Curious Conversations, a Research Podcast

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Travis

What do know about blue catfish? I didn't really know anything about them, but a couple of years ago I started to read about how they were taking over the Chesapeake Bay. As the part of me who loves seafood became more more concerned, I felt I needed to know more about the environmental and economic impacts of this invasive species, and what we could do about it. And thankfully Virginia Tech's Michael Shores is an expert in this very subject, and was kind enough to answer all those questions and more.

Michael is the director of one of Virginia Tech's Agriculture Research and Extension Centers, which are often called ARECs. His is the Virginia Seafood AREC and it's located in Hampton, Virginia. His research includes land-based and offshore aquaculture production system design and optimization, the identification of environmental production limits for aquaculture species, and the development of production protocols for new and emerging species. So Michael and I talked a little about the history of the blue catfish and how it came to be in the Chesapeake Bay. He shared some of the theories as to why it's flourishing there and the realities of how it's basically eating through all the other things we would like to fish out of the bay. He also shared insights as to how this fish's diet has actually transformed it into a very nutritious and, in his opinion, quite tasty fish. So while he sees this invasive species as a very big problem, he also sees it as a very big opportunity for both Virginia and surrounding states. So we talked about both the upsides and the challenges to harvesting more blue catfish and how this is one

of those rare problems we can literally eat our way out of. I'm Travis Williams and this is Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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Travis

I know I want to talk with you about this problem that we have with the blue catfish and it's super pressing, but I think maybe a good place to start this conversation might be to simply let folks know what does an AREC mean? What does it do? And where is yours located? Because I think that might be helpful for the context of this conversation.

Michael

As Virginia Tech is a land grant institution, we have agricultural research and extension centers located across the state of Virginia, and they cover different agricultural commodity sectors. So again, wherever there is a preponderance of poultry or row crops or what have you, they would be located in those regions of Virginia.

We have 11 AREC across the system. Ours is the seafood AREC. So we are down on the coast in Hampton, Virginia and located in Hampton. And we consider ourselves kind of a one-stop shop for anything fisheries, aquaculture, food safety, you name it. If there's issues, if there's questions from public clientele or industry needs help with a new product or a new...

processing or what have you, safety. have faculty and staff that can jump in and help take care of things. we consider ourselves a vital cog in the Virginia seafood industry to help keep things, to help keep Virginia seafood products of ultra high quality and safety and keep the industry progressive and moving forward. Yeah. Well, I think that that context is super helpful to this conversation. Like I said, I think I meet people all the time that maybe don't even know of all the places Virginia Tech is located throughout the state. So I just wanted to set that up.

Travis

Well, I know we want to talk about the blue catfish, but a lot of people may not even know what a blue catfish is, why it's an issue right now. So I guess what is a blue catfish and what is the most recent history of the blue catfish that we're concerned about?

Michael

Sure. Blue catfish ⁓ is a catfish species that is indigenous to the Mississippi River drainage basin. So it's throughout North Central Southern U.S. And again, I think just about all of the tributaries that feed into the Mississippi, which includes a small portion of Southwest Virginia, where they are considered native. They're on the other side of the mountain range. any, you know, they're in the Mississippi watershed, the waters from there do not flow into the Chesapeake.

So they're nothing new. They're, they're indigenous throughout most of the U S back in the 1970s and eighties. So there was an initiative to stock some of these fish in Virginia waters to enhance recreational fishing opportunities because it's a, it's a fun fish to catch. It's a good fish to eat and it grows very large. So there's a lot of interest to have like, you know, a large trophy fishery and recreational fishermen like that. So, back in the seventies and eighties, there were.

There were a lot of fish being stocked in non-traditional waters throughout the U.S. from a fisheries perspective. I think at the time there was less knowledge of the potential issues that may arise when you stock a fish in a non-indigenous waters. And we've had many examples of that since then. And the blue catfish is one of those.

