Large school of catfish seen in middle harbour after heavy rain at the start of April (Catfish ?)

[nal]

Hey everyone,

After our heavy rainfall at the end of March I went for a fish on the first of April in the muddy waters and a very large school of catfish in the hundreds were swimming around the local pontoon and shark net.

Does anyone have an ID or recognise them? You can’t see them too well in the picture due too the glare but I hope you can make it out.

I assumed due to the heavy amount of rainfall and therefore large amounts of freshwater entering the harbour that they were a freshwater species possibly? But I’m not too sure, any opinions would be great.

[Blackfish]

Cant really see the fish in the photo but.. my guess would be Juvenile Striped Catfish which do ball up.

 

With your description we can only call them Catfish as the photo makes it to hard to make a positive ID.

Edited July 30, 2021 by Blackfish

[nal]

22 minutes ago, Blackfish said:

Cant really see the fish in the photo but.. my guess would be Juvenile Striped Catfish which do ball up.

Yeah the photo is pretty crappy, I had a few videos which would have been slightly better but I can’t upload due to duke size. I thought it could be those but I remember them being mainly brown and quite large.

[Blackfish]

Were they definitely Catfish MF.

[nal]

1 hour ago, Blackfish said:

Were they definitely Catfish MF.

I assumed so, they had the distinctive cat-like whiskers of a catfish

 

[noelm]

It's pretty common to see "balls" of Catfish when diving, most are about 100-150mm long, you see them in the ocean, in rivers and so on, they have a distinctive stripe, and seems to be almost like a moving, tight bunched ball.

[nal]

6 hours ago, noelm said:

It's pretty common to see "balls" of Catfish when diving, most are about 100-150mm long, you see them in the ocean, in rivers and so on, they have a distinctive stripe, and seems to be almost like a moving, tight bunched ball.

Yeah except these were fairly large and lacked the stripes you described, they also seemed to more be in a school rather than a tight ball.