Channel catfish

Where channel catfish have been recorded

141 of the 1,788 Minnesota lakes on this site with fish records list channel catfish, across 46 counties. Tap a dot to open that lake’s depth map.

How many turn up in DNR surveys

Minnesota DNR lake surveys use standard gear: gill nets set offshore for 24 hours (the main gear for walleye, northern pike, yellow perch, cisco, whitefish and trout), trap nets set near shore (the main gear for bluegill, crappie and bullheads), and on some lakes electrofishing, most often for bass. The DNR reports each gear separately, as fish per net set. These rates come from the newest standard survey of each lake on this site, 1959–2025 — a measure of how many fish a lake holds, not how many an angler will catch.

Often found with

Share of these lakes that also list each fish.

• Crappie 99%
• Bluegill 95%
• Walleye 95%
• Bullheads 93%
• Northern pike 93%
• Yellow perch 93%
• White sucker 78%
• Largemouth bass 77%

How to recognize it

A comet-shaped fish with a flat head, barbels around the mouth, smooth scaleless skin and a deeply forked tail. Small fish are steel gray with scattered dark spots; older fish are darker and lose the spots.

Don’t confuse it with

Life in a Minnesota lake

Channel catfish are plentiful in the Red, St. Croix, Mississippi and Minnesota rivers and also turn up in many inland lakes, mostly in the southern half of the state. Two DNR hatcheries raise roughly 30,000 yearlings each year, stocked mostly into lakes where they can outgrow river fish; they are able to breed in still water, but many lake populations exist only because of stocking.

They find food by taste, smell, touch and vibration, with taste buds on their barbels and along the body to the tail, so they feed well at night and in murky water. The male guards the eggs, which hatch in six to ten days.

Source: the sources below.

Rules and eating

Check the rules before you keep fish. Each lake page shows the regulations that apply there, and the Minnesota DNR fishing regulations page is the official source. Before eating fish from a particular lake, check the Minnesota Department of Health’s fish consumption guidance.

All 141 lakes with channel catfish