Fisheries Management & Legislative Report

WASHINGTON – Congressman Rob Wittman (VA-01) joined Congresswoman Sarah Elfreth (MD-03) in introducing the Mitigation Action & Watermen Support (MAWS) Act, bipartisan legislation that will address invasive blue catfish and protect aquatic ecosystems throughout the Chesapeake Bay. Specifically, the MAWS Act would establish a pilot program within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Chesapeake Bay Office to facilitate a new market for blue catfish in the pet and animal food industry and instruct the NOAA to collect data on the impacts of this program on the biodiversity of the Bay and health of fish and crustacean populations. Additional cosponsors of the MAWS Act include Congresswoman Jen Kiggans (VA-02) and Congressman Steny Hoyer (MD-05).

“Having grown up on the Chesapeake Bay, I understand how important it is to protect our marine wildlife and restore the Bay’s ecosystem,” said Congressman Wittman. “Since their introduction, blue catfish have become an invasive species, posing a growing threat to the biodiversity of the region’s waters and inflicting economic damage to the seafood industries that rely on the Bay. I am proud to join Representative Elfreth in introducing the MAWS Act, which will create a new market to incentivize the harvest and sale of blue catfish while providing valuable data for future efforts to combat invasive species in our waterways.”

“The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States, with more coastline across the Watershed than the entire coast of California. It is a pillar of our local economies through recreation, seafood, and tourism. The ecology and economy of the Bay are under threat by an invasive aquatic species - the blue catfish. I am introducing the bipartisan MAWS Act alongside co-lead Rep. Rob Wittman to take decisive action to address the damage inflicted by blue catfish in a way that strengthens the seafood economy and provides critical protein to pets nationwide,” said Congresswoman Elfreth.

Read the full bill text here:

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This aquatic invasive species eats the striped bass, menhaden, and blue crabs so vital for the Bay’s health, recreational fishing, and economy

Great tasting: check. Will pull the rod from your hand: check. High chance of success: check.

It probably sounds like we’re talking about peak-season Gulf redfish or Long Island striped bass, but believe it or not, we’re talking about blue catfish – an incredibly resilient invasive species that is taking over the Chesapeake Bay’s waterways and harming important fisheries as it gobbles its way through them.

While native to middle America’s Mississippi and Ohio River watersheds, blue catfish are considered an aquatic invasive species in the Chesapeake Bay. Like other AIS threats around the country, their presence negatively impacts recreational fisheries, ecosystems, and economies. When TRCP and its partners convened an AIS commission two years ago, we had harmful species just like this in mind.

As the largest species of catfish in North America, blue cats can exceed 100 pounds thanks to a voracious appetite, unmatched adaptability, and a willingness to live just about anywhere and eat just about anything. So what are they doing in the Bay, and what can be done to blunt their impacts?

Photo Credit: Rocky Rice

Unforeseen Consequences

In the mid-1970s, the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries were overfished and highly polluted. In response, fisheries managers in Virginia decided they needed to stock a different type of fish – a hearty specimen that could handle the poor conditions, offer anglers a good fight, and provide nice table fare. They settled on blue catfish. An added benefit they saw to this freshwater species was that it wouldn’t be able to spread beyond the targeted rivers.

“They thought because they are river fish they wouldn’t tolerate the saltwater conditions in the Bay,” said Dr. Noah Bressman, assistant professor in the Department of Biology at Salisbury University. “But they were wrong.”

Managers initially released blue catfish into the James and Rappahannock rivers, but they have since spread widely throughout most of the upper Bay. Today, blue catfish can be found in every major tidal river in Maryland, and in some locations make up as much as 70 percent of the total biomass.

“As an apex predator, invasive blue catfish continue to impact the ecological balance of the Chesapeake Bay by competing with native species for important forage species like menhaden and herring,” said Dave Sikorski, executive director of Coastal Conservation Association Maryland.

Photo Credit: Noah Bressman

Not a Picky Eater

Dr. Bressman is a top expert on invasive blue catfish, researching such areas as their primary diet, feeding behavior, and ecology in the Bay. His lab uses boat-based electrofishing with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to catch hundreds of thousands of blue catfish for research. What they’ve learned is that these generalistic, opportunistic omnivores—much like coyotes or cockroaches—will eat anything.

