More Giant Aquatic Dwellers (and edible too!)

Pangasianodon gigas
Otherwise known as the Mekong Giant Catfish. That's no understatement!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/photogalleries/giantcatfish/index.html

Surprising statistics from National Geographic:

According to John Lundberg, researcher with the All Catfish Species Inventory, 2,800 species of catfish have already been described and an additional 1,500 species may yet be discovered. "One out of every four freshwater fish, one out of ten fishes, and one out of twenty vertebratesis a catfish." Catfish are found on every continent except Antarctica and in fresh, coastal, and marine waters.

The World Wildlife Fund has a page on the Mekong Giant Catfish, in view of it's endangered status. There's a PDF factsheet on this page for download, if your appetite (mental, please - not physical) is whetted by this post, and you're wanting more food for thought.

This is one of a number of Posts thats been sitting in my drafts folder for too long. So I release it now from blogpost purgatory, with a little bit of cleaning up, and a little recollection of a meal that Laura, Henry and I had on the last dinner in Manila, in early June 09, where we were working on the Centex Manila school IT Lab.

One of the dishes we had at a restaurant serving local food, a short walk from the hotel we stayed at, was catfish, grilled over what we believe was a charcoal fire at the back of the establishment. It was one of the dishes we ordered by pointing at what we saw at a nearby table that looked interesting - we didn't know it was catfish at that time. Very tasty, lovely texture. It was a perfect complement to the grilled squid that also graced our table.