Story of Catfish Swallowing a Basketball that Gets Stuck in its Mouth: Facts

Story:

Catfish Swallows a Basketball and it Gets Stuck in its Mouth

Other Versions

The Catfish That Ate a Basketball…

True Fish Story

A guy who lives at Lake Macquarie (50 miles north of Gosford near Newcastle) saw a ball bouncing around kind of strange in the lake and went to investigate. It turned out to be a flathead catfish who had obviously tried to swallow a basketball which became stuck in its mouth!!

The fish was totally exhausted from trying to dive, but unable to because the ball would always bring him back up to the surface.

The bloke tried numerous times to get the ball out, but was unsuccessful. He finally had his wife cut the ball in order to deflate it and release the hungry catfish. You probably wouldn’t have believed this, if you hadn’t seen the following pictures…

Picture of Story of Catfish Swallowing a Basketball that Gets Stuck in its Mouth — Story of Catfish Swallowing a Basketball that Gets Stuck in its Mouth

Analysis:

A set of interesting pictures doing rounds online since many years claim to show that a Catfish swallowed an inflated Basketball that got stuck in its mouth, as a result of which the fish kept floating on the surface and could not dive in. While some viewers suspected possible photoshop, the photographs showing the basketball stuck in the Catfish’s mouth are real. The incident however did not occur near Gosford in Newcastle (Australia), but at Sandalwood Lake in Kansas.

The photographs in question do in fact show a kid’s basketball stuck inside the mouth of a Flathead Catfish at Sandalwood Lake in Kansas, United States back on 28th May 2004. The Catfish was probably trying to eat the basketball. According to an account of the incident that was reported in The Wichita Eagle Newspaper on 30 May 2004, the eight-inch ball floating in Sandalwood Lake was spotted by Bill Driver, a local fisherman standing on the deck of his house near 119th Street West and Central. Bill said that the Catfish seemed to have exhausted after trying several times to dive inside water, only to be brought back to the surface by the buoyancy of the inflated basketball. “I just couldn’t pull that ball out of its mouth. I was lifting up out of the water as best I could by the ball. I finally sent my wife to the house to get a knife,” said Bill Driver. They deflated and removed the ball carefully with the knife and the estimated 50 pounds Catfish reportedly swam back deep into the lake. The interesting incident at Sandalwood Lake in Kansas is sometimes misattributed to have happened at many other places like Lake Conroe in Texas, Pueblo Reservoir in Colorado and the Red River in North Dakota.