You can very often read this “5m” but never with much more information. As the Wels is a common species where I live, and I find it very interesting, I made a whole lot of research about this species since many years. The facts are much lesser imposants than the alleged tales.

The wels can grow big, without doubt bigger than any north-american catfish species, but it stays much smaller than many of you probably think. You will find specimens over 2m only extremely rarely, and weights of more than 100 pounds are really exeptional. Even in Italy and Spain where they were introduced in the early 20th century, and where they grow due to the warm climate better than in most of their native habitat, lengths of more than 2m are far away from being normal. If you look at the statistics of record specimens as well as scientific investigations of sizes among populations you can see that the relation between size and individual number is some kind of pyramide.

The bigger the rarer they are. There is only a handfull of specimens over 200 pounds or 2,50, and even lesser if you look a even bigger ones. There is one single specimen from the Po-Delta in Italy which was caught some years ago, which reached the incredible length of 2,78 and weighed 144kg. This is really extraordinairy, and only one among millions will reach this size. In fact there are no credible records of bigger ones. I checked a lot of primary literature, including historic literature, and there were nowhere true indications that this fish reached bigger sizes in the past.

There is a handfull of alleged reports about oversized wels catfish, but none of them is credible. Not only that it would be strange if they would be able to surpass the known maximum length for nearly 100% without any records of immediate sizes, the relations between length and weight are also always ridiculous, which is a very typical trait for exagerated big fish stories. A hypothetical wels catfish of 5m would weigh at least 1400 pounds, but most probably even more, as they grow in general stockier with additional length. But there aren´t any reports of such weights. Even from early times of the Renaissance I found only a weight of about 150 pounds for the wels, what is still very big and would be probably among the top-ten in middle-european fishing-charts.

You can also very often read that the wels attains huge sizes in Russia. But is also not the truth. It seems that there are two or three old reports which were repeated for more than a century in literature, similar to the alleged 12m great whites or 4,5m Arapaimas. I checked newer literature (including old reports) with more information about the sizes among populations, and there was not a grain of indication that the wels would reach larger sizes in Russia of the regions of the Caspian sea than in Europe. There is actually now already some sort of catfish-fishing-tourism in some regions of Russia. The fish there are good, comparable to those of Italy, but far away from being monster-sized.

There is a lot of more things I could wrote about this topic (actually I wrote an aritcle about this topic for a magazine which is about 9pages long).

‘Jaws’ record-breaking catfish caught in Spain

I have seen a Catfish that weighed nearly 150kgs [330 pds] and it was about 3 meters [9 feet] long. That was a huge fish and I am sure it could eat a child without any trouble. Not too long ago there was a Catfish in a pond that ate an old woman’s dog (in Germany if I remember correct). They eat seabirds as well.

The length of a Volkswagen is already reached in Europe so why not in the States, especially in areas where the climate and the environment is similar?