Thinking about adding some hybrids to tank but we have a lot of mudcats that I want to get rid of. Anyway of doing this without wiping out all the fish and starting from scratch??

Seine the tank, throw the fish you don't want to remove on the other side of the net.

It's about 18' deep and around acre and half. Might be a little difficult to do that.

Yellowcats?

Yellow cats and flathead the same fish? Which is different than a mudcat, right?

Correct

(yellow cat = flathead) =\= mudcat

Mud cats are the dwarf catfish that seem to spawn from cow chit. And sting like a mother when you get poked by their fins. Btw, chewing tobacco does seem to take away the sting.

I believe he is talking about pollywogs, the little catfish (yes, it's legal) that can be used for bait.

We have an approx 1 acre stock tank that was infested w/mudcats, about 2 yrs after I stocked channel cats and a few largemouth. They loved that I had a fish feeder throwing daily
We fished it hard that spring and summer, and caught 120 mudcats (none returned...`coons were happy)...virtually all the same size (7-8"). Kids had a blast (just stayed away from the fins).

Now the occasional mudcat caught is actually decent size, and very few seem to be present. The bass are certainly of size to be a predator, And the big channels are at 6-7 lbs. Not sure if that's why the mudcat numbers stay low.

Tough to eliminate them completely without dumping Rotenone in the tank and killing everything. But you can introduce bigger predators, fish them hard (and toss them), net out the "balls" of mudcat fry that hang out in the shallows, etc. and really cut down on their numbers.

Mudcats as in bullheads?

As long as egrets fly from tank to tank....

They are ubiquitous like green sunfish. Given time, they find their way to any pond.

Big bass love them will eventually get rid of them. Big yellows will eat every thing including bass.

Take a can of dog food, put holes in it with an ice pick, and place it in a perch trap. You can trap 50 to 60 at a time. Eventually you can reduce their numbers. Plus, they are good trotline bait.

I am curious if the OP is referring to a flathead or the pollywog version. I grew up on a South Texas lake and most of the old timers referred to flatheads as mudcats or opelousas. TPW has mud cat listed under "other names" for the flathead.

I believe he's talking about pollywogs.

I once caught 3 of them out of some riprap on lake texana that were 2+ lbs. Those were huge for bullhead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_bullhead

Oh yeah? Which one? I did too.

You guys keep mentioning pollywogs. I didn't know that was a fish. I thought it was a stage of tadpole development. ??

Not sure if OP is referring to Madtoms or Bullheads.

http://wildlife.tamu.edu/files/2010/04/2_Identify_Catfish.pdf

quote:

---

You guys keep mentioning pollywogs. I didn't know that was a fish. I thought it was a stage of tadpole development. ??

---

We always called them pollywogs in central Texas in the 70s. Granddads called them that too. I can't recall using mudcat for those same small stock tank catfish that seemed to be ubiquitous.

quote:

---

Not sure if OP is referring to Madtoms or Bullheads.

http://wildlife.tamu.edu/files/2010/04/2_Identify_Catfish.pdf

---

That page says those madtoms get to a max size of 2 inches. I guess what we called a pollywog was a bullhead.

Where you at? I'll take my youth football team out there one afternoon and wear em out.

God I hate those things