A Catfish Amongst the Pigeons

G'day! How's tricks? Pour yourself a robust mug of coffee and latch onto one or more virtual treats before you swim over here to the table. Say, if people go fishing to catch fish are fishermen, what would you call fish that go pigeon-hunting? Would they go pigeoning and be called pigeonerfish? Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Well listen to this...
 
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”. 

This was featured in DiscoverMagazine.com, 12-5-2012] 

Sounds like a good name for a story, wouldn't you say? "A Catfish Amongst the Pigeons".

See ya, eh!

Bob