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Submission: On November 15 via manual from DE — Scanned from US
Submission: On November 15 via manual from DE — Scanned from US
Form analysis 6 forms found in the DOM
GET https://nautil.us/
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* Zoology
THE MYSTERY OF THE VANISHED CATFISH
Was the Fat Catfish ever really there at all?
* By Kata Karáth
* November 13, 2024
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Nestled on the eastern ridge of the Colombian Andes, some 150 miles from Bogotá,
sits Lake Tota, Colombia’s largest lake. Each week, hundreds of tourists flock
to the lake’s shores to enjoy its serene waters, white sand beaches, high
montane forests, and a cluster of restaurants specializing in rainbow trout. But
beneath the placid stillness of the lake’s surface lurks an unsolved mystery: An
unusual fish called the Fat Catfish, considered the lake’s only endemic fish
species, has seemingly vanished.
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The Fat Catfish (Rhizosomichthys totae) has not yet been officially declared
extinct—whether any members of the species still remain in the lake, no one can
say for sure, but the fish has been lost to science for nearly 70 years. Now a
cadre of scientists has become obsessed with closing the case. If they can
confirm that the fish is no more, it would be the first freshwater fish
extinction recorded in all of South America in modern times.
Colombians call the Fat Catfish pez graso or “grease fish,” perhaps because
locals reportedly used its fat for fuel in oil lamps at the beginning of the
20th century. That is to say, the Fat Catfish is, in fact, fat. According to
reports, the fish is about 5.5 inches in length, and its core is enveloped in
six or seven rings of connective fat tissue, giving it the appearance of a
Michelin Man with the head of a fish. Even before it vanished, the fish had
reportedly only been sighted in Lake Tota, and nowhere else in the world.
> The fish burns like a candle when either of its fins is ignited.
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Carlos Lasso Alcalá, a researcher at Colombia’s Humboldt Institute, is one of
the scientists who has become consumed by the hunt for the Fat Catfish. He is a
leading freshwater fish expert in Colombia, with a passion for remote
ecosystems, such as rivers in caves and unexplored parts of the Amazon. Lasso
Alcalá coordinates the Fat Catfish search project, which launched in 2021 and is
part of a campaign called Search for Lost Species, which is partially funded by
actor Leonardo DiCaprio and organized by United States-based conservation group
called Re:Wild, along with SHOAL, a United Kingdom-based NGO focused on
freshwater fish protection.
The Search for Lost Species effort has a rotating list of 25 “most wanted”
species in the world—everything from toads, beetles, moles, and fungi, to of
course, the Fat Catfish. They are selected from a long list of 4,300 species
across taxa and geographic distribution. To qualify for the long list, a species
must have been lost to science for at least 10 years and no members of the
species can live in captivity. Which species make it onto the priority list is
relatively subjective, but these lost species are generally ones whose
disappearance involves a compelling story, draws significant interest from local
scientists and authorities, and has the potential to inspire concrete
conservation action for an entire habitat. Each time a lost species is found
again, a new one takes its place on the list. The campaign has so far managed to
“re-discover” 13 “lost” species around the world, including the De Winton’s
golden mole, Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, and the big puma fungus.
HIGH ALTITUDE: Lake Tota is Colombia’s largest lake and it sits nestled high in
the Andes, 10,000 feet above sea level. It is known for its white sand beaches
and the restaurants dotting its shores that serve up rainbow trout. Photo by
Carlos Lasso.
The first written account of the Fat Catfish seems to have been recorded in 1942
by Cecil Miles, an English ichthyologist and a pioneer of commercial-scale fish
farming in Colombia. Most everything we know today about the fish appears to
come from Miles’ rather florid description of the fish, and the analysis of a
mere 10 specimens he donated to museums in Colombia, the U.S., and the U.K.
According to Miles, the fish could be easily distinguished from other catfish
species by “its fatty rings, which resemble a series of automobile tires” and
“by its repulsive appearance and buttery odor.” Miles theorized that the fatty
rings provided insulation against the cold depths of Lake Tota—which features
surface temperatures of between 32 and 54 degrees Fahrenheit—or perhaps served
as a form of energy reserve. “This fat is easily combustible,” he wrote in his
account, “and the fish burns like a candle when either of its fins is ignited.”
He also observed that locals sometimes used the oil from the fish in lamps to
light up their homes.
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These days, hunting for rare, elusive, or lost species often entails borrowing a
technique from the forensic sciences: collecting DNA samples from water, soil,
air, or snow and then attempting to match these environmental DNA samples
against ones kept in a bank for a given species. This way, scientists can detect
the presence of an animal, plant, or fungus at a particular location without
directly glimpsing the species in the flesh.
The problem with this method in the case of the Fat Catfish is that researchers
have little information about its genetic blueprint: All the specimens are kept
in formalin, which damages DNA, says Susana Caballero Gaitán, an associate
professor at the University of the Andes in Colombia, who specializes in
conservation genetics. She is also in charge of the environmental DNA analysis
in the Fat Catfish search project.
The workarounds, says Caballero Gaitán, are labor intensive. “What we have to do
is like a process of elimination.” The scientists collect water samples from the
lake and eliminate the DNA of all identifiable fish species one by one, hoping
to find an anomalous sample that is similar to that of the Fat Catfish’s closest
relative, the capitán de la Sabana fish (Eremophilus mutisii). The capitán de la
Sabana fish belongs to the same taxonomic subfamily as the Fat Catfish, has
similar physical features and is endemic to the region. (Though it is common in
Lake Tota, it is not native to the lake. It was introduced to the lake by
humans.) All these similarities suggest that the two fish are evolutionarily
close and probably share some DNA as well. If the researchers could find such
samples, it would be the first concrete sign of hope that the Fat Catfish might
not have been lost forever.
