Freshwater Shark

About

The freshwater shark (Wallago attu) is one of those fish that should come with a serious warning label. Ranging across a vast stretch of Asia from Pakistan through to Vietnam and Indonesia, this is a large predatory catfish of big rivers, deep lakes, and slow-moving canals, where it lurks in bankside burrows and muddy pools waiting for prey. Adults are genuinely enormous, routinely reaching five to eight feet in length, and the mouth is packed with backward-curving, needle-sharp teeth that can do real damage to a careless hand. This is not an exaggeration for dramatic effect; larger specimens are capable of causing serious injury. In the wild, young fish start out on insects but quickly graduate to fish, crustaceans, and mollusks, and in the aquarium this aggression carries through. Anything that fits in that capacious mouth will be eaten, and anything that doesn't may still be attacked. Keeping one means housing a single specimen in a truly massive dedicated system, which puts it firmly in the territory of only the most committed and well-resourced keepers. Young fish occasionally turn up for sale and can look almost manageable, but this is one species where resisting the impulse to buy is genuinely the right call for the vast majority of hobbyists.