An invasive fish thought it was slick, rapidly increasing its population along Maryland’s eastern shores. But the dummy forgot to take something into account as it turned into an apex predator that was wiping out local fish, a problem I’ll let second-grader Ben Rochon describe while speaking to a reporter: “It’s yummy.”
According to an NPR report, the blue catfish is a massive, 100-pound Midwestern sea beast that didn’t call Virginia rivers home until the 1970s, when it was brought in for recreational fishing. State officials assumed the salty water would keep them confined to a small area, but after massive rainfall, the fish found they actually kind of liked the brackish water and started living in every tributary in Maryland, gobbling up local blue crabs and rockfish.
Maryland’s Newest School Lunch Is Helping Fight an Invasive Species
It has no natural predators, so humans eventually had to step up to bring some order to the local food chain or risk throwing off the delicate hierarchy of who gets eaten for dinner. That’s when Beth Brewster was brought in. Brewster is a food service supervisor for Caroline County Public Schools.
State officials asked her to find a way to take this fish that was threatening the local ecological balance and feed it to kids in local schools. That’s how she invented the “catty patty,” a USDA-approved crab cake-style fish patty that sold in school cafeterias.
These blue catfish have some rich tastes. Those crabs and rockfish they eat make their own meat surprisingly sweet, white, and deliciously flaky. Local fishermen harvest thousands of pounds of blue catfish year-round with no catch limits, and those fish are served patty-style to kids across Maryland and Virginia. The kids can’t get enough of them.
Is a good chance that the blue catfish will never fully go away, but as long as it remains tasty, it will always have a spot on a child’s lunch tray.
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