> The fish could be distinguished from other catfish by “its fatty rings, which
> resemble a series of automobile tires.”
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The lake is large—some 34 square miles in surface area, and more than 164 feet
in depth—so in 2023 and 2024, the team sent divers to sample various spots along
the shore and at different depths. As of November 2024, the scientists have not
found any bits of DNA that could belong to Fat Catfish, but they did detect an
“unspecified fish” in one of the samples. There is a remote possibility it could
be linked to the Fat Catfish, but researchers are still working out what this
genetic sample could mean for the search.
Diving to search for this microscopic evidence at the altitude of Lake Tota is
no simple matter: Its dazzling waters lie nearly 10,000 feet above sea level.
It’s dark and cold, and at greater altitudes, the atmospheric pressure is lower.
This means that decompression sickness—a serious condition when nitrogen bubbles
form in the bloodstream if a diver ascends too quickly from depth—can occur more
easily. Visibility in Lake Tota is also low thanks to muddy sediments, so divers
often see less than 10 feet ahead.
Luis Fernando Barrios, biologist and scientific diver at the Colombian
Federation of Underwater Activities, together with Lasso Alcalá and other
divers, spent a week in 2023, and another week in 2024, collecting samples from
the shores where tributaries meet the lake and from the lake itself at depths
down to 82 feet. The divers were armed with underwater cameras and headlamps so
they could also conduct a good, old-fashioned visual hunt for the fish. They
came up empty: No Fat Catfish, no sure-thing DNA.
From there, the team pivoted to historical research. They took a deep dive into
local records, maps, Indigenous legends, and even paintings and illustrations
related to the lake from as early as the 16th century, to see if any clues about
the fish would rise to the surface.
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Lake Tota has been a sacred place for the Indigenous Muisca peoples since well
before the Spanish conquest of Colombia in the 16th century, says Mariana
Moscoso Rodríguez, an anthropologist and journalist of Ictiología y Cultura, a
social research group in charge of the anthropological and sociological efforts
of the Fat Catfish search. The Muisca have passed down legends about sacred
animals that lived in the lake, including a monstrous fish that had an ox-like
black head and was bigger than a whale. This myth largely scared local people
away from fishing in the lake until the turn of the 20th century, when it was
fully mapped and the Colombian government began looking into possibilities for
economic development. But the team turned up no Muisca legends or even rumors
about a catfish with puffy rolls of fat.
FAT FISH: A specimen of Fat Catfish, recorded as collected by Cecil Miles in
1942 from Lake Tota, and kept at the Natural History Museum, a university museum
in Bogotá. The unusual catfish was known for its rings of fat that encircled it
like tires around a Michelin Man. Photo by Ictiología y Cultura.
>
Moscoso Rodríguez and her team spent weeks in 2022 interviewing local
communities about their memories of the fish around Lake Tota and its
tributaries. “We asked very old ladies, like 90-year-old grandmothers, and it
was a very visual search because we showed them photographs,” she says. “It’s
crazy because if Indigenous people lit their torches with the fat from the fish
… this would be in peoples’ memory.”
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Rodríguez and her colleagues decided it was time to fact-check Miles’
description of the fish—and they found some irregularities. For example, he
claimed in his account that an earthquake “a few years before” 1942 killed “a
large number” of Fat Catfish and left them floating on the surface of the lake.
After checking the Colombian Geological Service’s archives, Moscoso Rodríguez
found no significant seismic activities recorded in the region during that
period of time.
Did Miles ever really see the fish in Lake Tota? Did it come from somewhere
else? “It’s very possible that someone, an Indigenous person or a farmer,
brought this species to Miles either from the páramo or somewhere else,” says
Rodriguez.
The lack of collective memory about the striking fish pushed the scientists to
cast their net wider and map smaller waterbodies around the highlands of Lake
Tota and to recommend additional DNA collection spots to the team for future
expeditions.
Meanwhile, Lasso Alcalá found a speckle of evidence regarding the possible
whereabouts of the Fat Catfish. “There is a piece of sand in the mouth of a
[preserved] specimen that has nothing to do with Lake Tota,” he says. Geological
analysis of the origins of this grain of evidence could push researchers in new
directions in their search for the fish. Lasso Alcalá is also keen to give
Miles’ fantastic earthquake claim another chance and carry out archaeological
excavations around Lake Tota’s shore to look for possible preserved remains of
Fat Catfish.
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If the fish did once swim in Lake Tota, Miles may have been the one to spell its
doom: He helped establish the first trout farm at the lake in 1939. One
prominent theory about the reasons behind the disappearance of the species is
the introduction of these rainbow trout into Lake Tota. This larger trout preys
on other fish, and as the lake’s only known potential endemic fish, the Fat
Catfish might have been on its menu. Alternatively, it might have been crowded
out of its habitat by the other fish species introduced to the lake as food for
the trout.
For now, the mystery endures. The results of the search remain inconclusive but
the team is not giving up, says Lasso Alaclá. “We are handling many hypotheses.
This story is not over yet.”
Lead image: Apokryltaros / Wikimedia Commons
* KATA KARÁTH
Posted on November 13, 2024
Kata Karáth is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker. Her work has
appeared in The Guardian, Science Magazine, Quartz, and New Scientist, among
others. She is based in Ecuador.
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