Biologists Finally Know What's Hunting Catfish in the Mississippi River — And No One Can Explain Why

In March 2025, a commercial fisherman pulled a hoop net out of the Mississippi below Vicksburg and found eight blue catfish with their tails gone — not chewed, not shredded, the bodies ending in a smooth curve behind the belly, the heads untouched. He had been setting nets in that stretch since he was nineteen, and he carried two of the fish to a fisheries office in a cooler mostly because he wanted somebody to tell him he was being stupid about it. Since 2021, agencies in three states have logged the same damage from men who have never met, always the back half, always one clean cut, always on deep sets in the same few weeks of early spring. Biologists finally know what's hunting catfish in the Mississippi River, because exactly one animal leaves a wound like that — and no one can explain why it would be sixty feet down in a cold March channel, or why it would take a third of a hundred-pound fish and leave the rest.