If the spines should prick your skin, the poison runs down the spine and into the wound, resulting in a painful sensation similar to a wasp sting. Stonecats are tenacious of life and make good bass bait. They are of no real food or sport value, but are interesting members of the catfish family. Distribution of stonecats in NY state. Dark dots represent where actual samples of stonecats were taken.
White dots represent historic distributions.
A 193 KB image of the stonecat is also available for download .