In the Chesapeake Bay, the blue catfish really did extremely well in the climate and environment and the ecology of the rivers and the Chesapeake Bay as a whole. And so what's happened over the last 50 years is from a few hundred thousand fingerling that were stocked, we're now at a biomass, I estimate between probably 700 million and 1 billion pounds. It has invaded every aspect, every tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland through Virginia. And they have eaten a lot of the biomass in the rivers and they're now pushing further and further into saltwater to the point now where when we fish east of the Chesapeake Bay bridge tunnel, which is considered the Atlantic, in the middle of winter, when you're fishing for rockfish, you may catch 40, 50, 60, 70 pound blue catfish in saltwater. So they are now throughout the watershed in the Chesapeake Bay. And at this point we're aware of quite a bit of damage they're doing currently to our commercial fisheries, crabs, oysters, clams, rockfish, spot croaker. We see correlations between those species going down and the blue catfish moving further into the Chesapeake. And we've been analyzing some gut contents at local processors. we're seeing the gut contents of a two-pound blue catfish can contain upwards of 150 or more juvenile clams or

same numbers of oysters by rasping the new oyster strike off of existing oyster reefs so we can tell what they're eating by looking at their stomach contents. And they're definitely causing a tremendous amount of damage to traditional commercial fisheries in the Bay today.

Travis

You mentioned that catfish and you said that was what a two pound catfish. And it sounded like that from the way you described the catfish itself, that two pounds might just be the starting point for how big these things can get.

Michael

Yes, they easily go over a hundred pounds. I was on a blue catfish zoom call yesterday and I was informed by one of the people on the call that they were aware that the, and I had never looked into this, that the largest blue catfish ever caught in the Chesapeake was over a hundred. That's a big fish. And they can eat if they, if they're under the right conditions, good water temperature, good oxygen, and they can find as much food as they want. They can eat upwards of 8.5 % body weight per day, which is much more than any standard freshwater or marine fish, which is usually anything over, you know, they're in the one, one and a half body weight per day. If they can find everything, they want these guys. These guys are, are vacuum cleaners that just are running around eating whatever they can find.

Michael

Wow. 140 pounds is like a wide receiver on a high school football team. So that is, is pretty alarming. What is it about the Chesapeake Bay and the Eastern region of the country that has allowed them to flourish so much besides the abundance, I guess, of seafood now that they're really into?

Michael

That's actually a really good question, Travis. And I don't...have a good answer. We know that what's contributing to this is that they grow very quickly. They reproduce quickly. They lay eggs. They protect the eggs. They brood the eggs. So there's a lot of parental care in the early life stages. In literature, it identifies that they really don't have any natural predators. There don't seem to be any diseases as of yet that have come forth in You know, the Chesapeake Bay environment that the blue catfish as an invasive might be, ⁓ you know, susceptible to, we're not seeing any of those things. So there's really nothing. And it's an apex predator. So there's really nothing else really eating it except for they will eat each other. They are cannibalistic. So where we normally see checks and balances, like, you know, we don't have a blue catfish issue in the Mississippi River to my knowledge. It's, you know, it's, been there for as long as I know. And it's in balance with other species and things in the ecosystem and the Mississippi River drainage basin, but that's not the case here. I've got several publications. One I can think of, was published by NOAA, I think in 2011. So this would have been 2009, 2010 data, probably.

And it indicated that, and again, this was published in 2011, that 75 % of the biomass in the James York Rappahannock, which is the large freshwater tributaries going into the Chesapeake Bay proper, that back then, 15 years ago, more than 75 % of the biomass was blue catfish which already indicates that there is a massive natural imbalance and that this species is just taking over. And it's continued to do that and the populations are still growing. And we're seeing again, people now catching, I'm getting reports on some of the fishing websites of people catching blue catfish on the James River Bridge, which is down here by Newport News by the shipbuilding yards. And everyone's holding up their pictures with the fish and going, what is this? And they're blue catfish. So sometimes I'm chiming in going, you've captured a Chesapeake blue catfish. know, these are really good to eat. They're tasty. But it's just, even in current social media, it's just really starting to hit. But it's nothing new. It's just that the populations have gone so high that they now have to go into the Chesapeake Bay proper to find food.

