This fish is found in lakes and streams with gravelly or stony bottoms more often than in those with mud bottoms. Channel catfish in New York usually weigh 2-4 pounds and may occasionally exceed this. However, our channel cats do not reach the weights of 40-50 pounds recorded for the southeastern states where growing seasons are longer and living conditions more favorable. Distribution of the channel catfish in NY state. Dark dots represent where actual samples of channel catfish were taken.
White dots represent historic distributions.
A 209 KB image of the channel catfish is also available for download .