Nature
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On January 13, 2025, a lodge in South Africa caught a very unusual sight on camera. The nighttime footage shows several catfish gathering around the edge of a pool of water before shimmying up on land to do some exploring. Walking catfish? What will they think of next?
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.These are African sharptooth catfish (Clarias gariepinus). Seeing them shuffling around on land isn’t a common sight, but it's always a risk when hanging out with air-breathing catfish.
The rare footage was captured on an Africam Live Cam at Naledi Bush Lodge in South Africa. It shows several African sharptooth catfish doing their best impression of walking in what feels like an ichthyologist’s take on Paranormal Activity.
The catfish are reported to have been moving in and out of the water for around 20 minutes in search of food. According to the South African National Biodiversity Institute, these catfish are omnivores with a highly diverse diet that includes fruits, seeds, various aquatic invertebrates, small vertebrates, and small mammals. Food isn’t the only reason they leave the water, however.
The region has recently experienced floods, so it’s possible the catfish were making the most of life on land while conditions were still quite damp. These catfish are also known to walk on land as a way to find new habitats when their waterholes dry up. It’s a rarely seen behavior, and even less often caught on camera.
"They were coming in and out for about 20 minutes, most probably searching for things to eat,” said a spokesperson for Africam in a release emailed to IFLScience. "It's always interesting to see something so unusual. It's more common to see them do this when the waterholes dry up, but now we are having flooding in the area so they may feel safer to explore and move due to the overflow."
Catfish as a group have a tendency of journeying places most people wouldn’t expect them to. The armored catfish found in Central and South America moves around on land in such a strange way that scientists invented a new kind of locomotion: reffling.
Then we have the bumblebee catfish of Brazil that take things one step further by climbing walls en masse. And, of course, there’s the walking catfish that’s invading Florida and uses chemoreception to navigate on land.
So, if you think you’re safe on land, think again. The catfish are coming, and they can taste you.
