated inspection program for the wild-caught, U.S. catfish industry. “With the U.S. seafood trade deficit reaching historic proportions, strict harvest limits on most other wild seafood species, and traditional U.S. seafood jobs on the decline, the (Trump) Administration must provide every possible advantage to Americans seeking to invest in the business of wild-caught, domestic catfish,” Hogan wrote in the letter dated Tuesday, Aug. 8. Hogan wrote that American consumers increasingly are demanding wild, domestic seafood, and catfish is among that. The “seafood market for catfish in the Maryland/Virginia/D.C. region has grown from zero to millions of pounds sold in just a few years,” the letter reads. click here to read the story 08:30