Wels catfish

Where does the wels catfish live?

Home: Slow, deep rivers and warm lakes across much of Europe.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Germany, Ukraine, Poland, Spain, France.

Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.

The short profile

Fully grown: usually 1.3-1.6 m long, up to 2.8 m. It weighs about 18 kilograms. On the menu: meat.

The story behind it

A wels catfish has no scales at all. Its skin is smooth and slippery, covered in a slime that helps it slide past weed and mud. It hunts mostly in the dark, feeling its way with two long barbels on the upper jaw and four shorter ones below, which pick up taste and touch in water far too murky to see through. Its wide mouth is lined with hundreds of tiny rough teeth that grip rather than cut, so prey is swallowed whole. Most of its food is fish, worms and crayfish, but large wels have been filmed lunging out of the shallows to snatch pigeons drinking at the edge. In Swedish lakes some wels are thought to live for around seventy years, which makes them among the oldest freshwater fish in Europe.

Find it on the globe

Wels catfish is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.