Photo Credit: AKZOphoto

Bressman’s research has turned up a 47-pound catfish with a whole adult wood duck in its stomach, and a 30-inch catfish with a 19-inch striped bass inside. Blue catfish eat many millions of blue crabs per year, and readily gorge on white perch, menhaden, striped bass (also known in Maryland as rockfish), even turtles and muskrats and their own young. On the Eastern Shore, they also target other important forage fish species – alewives and blueback herring. Tissue sampling evidence even suggests they are eating the eggs of striped bass, herring, and other fish, and as top predators they also compete with sportfish for the same prey.

“People think of catfish as slow-moving bottom feeders,” Bressman said. “But these are active predators. They eat anything and everything they can get their mouth around.”

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Eat ‘Em

Ask anyone, and they will tell you this problem is not going to go away. Bressman said that blue catfish are the most abundant fish, by biomass, in the rivers around the Bay. The problem has gotten so bad in the last couple decades that it’s actually generated a growing commercial fishery.

“What started as me targeting striped bass and hard crabs, and only fishing for blue catfish in between, has now gotten reversed,” said Rocky Rice, owner and operator of Piccowaxen Creek Seafood.

Rice has been commercially targeting blue catfish in the Potomac River for the last 12 years. He started fishing for these invasives merely to generate income in slow seasons, but now blue catfish are the main focus of his operation. Using primarily longlines and hoop pots, he targets fish in the best eating range of about 3 to 10 pounds.

Photo Credit: Chesapeake Bay Program

And Rice is not alone. In 2022, commercial harvesters on the Potomac reported more than 3.1 million pounds of blue catfish landed, according to the Potomac River Fisheries Commission. This number far exceeds those for all other finfish species, except menhaden, harvested in the brackish river. By comparison, striped bass was the next highest fish species commercially landed at 428,000 pounds. And that’s just in the Potomac.

Unlike striped bass, whose numbers have been trending lower for years, blue catfish populations are practically impossible to eradicate, or even stunt. Rice says it’s one reason he targets this invasive.

“Granted I’m a fisherman and I need to make money,” Rice said. “But if I can minimize negative impacts on our native species also it’s a win-win.”

Dr. Bressman says just to keep the blue catfish population stable, fishermen must remove 15- to 30-million pounds of catfish from the Chesapeake Bay each year, and much more to reduce it. He asserts that without active human intervention, catfish could likely become the dominant predator in brackish portions of the Bay.

Photo Credit: Rocky Rice

Fun to Catch

So the best solution to keeping blue catfish populations in check, and to help protect native species, is one that offers real rewards: Go fishing. Blue cats are known for growing big, fighting hard, and tasting far better than most people expect. They’re also fairly simple to coax a bite from, and in Maryland there’s no catch limit.

If you’ve got a rod and reel, and willingness to target a different sort of fish, Rice says you can fish virtually anywhere in the brackish and fresh portions of the upper Bay. Dr. Bressman can back this up. In a previous tournament targeting blue cats, he fished from shore to pass the time while he waited for boats to come back in for weigh-ins. He had to stop one hour into the eight-hour tournament, and still almost won the shore fishing category with a half-dozen fish.

CCA Maryland, along with partners like Yamaha Rightwaters, is working to raise awareness with recreational anglers to help get them into the game. To target the threat of aquatic invasive fish species in the state, they offer fishing tournaments and other events to help engage anglers. A good example is the Great Chesapeake Invasives Count, which launched April 1 and runs through March 31, 2025.

Photo Credit: Noah Bressman

“To combat this looming issue, and empower anglers to do their part, CCA Maryland is proud to partner with Fish & Hunt Maryland, Maryland DNR, Maryland’s Best Seafood, and others to promote the opportunities for fishing that invasive catfish present, and support data collection efforts to help guide future management actions,” said Sikorski.

Even Better to Eat

“These aren’t your muddy-bottom catfish,” Bressman said. “They eat things we like to eat and that makes them taste better than other catfish.”

Bressman, Sikorski, and Rice all say they love dining on firm, flaky blue catfish filets, which taste quite similar to those of striped bass – largely because both species are active predators that compete for the same prey. The culinary value of this fish is catching on. Maryland’s Best, a state-run program that connects consumers with locally sourced agricultural products, offers a listing of 16 grocery stores and 24 restaurants that sell wild-caught Chesapeake blue catfish, to help support the state’s watermen and fight this invasive.