Travis

Do we know how much that is impacting fisheries? You mentioned a little bit about how much they eat. we know how much that's impacting like economies and watermen yet?

Michael

Yeah, we really don't. We know that when we look at clams and oysters and spot and croaker, blue crabs, those numbers keep going down in general, including the rockfish. I don't think we have an understanding and that's probably a really good research area that should be focused on sooner than later to understand the ecological impact of the blue catfish and its predation on the other fisheries. My general assessment would be that is extremely significant, significantly impacting those fisheries just from looking at the gut contents of fish that we're pulling from processors in Virginia. When you see us, you know, I have a picture from a processor in Maryland. It's about an eight pound blue catfish and the gut contents reveal 41 blue crabs, largest of which were four inches point to point, which is basically a market size blue crab. So one fish in one feeding period, whatever that may be, assumed 41 fairly large blue crabs. So, It's not a hypothetical leap to go, okay, we know that they're eating a lot of what's in the Bay. How much we don't know. I've got a picture of one. I looked for it recently. I couldn't find it. It was a blue catfish on a Southern beach of the Chesapeake Bay. It looked like about an eight pound blue catfish and it was dead on the beach with a five pound rockfish stuck in its mouth. So people would say, well, okay, you know, yeah, there's a lot of blue catfish, but yeah, it's not catching rockfish. No, they are because something I forgot to mention earlier that makes this fish very different. It's one of the reasons it tastes so good is while it will eat on the bottom, it is a mid water predator, meaning it feeds in the water column. Well, we're a rockfish. in the water column.

Travis

So not just your typical bottom feeder.

Michael

It's not a bottom. They will, as we see, they're eating, you know, mowing through our clam beds, our wild clam beds and our oyster beds. They're pulling the new strike off because they're hungry. But so they will feed on the bottom and they will feed in the bottom because when they're getting those small clams and for the fish that were around two pounds with a hundred, 150 clams in them, they were about a quarter of the size of your small fingernail. So they were very small. But yhey are physically sucking those out of the sand because those baby clams are not on the surface. They're under the surface. So they're eating everything from the surface of the water to in the water column to anything that's edible under the sand or under the bottom as well. They're cleaning house and they're quite effective. Well, it sounds like the only positive thing that I've heard so far.

Travis

Well, I've heard a couple of positive things, but one is it sounds like they're good parents so that we can give them props for that. But it sounds like a huge problem that we are kind of in the middle of, honestly, not even at the beginning to some degree. What is it that we can do? What should we start to do related to the blue catfish?

