Catfish Hunting Pigeons
The catfish in the Tarn River in southern France are so aggressive when hunting that they'll push themselves on the shore for the chance to snatch a pigeon:
Other aquatic hunters strand themselves in a similar way, includingbottlenose 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”.
Alerted to the fishes’ behaviour by local fishermen, Cucherousset watched them from a bridge overlooking the island. Over the summer of 2011, he filmed 54 attacks, of which 28 percent were successful.
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