North American channel catfish, Ictalurus punctatus: a neglected but potentially invasive freshwater fish species?

Abstract

The North American channel catfish Ictalurus punctatus has been introduced to several locations in Europe but has received little or no scientific study despite its invasive attributes, including prolific reproduction, tolerance to a wide range of conditions, opportunistic feeding, at least partial ‘predator release’, and some evidence of environmental impacts (e.g. disease transmission). To assess the species’ potential invasiveness and the likely risks to native species and ecosystems in Europe, available literature from both North America and Europe was reviewed and used to carry out risk screenings of the species for the risk assessment areas, North and South Italy, using the Aquatic Invasiveness Screening Kit (AS-ISK), which was followed by a more detailed evaluation (for both North America and Europe) of the species’ potential impacts using the Environmental Impact Classification of Alien Taxa (EICAT) assessment protocol. The AS-ISK score indicated that channel catfish is likely to pose a high risk of being invasive in both North and South Italy, with EICAT scores indicating “Major” impacts for both North America and Europe, at high and medium confidence levels, respectively. The present results emphasise the urgent need to carry out in-depth studies on introduced populations of this species to understand better its invasive potential so as to inform management decisions on the appropriate control or eradication measures for invaded water bodies.

Development and application of a multilingual electronic decision-support tool for risk screening non-native terrestrial animals under current and future climate conditions

“…importation/ commercial exploitation/evaluation of existing impacts for a specific risk assessment area (e.g. Castellanos-Galindo et al 2018;Suresh et al 2019;Baduy et al 2020;Zięba et al 2020;Haubrock et al 2021;Kumar et al 2021;Yoğurtçuoğlu et al 2021).…”

Evidence of hybridization between Yaqui catfish Ictalurus pricei (Rutter, 1896) and channel catfish Ictalurus punctatus (Rafinesque, 1818) in north‐west México revealed by analysis of mitochondrial and nuclear genes

“…The channel catfish is one of the most widespread catfish species around the world (Kwak et al, 2011), but its invasiveness has been poorly studied, although the high risk to native species by predation, competition and hybridization has been emphasized (Haubrock et al, 2021). For example, the headwater catfish was recently assigned a status of threatened in Texas State Threatened and Endangered Species list because of habitat degradation, the presence of channel catfish and hybrids of both species in high‐quality headwater catfish habitats (TPWD, 2020; Parker et al, 2021).…”

Expanding the invasion toolbox: including stable isotope analysis in risk assessment

“…With all the discussed potential insights provided by SIA-based risk assessments to improve management programmes, this approach potentially presents a unique way to inform practitioners in the fields of biological invasions and conservation biology to better inform stakeholders and governmental institutions. In practical terms, SIAbased risk assessments could be integrated in already existing tools such as EICAT and/or SEICAT as well as AS-ISK (Hawkins et al 2015;Copp et al 2016;Bacher et al 2018), which have been widely adopted (also in combination, see Haubrock et al 2021c), and new ad hoc tools can also be developed.…”