{"id":954062,"date":"2026-07-23T13:31:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T13:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/954062\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T13:31:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T13:31:17","slug":"scary-finding-in-catfish-a-contagious-cancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/954062\/","title":{"rendered":"Scary Finding in Catfish: a Contagious Cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n Researchers on a Vermont-Quebec border lake have stumbled onto something never seen in fish before: a cancer that appears to spread like an infection. The ailment is affecting brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphremagog, reports the New York Times<\/a>. For more than a decade, the fish have been turning up with black growths and lesions on their bodies that were eventually found to be melanomas, or skin cancer, notes NPR<\/a>. That’s rare enough. Now, a new study in Nature<\/a> suggests that the cancer traces back to a single fish that developed a tumor and shed cancer cells into the lake. \n <\/p>\n


\n “It is the infectious agent itself,” says study co-author Julie Dragon of the University of Vermont. “Those cells can somehow escape the host, maybe live in the environment\u2014the aquatic environment\u2014and then infect a new host.” The finding adds catfish to a short list of animals known to host transmissible cancers, alongside dogs, Tasmanian devils, and some shellfish and clams. Researchers suspect close-contact spawning and bites give the cancer cells an entry point, and they’re now hunting for cases elsewhere. As Dragon puts it: “Is this really as rare as we think it is, or are we just not looking?” <\/strong>They’re also urging anglers not to eat tumor-covered fish, while stressing there’s no evidence the disease can infect humans. \n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Researchers on a Vermont-Quebec border lake have stumbled onto something never seen in fish before: a cancer…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":954063,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[27],"tags":[159,74119,67,132,68,2742,837],"class_list":["post-954062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-shellfish","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-vermont","tag-wildlife"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116969542988496866","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=954062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/954063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}