“It makes no sense for someone to buy a catfish that comes from overseas, because we have a better quality product right here,” Rice said. “We have to eat our way through this problem.”

Rice says he personally likes to deep fry the white, flaky filets, but has broiled and blackened them too. He’s even had blue catfish pot pie. He said their versatility and palatability is probably why chefs like these fish so much.

Photo Credit: Stephen McFadden

“I’ve fed it to a lot of my friends who’d said they didn’t like catfish,” he said, “and now that they’ve had it it’s one of their favorite foods.”

Do Your Part

If you do head out looking for blue catfish in the Bay area, be sure to share the photos and filets with family and friends – especially via online imagery – to help drum up interest. And whether or not you target these fish, if you ever catch one, be sure to not throw it back into the water alive (an exception being some parts of Virginia, where you need to be aware of a daily 20-fish creel limit and allowance for only one catfish over 32 inches).

Also important to note is that in some areas around the Chesapeake Bay, catfish – especially larger ones – along with other fish species like striped bass may have unsafe contaminant levels due to poor water quality. Avoid eating catfish over 30 inches long, remove the skin and fat when preparing, and and keep up with each state’s fish consumption advisories like those for Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Delaware.

If you don’t want to catch or cook blue catfish, you can always support Bay-area businesses that offer locally sourced blue catfish filets. The bottom line is that dealing with blue catfish is an all-hands-on-deck situation, so the conservation community needs a lot of people working to tackle it in different ways.

“We need a cultural shift,” Bressman says. “The more catfish you eat, the more striped bass and blue crabs will be in the Bay.”

Learn about TRCP’s Aquatic Invasive Species Report here.

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Blue catfish vacuum up native species and are equally voracious when it comes to reproduction

“This is ground zero,” Mike Steiger, a fisheries biologist with Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, said one morning last month. Steiger was standing on a wooden walkway in the Russell Peterson Wildlife Refuge, looking over the steel-gray Christina River, a narrow tributary that twists through Wilmington, Del., and along I-95, eventually spilling into the Delaware River. “This is the first place we found them.”

That first find was a decade ago. In 2013, a recreational fisherman hooked an unfamiliar, 25-inch brute of a fish while casting into the Christina from a boat ramp in the town of Newport, about two miles from where Steiger now stood. The fisherman knew he had a catfish, but it didn’t look like a channel catfish, a common species in the Delaware River watershed. He snapped a photo and sent it off to the natural resources department.

The department forwarded the image to fishery biologists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science who were quickly able to confirm that the fish in question was a blue catfish. The Christina “blue cat” was the first of its kind recorded in the watershed but it would not be the last. These days, Steiger and his counterparts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey are bracing for an invasion that has already upended marine ecosystems in Virginia and Maryland.

At first, the Christina blue catfish appeared to be an anomaly. The Delaware natural resources staff had put out an alert to Delaware anglers, asking them to notify the department of any other blue catfish encounters, but no additional reports surfaced for another five years. “For a long time, we wondered if someone had stocked this one fish here and that the fisherman just happened to catch it,” Steiger said.

How the blue catfish got in

But then, in 2018, during their annual gill-net surveys in the Delaware River, not far from the mouth of the Christina and adjacent to South Jersey’s Pennsville Township, Steiger and his colleagues hauled up more blue catfish. The following year, Steiger finally got what he believes is the answer to the question of how the lone 2013 fish had made it into the Christina: That September, eight big blue catfish were caught in the C&D Canal, the manmade corridor connecting the Delaware Bay with the Chesapeake Bay.

The reports have poured in ever since. “I believe the northeast section of the Chesapeake Bay is feeding our infestation,” Steiger said.

Chris Smith, who oversees invasive aquatic species for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, agrees. “We don’t know for sure if the C&D Canal is directly where they came from,” Smith said. “But we can speculate that it’s the most likely pathway the blue cat took.”