Michael

Yeah. Well, that's a really good question. And what we should do is more of what's been happening over the last 10 or 15 years. And that is we have more watermen targeting blue catfish and we have people that have begun processing, filleting the blue catfish and starting to move this product into seafood markets. There's several grocery store chains now that carry fresh Chesapeake Bay blue catfish in the seafood markets. And we have numerous restaurant chains, mostly coastal, most locally that are starting to carry blue catfish. So if you're on the coast in Virginia or Maryland and you're at a restaurant and you see catfish on the menu, it's not a bad idea to ask the server to check with the kitchen and ask, are these the Chesapeake Bay blue catfish that I've heard of? One, if it is, you're going to really love it. And two, we're trying to get more chefs and restaurants and consumers to be aware of it because most people are completely unaware of the blue catfish, that it's there, that it's a problem. And by the way, it's a fantastic eating white flesh filet with wonderful sweet texture and flavor. And where that comes from is fish in general, you know, they pull their nutrition. They're going to taste like what they eat. What they put into the filet, what we call fatty acids or the proteins come from what they're eating. if they're eating things out of the Chesapeake Bay, it's the saltwater environments that have more of the omega-3s, the heart-healthy fatty acids that tends to come more from marine protein sources than freshwater. So not only does it have none of the off flavors that are sometimes associated with freshwater blue catfish, it doesn't have those because those don't exist really in the Chesapeake Bay environment. And the things that they're eating have very high flavor profiles. So the blue catfish is just assimilating those. if you, if you eat a blue catfish for the first time, you will be amazed. I have a quick story I can share. We've been, we've been collaborating with stakeholders across the board, trying to move the needle on blue catfish in the state of Virginia. And recently we partnered up with Virginia State University Aquaculture Group, which we've been working with for over 30 years, and we held in the pavilion there a blue catfish information booth that we served, that we staffed together. And we had Virginia State University organized a food truck to be at the pavilion. And between one and 3 PM on Monday through Friday of the state fair, we served small samples of fried blue catfish on toothpicks on serving trays. And thousands of people came through and it was by no means an exaggeration that so many of the people that tried it, one, were trying it for the first time because I asked them. And two, were almost in disbelief that it was a catfish because it tasted so good to the point where it was fairly common for myself to be hovering around the area and the pavilion when the blue catfish samples were being served. And I would overhear a couple, know, thank you. No, I'd rather not try it. don't like catfish. So I would kind of, you know, nudge myself over and say, myself and say, Mike Schwartz with Virginia Tech, Virginia State. You know, we're promoting the blue catfish here. Would you trust me that this is not like any catfish you've had before? Would you do me the honor of just trying a small little piece off the tray? And the response was, well, I don't like blue catfish because sometimes when I eat it, there's enough flavor. I'm like, Trust me, this is a very different fish. It's coming out of the Chesapeake Bay. So bar none, they would all try it. And I don't think there was a single person that tried it for the first time that then didn't comment. Wow. I am amazed at how good it tastes. And quite a few of them would later walk away with a little napkin and an extra two or three samples of the blue catfish in their hand as they walked away eating it. And I could hear them going, wow, this is really good. I mean, So, you know, what we're thinking and what we're promoting now is to harvest this fish down to a sustainable level, maybe down to three or 400 million pounds as a biomass and create a sustainable fishery that will help the challenge seafood sectors in Virginia and Maryland and neighboring states as another emerging high quality seafood product that is available and can be commercially viable if we have enough people harvesting, enough people processing, and enough people, you know, selling and distributing to consumers that once they know what this is, we'll want more. Yeah. Well, one, you're a great salesman. It sounds like you've, you've picked up a new skillset you've added to your bag and that's awesome. one of the many stakeholders in Virginia that's helping to promote this is the Virginia Marine Products Board under the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. And Mike Cutt was the director. He just retired, but I've been working with Mike for probably 30 years, as long as I've been here at Tech. And the Marine Products Board takes Virginia's seafood products and promotes them around the world, both domestically and internationally. Marine Products Board will have a seafood booth at the Boston Seafood Show, which is the largest seafood show in North America. They'll have a booth in Barcelona. They'll have a booth in Singapore, different areas around the world. And then vendors come and sample products and then place orders. So proactively Marine Products Board has been bringing blue catfish to all of these international seafood shows with tremendous response and reception and inquiries from buyers wanting to immediately buy container loads of individual quick frozen blue catfish fillets because they say, look, we know we can sell this here to our buyers. And unfortunately, my cut had to always respond. Our processing industry in Virginia or Maryland right now, I don't think anyone is producing IQF frozen fillets. requires additional infrastructure. We may have one that I'm missing that's doing a little bit, but as far as we don't have anyone that, you know, an international buyer can pick up the phone and say, Hey, send me two 40,000 pound containers of IQF frozen catfish fillets. We don't have anyone producing that. think the last numbers that I tabulated for 2025 was in the area of five to 7 million pounds of blue catfish harvested, and sold in Maryland and Virginia. ⁓ you know, we need to be doing 10 times that. So the challenge right now is to get more people fishing. We need more people processing and we need more people selling and we need more people buying. It's kind of a chicken and egg right now. If you talk to a typical processor right now, they'd be like, well, I could process more blue catfish if I had more buyers. And if I had more people bringing me more watermen bringing me blue catfish. And then we have the blue catfish watermen saying we'd be happy to catch more blue catfish, but we need buyers. You know, and we know that they need a certain price range. So there's a need for a comprehensive push from harvesting to processing to value adding to marketing, to creating alternative value added products. sounds like that there's a whole infrastructure that, you know, is, ready to be built out but it's going to take a lot of different pieces.

