This aspect of their appetite was illustrated this week by a rant from the respected big-fish columnist Des Taylor in Angling Times. He pointed out that Spain’s River Ebro was once famed for its barbel fishing Now there are fewer barbel and more big catfish. (Curiously, the same issue has an angler posing with a 200lb catfish from that very river.)If catfish had stayed in Spain and Kazakhstan, the two favoured venues for catching a whopper, all would be fine. It reached a peak when a tiny Essex lake tried to claim a record with a 102-pounder.The trouble is, catfish-loving loonies are illegally stocking them everywhere. But now the record-fish committee has had to scrap all claims because so many illegal immigrants have been smuggled in.

There are rumours of them eating all sorts of things, from dogs (the cats’ revenge) to small children. When I was in Russia some years ago, our guides told the story of a youngster who was drowned by a catfish. He had wrapped his line round his foot and gone to sleep in the sun. He said: “Can’t see why people want them in their waters anyway They end up eating everything else. In the end, you’ll just have one bloody great big hungry catfish in the water.”We are talking about an eating machine. In fact, it’s every other water creature that needs protecting from the ugly brute.
The Wels, or European, catfish, is not a team player. It looks like a cross between a Lord Of The Rings orc and a giant slug.I once interviewed a shadowy character who knew all about how to smuggle them into the UK from Eastern Europe.

Apart from the fact that it grows very big and is tougher than anything found in British freshwater, it has few redeeming features. It has mean little eyes, a huge mouth that gives it a smug, self-satisfied look, and sickly colouring. Antarctica was the best place for mammals to live, and the rest of the world would not sustain human life,” he said.Sir David warned that if the world did not curb its burning of fossil fuels “we will reach that level by 2100″.. If ever an organisation was ill-named, it’s the Catfish Conservation Group. Though this doughty band of feline fish fanciers would surely disagree, silurus glanis can look after itself perfectly well, thank you. The last time they were at this level – 379 parts per million – was 60 million years ago during a rapid period of global warming, he said. Levels soared to 1,000 parts per million, causing a massive reduction of life.”No ice was left on Earth.

The warning – one of the starkest delivered by a top scientist – comes as ministers decide next week whether to weaken measures to cut the pollution that causes climate change, even though Tony Blair last week described the situation as “very, very critical indeed”.The Prime Minister – who was launching a new alliance of governments, businesses and pressure groups to tackle global warming – added that he could not think of “any bigger long-term question facing the world community”.Yet the Government is considering relaxing limits on emissions by industry under an EU scheme on Tuesday.Sir David said that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – the main “green- house gas” causing climate change – were already 50 per cent higher than at any time in the past 420,000 years. Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the Government’s chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week.
He said the Earth was entering the “first hot period” for 60 million years, when there was no ice on the planet and “the rest of the globe could not sustain human life”. Luckily, one of them spotted the cameras and warned the rather violent one to cool it He put handcuffs on me and started to search me Here we go again, I thought, as I readied my bruised bottom. Fortunately, our very forceful American co-ordinator intervened in a very un-English manner and I was released after 20 minutes of tense negotiations – made even more surreal by the arrival of a police dog team, whose animal continually tried to pee on my suit.Tomorrow we drive across the Mojave desert dressed as Red Indians The average temperature will be hovering at around 50C I’m sure everything will be just fine
More from Dom Joly. I was wearing a fetching Elvis costume from the deep-fried banana sandwich period and had an open bottle of beer in my hand. I was letting anyone who cared to know that I could have been a contender. I was the winner, three years running, of Bolton’s prestigious Elvis Impersonator of the Year contest Admittedly, I had been the only entrant.