Effect on ecosystem

“Invasive” is a tricky label. The channel catfish, which most New Jersey anglers would consider native, was in fact introduced in the state’s waters about a century ago. The largemouth bass, a beloved game species among freshwater fishermen, comes from the Mississippi River basin and the Southeast. At this point in history, when humans have so thoroughly and haphazardly scattered plants and animals across the globe, it is less about a species’ origin than it is about the impact it may have on its new ecosystem.

And blue catfish, Steiger said, “are big, angry, slimy, eating machines.”

In the 1970s, blue catfish — named for their silvery-blue hue — were stocked in Virginia to boost recreational fishing in the Rappahannock, York and James Rivers, whose ecosystems had been decimated by decades of pollution. Unlike the rivers’ native species, especially the shad and Atlantic sturgeon, blue catfish and other nonnative species, like the northern snakehead, thrive in the kind of low-oxygen environments that result from poor water quality.

Feasting on native species

Though they are native to the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Rio Grande River basins, blue catfish have also proven to be tolerant of salty water. When they reached the mouths of the Rappahannock, York and James, they had the entire Chesapeake Bay before them. Year by year, they crept north, vacuuming up native species, like menhaden, shad, river herring and blue crab.

Steiger and Smith worry that mature blue catfish may also enjoy eating young Atlantic sturgeon, a particularly worrying preference in the Delaware River and Bay, where fewer than 250 spawning adults remain. Each fall, Steiger and his colleagues conduct net sampling of juvenile Atlantic sturgeon in the Delaware River, about three miles downriver of the Christina’s mouth, and in recent years they’ve found blue catfish in their nets. “We’re only catching little ones, but if a 100-pounder was there, it could definitely eat a juvenile Atlantic sturgeon,” Steiger said. “We haven’t seen it yet, but it absolutely could happen.”

Blue catfish are equally voracious when it comes to reproduction — an aquatic version of the rabbit. During the spawning season, which runs from late May to June, a female blue catfish will produce up to 8,000 eggs per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of her body weight. The species can grow up to five feet and weigh over 100 pounds — a size that could yield over 360,000 eggs. “Snakeheads actually eat each other, so their numbers are kept down that way,” Steiger said. “Blue cats protect their young, so their numbers tend to explode.”

In New Jersey, Smith said, word-of-mouth reports of anglers catching blue catfish have made their way to the DEP for the past decade. But it wasn’t until 2021 that the department received a photo of a blue catfish that was caught in Salem County’s Lower Alloways Creek, a Delaware River tributary that is south of the C&D Canal and close to where the river turns into the Delaware Bay.

That the species is heading toward saltier water is a concern for the DEP, Smith said. He used the northern snakehead as a cautionary example. “We’ve confirmed them as far south as the Cohansey River this year, and, most likely, they will continue to expand down to the Maurice River,” he said. Both the Cohansey and Maurice rivers are in Cumberland County.

Anglers not dependable source of data

As of now, though, Smith and his colleagues have not detected any blue catfish below Lower Alloways Creek. But relying on anglers to map the species’ movement through the watershed is problematic. Many don’t bother — or don’t know — to report their catch to the DEP.

To fill that gap, Smith is hoping that, in the coming years, the DEP will invest in eDNA sampling, which is the process of identifying plant and animal species by analyzing the DNA they leave behind in the water column. “It’s a great screening tool,” Smith said. “We won’t have to do electrofishing” — a tool that uses an electrical current to temporarily stun fish — “or put a net in the water. We can just take a water sample and get a better indication of the distribution of species.”

Both Smith and Steiger, along with their counterpart in Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection, Sean Hartzell, are part of the Mid-Atlantic Panel on Aquatic Invasive Species, which brings together state and federal agencies, academic institutions, environmental groups and other stakeholders to develop and coordinate strategies to manage an ever-growing list of destructive invasive species.

For now, though, the most effective way to stay ahead of the blue catfish’s spread throughout the Delaware River watershed is regular coordination among Smith, Steiger, and Hartzell. If an angler reports a blue catfish or a northern snakehead or a freshwater drum — another recent arrival to the watershed — the three biologists will add that information to their growing body of research. If one turns up in the Delaware team’s Atlantic sturgeon nets, Steiger will alert the others.

Most importantly, Smith and Steiger said, is that anglers know a blue catfish when they see one, so that they can report it back to their state environmental agency. And then, if they’d like, they can take their catch home for dinner.

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