From Neil Santaniello:
One of 34 exotic fish existing in Florida, the walking catfish remains widespread and "locally abundant," Shafland said. It fanned out across 20 counties in just 10 years, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.
But scientists said its numbers appear to have declined in the 1980s and 1990s after an initial population boom. "We've seen that with a lot of introduced fishes," said Bill Loftus, a Geological Survey research ecologist based at Everglades National Park. Predators eventually start to key in on them, food dwindles and their proliferation is curbed, he said.
"They don't really crash -- they come to a kind of balance with the environment," Loftus said. The lack of a visibly serious impact from walking catfish does suggest that "the aquatic ecosystem is far more resilient to disturbances than what is commonly perceived by environmentalists," Shafland said.
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