"In the fall of 2024, somewhere near the headquarters of Brazil's Environmental Military Police, an unending reverse-cascade of catfish began to climb the slippery rocks of the Sossego waterfall. The climbers were orange with thick black stripes, hence their nickname: bumblebee catfish. They had gathered in the thousands, their bodies latched onto the rocks and each other. Slowly and surely, they were heading upstream."
"The police alerted a group of researchers from the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul and the Pantanal Biopark, who arrived at the scene to witness this unprecedented migration of the catfish Rhyacoglanis paranensis. What they saw amazed them, and a brief paper on their observation was recently published in the Journal of Fish Biology. The species is rare, and scientists usually "find them one by one,""
In fall 2024 near the Environmental Military Police headquarters in Brazil, thousands of orange-and-black bumblebee catfish (Rhyacoglanis paranensis) began a reverse-cascade, climbing the slippery rocks of the Sossego waterfall and heading upstream. Researchers from the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul and the Pantanal Biopark observed the rare species emerging at night from small pools, scaling near-vertical faces, and overlapping one another on flatter rock sections; some even crept onto a plastic bucket. By day most individuals hid under rocks or in shaded parts of the stream. This represents the first recorded instance of bumblebee catfish climbing and aggregating in such massive numbers.
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