Travis

I'm assuming that these fish, and you may have mentioned this, but they can just be caught with a fishing rod. I know this is maybe a different, I don't know. I don't know a lot about catfish. Can these also be noodled? I see people on the internet noodling for catfish. Can you noodle for a blue catfish?

Michael

I would imagine so. You know, that's probably tied more to more the freshwater habitats where you may have some. muddy banks or dirt banks. I can assure you I would not want to be noodling and stick my hand in a hundred pound blue catfish's mouth.

Travis

No, I've yeah. Well, I feel like that's maybe ends up kind of like the story of Jonah from the Bible. If you go down that route, those are big fish.

Michael

something else I didn't share yet that I think is pertinent to the story is we have seen concurrent with reductions in quotas and harvests and things like that in the Virginia seafood industry. We have been experiencing more and more challenges with the labor force. Traditionally seafood companies, whether they're crab pickers or filet-ers are typically laborers that come in under work visas from Mexico, Central America. We have this whole economy where we're very heavy labor work that is repetitive. And for the seafood industry, they can't afford to pay very high sums of money. So it's not something that's very attractive to somebody, you know, maybe that's looking for a hundred thousand dollar a year job. So what we've been seeing in the Virginia seafood economy, which has also been very alarming. We're losing processors over time, not only because there's less seafood, but because they have less access to an affordable labor workforce. So this too is a significant issue in the domestic seafood industry. So this is just one other area where Virginia Tech And I'm talking about the College of Engineering, the College of Computer Science, the College of Agriculture and Life Science. know, all these different colleges and departments on campus are taking technology to the solution. We have faculty here at the Seafood AREC that collaborate with faculty across institutions, across the U.S. in Blacksburg and many of the different departments working on small scale and large-scale automation systems that need to be affordable and robust. And an example, we have one of the faculty here is working with AI machine learning and robotics. He is teaching a robot to pick a blue crab. We have research lines now where we are working with technology companies and other researchers creating robots that can fillet a fish by looking at it type of fish, the shape of the fish, the size of the fish, and knowing where the cutters can cut and produce a fillet automatically. This isn't something new. There are some fairly good automated systems for salmon, but a salmon is very different from a catfish or another fish. So as we're talking about the challenges of, in this case, the blue catfish, to get more people harvesting, to get more people processing. to get more people value adding, to get more people selling, to get more people eating. Concurrently, for this to be a sustainable, viable fishery, we also have to move the technology needle on the process. These are all happening concurrently through initiatives at Virginia Tech and many area and regional academic institutions and companies moving the needle to give our seafood industry the ability to monetize and capture value from this blue catfish fishery, which we strongly feel is the way to eat our way out of this problem and reduce the biomass in the bay. Yeah.

Travis

Well, you mentioned salmon and I feel like salmon, salmon has done a great job with the, whatever the marketing campaign there is, because everybody knows about salmon, but I want to give you the opportunity to maybe, maybe set, I'm going to set you up for another little, maybe marketing pitch here. believe you've told me in the past that the, the nutritional profile of a blue fat catfish might be close to something like a salmon, or maybe it's just got a really good nutritional profile?

Michael

Thank you for that. Yeah, no, that's an easy one to answer. One of our researchers, Dr. Yiming Feng, along with some other faculty here and on campus, recently published a Virginia Cooperative Extension fact sheet. The title eludes me, but it's nutritional composition of blue catfish or something. If you just Google it. It'll immediately pull it up as a Virginia Cooperative Extension fact sheet. You can download it, read it. And so what these researchers did was collect blue catfish fillets from different processors from different areas and analyze them as far as a fatty acid, nutritional profile, and protein profile and then compared it to other seafood products in the marketplace, like a croaker or a salmon or a halibut, or, I don't know what they were compared against. And because again, back to what we discussed earlier, fish kind of are what they eat. The marine environment is the environment where we have seafood that has higher omega-3s and high nutritional value. The blue catfish is mimicking these saltwater fish to where I think like on the Omega-3, which is the heart healthy, brain health, heart health promoter, it's just below Atlantic salmon in Omega-3 fatty acid profile, which is very high. So again, if we look at a freshwater catfish, they don't have that nutritional profile, excuse me, because those fatty acids are not in their diets in the fresh water. So when we look at a freshwater catfish nutritional profile, get one. If we look at a blue catfish saltwater nutritional profile, it's completely different and it's extremely healthy. And that is going to help with the marketing of the blue catfish. But again, we just got that data. And right now the people that are buying the blue catfish are buying it because they're used to buying catfish, but we need to get the nutritional profile into the storyline as well.

