In Southwestern France, a group of fish have learned how to kill
birds. As the River Tarn winds through the city of Albi, it
contains a small gravel island where pigeons gather to clean and
bathe. And patrolling the island are European catfish—1 to 1.5
metres long, and the largest freshwater fish on the continent.
These particular catfish have taken to lunging out of the water,
grabbing a pigeon, and then wriggling back into the water to
swallow their prey. In the process, they temporarily strand
themselves on land for a few seconds. Other aquatic hunters
strand themselves in a similar way, including bottlenose
dolphins from South Carolina, which drive small fish onto
beaches, and Argentinian killer whales, which swim onto beaches
to snag resting sealions. The behaviour of the Tarn catfishes is
so similar that Julien Cucherousset from Paul Sabatier
University in Toulouse describes them as “freshwater killer
whales”. Alerted to the fishes’ behaviour by local fishermen,
Cucherousset watched them from a bridge o