National Catfish Month

August is National Catfish Month, and the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga seems to be leading the celebrations. If you grew up in the South, the catfish likely still holds a honored place in your fish pantheon. They can get absolutely enormous, with the largest one caught in North America on record coming in at 150 pounds. The one in this picture is only about 90 pounds (scroll over to the diver to get a sense of perspective). In Thailand, the giant catfish can reach 10 feet and 650 pounds.

Catfish come in over 2000 different species across 31 families, including the walking catfish that sometimes travels over land to nearby water bodies. All of them have scale-free skins and the characteristic "whiskers" called barbels, which are covered with thousands of tastebuds, allowing them to find food in even the murkiest waters. The billygoats of the shallows, they'll eat damn near anything. Despite this, they are tasty, and I'm not even much fond of freshwater fish. If you want recipes, The Catfish Institute has you covered.

Several species can inject painful toxins through their pectoral spines, so you want to be careful getting them off the hook. Some catfish you probably want to avoid altogether, though. The electric catfish of Africa is capable of generating up to 350 volts and the tiny Southern American candiru catfish is the only known vertebrate parasite of humans, known to swim up the urethras of bathers and swimmers when they urinate in the water. Eek.

Update (2:15 pm): In the comments, Tripp points out that no catfish article should be considered complete without a reference to noodling, where you wiggle your fingers in a catfish hole until it clamps down, then pull it out. Snopes has more on the odd and dangerous pastime, along with some more pictures of gargantuan catfish.