I was watching the fishing show "Bottom Feeders" and they had a question and answer part. How many catfish is in the United States. The answer was 39! I've been catfishing for about 48 years now and thought there was only blue cats, channel cats, yellow cats (flat heads)and mud cats (bull heads). I guess they might be counting the different color phases of the flat head and the different names of the mud cat. They also said Tenn. had 20 some odd species of the catfish. This tells me one thing, I need to spend more time on the water and less time watching the tv. Hope all ya'll have a great fishing year and be safe! Bent rods and loaded ice chest for 2015.

Now I know too thanks, all i could add to your list was willow cat...

All u could add was a white catfish. Lol but a week or so ago I did find on tpwd benbrook lake alltackle records page a catfish called a leopard catfish that was caught with a cast net....which I Googled and apparently it's a catfish from the Amazon. So my question is how did a leopard catfish get into benbrook lake haha

Pet drop off^^!

caught,, cleaned,, fried,, the 3 that matters

I was told cast nets could not catch all tackle records. I was gonna start shattering some gizzard shad records at all the area lakes......they were all vacant.

Its not that they count different phases, its that a lot of people just don't know them. An example, you said bullhead...there are 7 recognized species of bullhead alone. The yellow bullhead, the brown bullhead, the black bullhead, snail bullhead, flat bullhead and white catfish and Im forgetting the 7th. Then you got several species of Madtom.

there are lots more catfish species but the main ones are what we are accustomed to going after and catching as the others don't amount to much... like several sub species of bullhead exist and there's a white catfish that usually only gets up to about 2 lbs ... a 2 lb'r is a biggun and very old. you can't count the albinos that come out in other species as whites though because they're not the same ... I think the white catfish is indigenous to the southeast mostly. I can think of 4 different types of bullhead off the top of my head but I know there's a lot more. there are other coastal types of catfish they're probably counting in that mess too like the hardhead saltwater cat and others in the gulf and oceans so there's a lot of them but the main ones are the top three which are of value as a food source which made them popular to start with.