Travis

So it tastes good, it's good for you, and you're, you're going to help out the environment by eating this fish. It all sounds good to me. I am curious, maybe just kind of wind down this conversation. What's your favorite way to eat this fish?

Michael

My goodness. You know, I've had it very many different ways. We've been working with the culinary Institute of Virginia, pairing students with local restaurant chefs and having blue catfish competitions. I'm telling you, I have had blue catfish in some ways that, you know, would get a star at a five-star white tablecloth restaurant, you know. We've had things as simple here. have a, Eat More Fish program at Virginia Tech where we're trying to educate consumers on, yes, you can cook fish at home. So we invite chefs and we have like an IT classroom where we video cameras and they will bring in, you know, the fish of the day or the shellfish of the day. And they will. Cook it several different ways. We'll have from the public, there'll be some in the audience. We record it. These are online on our website, Eat More Fish program. We have a blue catfish one that I think is getting ready to be loaded. We had coconut slider, sliders for blue catfish. had, I mean, it's a mild white fish. So you can do anything with it. you put, if you like garlic, dill and butter as just a random example, and you put that on a blue catfish. It's going to taste like fish with garlic, dill, and butter. I mean, it's going to take on whatever flavors you put on it. And I think one last little piece that I didn't share with, but I think is important. Now that we have the blue catfish and the Chesapeake Bay, the tributaries between the Chesapeake Bay and the intercoastal waterways of North Carolina are integrated one through the boat channel, but also the rivers and the little headwaters are very close to each other. Maybe even during floods kind of crossover.

So we have observed over the last 10 years or so, more and more blue catfish being harvested in North Carolina in the intercoastal wateries to the point where some watermen are setting a gill net. And when they come back later and harvest it, they'll have four or 5,000 pounds of blue catfish and nothing else. So I'm also getting significant blue catfish harvest reports from South Carolina and from Georgia. Keep in mind, all of these states have significant intercoastal waterways that go from freshwater to saltwater all the way at the ocean. And let's also keep in mind, these are the nurseries for many of the coastal fisheries that we have in the Atlantic. Flounder and rockfish, the white shrimp industry that the Carolinas and Georgia, the Georgia whites, the Carolina whites, those shrimps spend... a significant portion of their life cycle in these intercoastal waters. So when I'm just projecting out that the blue catfish is expanding rapidly in these other states, it's going to equally begin to impact their redfish, their speckled trout, their shrimp, you know, and the fisheries that depend upon some of these ⁓ fish. So if we fast forward maybe 15 years into the future. Just looking at regular fishery expansion of what we've seen from the blue catfish and the Chesapeake, we're probably going to have 150 plus million pound a year mid Atlantic intercoastal fishery for blue catfish. So this isn't just going to be a Maryland, Virginia thing. This is going to be a mid-Atlantic thing. And it's going to become, if we do everything right, a significant sustainable fishery that will not only increase seafood quality and safety and supply in the U S but also help remediate some of their impacts on the coastal fisheries and help keep our very traditional coastal seafood economies vibrant.

Travis

Well it sounds like there's a tremendous amount of potential there and a tremendous amount of really good eating that both you and I can contribute to, right?

Michael

That's the upside. I do my best. Every business meeting we have usually goes to a local diner and say, have you tried the blue cat fish?

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Travis

And thanks to Michael for helping us better understand the challenges and the possibilities that lie within the Chesapeake Bay Blue Catfish. If you or someone you know would make for a great curious conversation, email me at traviskw at vt.edu. I'm Travis Williams, and this has been Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations.

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