Hardhead Sea Catfish

• The male broods the eggs in his mouth: a few dozen marble-sized eggs, the largest of any marine fish relative to the adult, and he goes eight to eleven weeks without eating.
• Once the fry leave their father's mouth they keep taking refuge in it at any threat for days afterwards.
• It produces audible grunts by rubbing the bones of the Weberian apparatus, a system connecting the swim bladder to the inner ear.
• The male broods in his mouth. He gathers the eggs — enormous, the size of a marble — and carries them in his mouth cavity for two or three months, without eating in all that time.
• He keeps protecting them after hatching: the fry return to his mouth at any sign of danger for several more weeks.
• That investment explains why it lays so few eggs: between twenty and sixty-five, against the hundreds of thousands of a free-spawning fish.
• Its dorsal and pectoral spines are sharp and carry a toxin that causes intense pain and infections; it is one of the usual causes of injuries among fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico.
• It locates food in murky water with its barbels, which are covered in chemoreceptors.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bony fish)

Habitat and environment

Estuaries and soft coastal bottoms of the western Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico

Gestation / incubation

The male incubates the eggs in his mouth for between 60 and 80 days

Litter / clutch size

From 20 to 65 eggs, very large, up to 2 cm across

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Ariopsis felis