First off, I did not kill the fish in question. Somebody caught themselves some catfish, filleted them on the bank, and left the non-tasty parts. Which I then found. The bodies are mostly stripped of flesh thanks to some fire ants, but the heads are intact, so they're partially buried under a plastic crate (weighted down to prevent theft by possums) until bugs finish eating all the meat off. I hope to keep the tendons attaching the bones together. Once the skeletons are clean, I'm going to soak them in water until they're pliable and then pose them as naturally as I can and put them in the sun until they dry out again. If this works, I should have three posed, mostly intact catfish skeletons. The smallest is about 18" long, the medium is about 24", and the largest is missing part of the tail, but the head is an inch or so wider than the medium one, so it was even bigger. The remaining attached fin bits are in bad shape, but the skulls are intact and the bodies are in halfway decent shape.
What I'd like to do is mount these guys the way taxidermy fish are often mounted, with them posed around/on a piece of driftwood in relatively natural poses. The driftwood is partly so I can hide the cut-off tail of the biggest one. I also want to find a crawfish exoskeleton and pose it with one of the cats about to engulf it.
Anyone have any suggestions/tips? I know there's a limit to how realistic this is going to be, since it's with skeletons, but I want to make it look as much as possible like they're just doing normal catfish things.
And does anyone happen to have any pics of catfish in either a natural habitat or a large aquarium? I'd prefer blue cats, since I'm pretty sure that's what these were (mostly going by skin color), but any large catfish would probably have fairly similar behaviors.
Edited by Betta132, 03 January 2017 - 09:11 PM.
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