Hello everyone,

My Oscar tried to swallow the catfish equivalent to half of its size and the catfish stuck in his throat..
I was of the thought that the Oscar will expel it by himself but nothing happened for about 12 hours...
then luckily I visited this website and read about how to deal such situation..

I followed the steps and asked a friend to make the footage so that it may help the others ( the video quality is a bit low, recorded from Nokia N72):



I checked for any remaining scales of the catfish inside Oscar's mouth or throat but there wasn't any...
Kindly rate the video and post your comments!

Thanks!

if im honest didnt go mutch on the catfish vid nice busy setup you just got to love those pirate ships LOL

Thanks for posting the video, I'm sure this will help a lot of people.

I tried to watch it using Internet Explorer 8 but gave up in the end because it kept stopping and starting and it showed an error on the page. No problems with Google Chrome.

I think this will show that small catfish can cause serious problems if an Oscar tries to eat one. You will notice that the Oscar was doing the correct thing by trying to swallow the catfish head first. Unfortunately it was too big to swallow it. I suspect the catfish like many of the species had some small spines on its pectoral and dorsal fins which perform rather like a barb on a fishing hook and then stops the Oscar from spitting the fish out. I had a similar problem with the bristlenose catfish, thankfully the Oscar managed to spit it out without any outside intervention.

Please try and post in the correct forums

Welcome to the site and I must say thats an excelent first post!
Sure, we're here to have some fun and enjoy this lovely site, but the main thing is helping people and giving correct info and encouraging them to action for the welbeing of their fish.
Nice informative vid!

I had an algae eater I could never catch when i changed from carp to tropical.
Then I got my Oscar.
He had no trouble whatsoever catching the guy.
Swallowing it whole was more of a problem.
But he ate half the fish in 4 hour and then was able to spit it out!

Bad quality vid, but you get the idea.

to be honest, i am sure your oscar will survived and had digest that
catfish not for long. that is how vicious oscar is. i have same situation
when i used to give my o small rodent (2 inches body length)wherein the
tails of the rodent stays visible for more than 12 hours. the following day,
the rodents was totally gone and the oscar is fine.

This is becoming a nice thread.
Seems more Oscarkeeper had the same expierience.
I remember my wife running into the bedroom, screaming :YOUR OSCAR US EATING THE ALGAE EATER!!
Mind you my O was very small at the time, just a little bigger than my juvi SD's.

have you done anything after that? or just leave it alone?

Got my camera and was proud of my Oscar!
He caught the fish I couldn't!!!

i just saw this thread, i had a similar story with my o and a pictus catfish! nearly identical infact! i used some manicure sissors and carefully snipped a spine and he came right out with a little bit of motivation. they both lived thru the adventure, and the cat healed up just fine albeit one fin was a bit floppier than the other.

I remember my dad telling me about the time an oscar got a corydorus catfish stuck in its mouth. He cut the spines off to get the corydorus out. The corydorus didnt survive

When I saw him drop that cat back in the bucket, I thought the O was going to go back and try again.. lol