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Giant catfish caught in Seine

The giant fish measured over 8 feet long and weighed more than 200 pounds - Geoffrey Rulleau/Facebook
The giant fish measured over 8 feet long and weighed more than 200 pounds - Geoffrey Rulleau/Facebook

Few Parisians realise that big fish have returned to the murky waters of the Seine, but a giant 200-pound catfish, nearly 8 feet long, has been caught in a Paris suburb.

Geoffrey Rulleau, an amateur fisherman, made what is thought to be a record catch for the Seine near Choisy-le-Roi, south-east of the city centre. The next largest catfish caught in the Paris area last year was more than 3 inches smaller. The record for the world’s largest catfish ever landed was set by a Frenchman who caught a behemoth nearly 9 feet long, almost as big as a grizzly bear, in the Tarn, in southern France, in 2018.

Mr Rulleau, 29, a logistics manager for a supermarket chain,   said he set out soon after dawn with two friends and they caught nothing all morning. Then, around lunchtime, he felt a tug on his line. “My reel unwound completely and we couldn’t stop it. It took about 20 minutes to haul it out of the water. It put up a huge fight.”

After photographing and measuring his prize, Mr Rulleau put it back in the water. “It seemed to be in fine fettle when it went back in,” he said. “Catfish feed on dead fish containing mercury and lead, and they’re poor hunters whose prey is often sick. Toxins build up in them, which is why we don’t eat them.”

In the 1960s the Seine was so full of human, agricultural and industrial waste around Paris that it was thought to be almost devoid of fish.

The fish was caught by Geoffrey Rulleau, a local fishing enthusiast - Geoffrey Rulleau/Facebook
The fish was caught by Geoffrey Rulleau, a local fishing enthusiast - Geoffrey Rulleau/Facebook

Since then, the city’s authorities have attempted to clean it up after years of pollution and neglect, but it still looks dirty.

When a healthy-looking sea trout was sighted in the Seine in 2008 for the first time in the Paris area since records began, the authorities claimed it was evidence that water quality had vastly improved.

The trout is said to be highly sensitive and demanding about the quality of water in which it swims.

The Seine is certainly less polluted than it used to be, with 24 species of fish found in 2016 compared with two in the 1970s. But the Public Health Agency says swimmers still risk gastro-enteritis and leptospirosis, a bacterial infection spread by the urine of the rats that proliferate in Paris.

The city is now splashing out about €1 billion (more than £900 million) in the hope of making the river clean enough for competitors in the 2024 Olympic Games to swim in.