A fisherman recently may or may not have caught a three-eyed catfish in New York’s Gowanus Canal.  Why anyone would fish in the canal is a question that immediately comes to mind, immediately followed by “what would you do with any fish that you caught?”  In the case of the three-eyed mutant fish, the answer is “call the media.”

When I came to New York, forty years ago, I went to work as a naval architect for Moore-McCormack Lines, whose terminal was at 23rd Street in Brooklyn on the Gowanus Canal.  The water in the canal literally stank.  The pilings on the piers were not treated with creosote because the water was so too polluted for teredo worms. Four decades later, not much has improved.  Acknowledged as one of the most polluted waterways in the nation, the Gowanus Canal has been a “Superfund” site since 2010. It is expected to cost over a half billion to clean up and won’t be completed by 2022.  Last April, we posted about an environmental activist who went swimming in the canal on Earth Day to call for “an accelerated cleanup of the Canal.” Given the range of toxins in the water, the swim seems more likely to have shortened the gentleman’s life than to necessarily accelerated the cleanup. Two years earlier, a dolphin swam into the canal and died.

And now, a fisherman claims to have caught a three-eyed mutant fish in the Gowanus Canal. We add the qualifier “claims” because some are suggesting that the video of the three-eyed fish is a hoax. As quoted in the New York Times: “Everything is wrong here,” John Waldman, a biology professor at Queens College and author of “Heartbeats in the Muck: A Dramatic Look at the History, Sea Life and Environment of New York Harbor,” wrote in an email on Monday. “You’d never find a freshwater bullhead in the saltwater Gowanus Canal.” Others have pointed out that the canal does have some freshwater flowing into it.

Despite the criticism, the man who sent in the video, Greg Hunter, insisted the fish was real.  Again, from the New York Times:

“If it’s a hoax, it’s a hoax on me,” Mr. Hunter, 34, who works at a bodega in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Hunter said he had been eating lunch on Sunday in the park near the Gowanus Whole Foods when he noticed people clustering around the fisherman on the Third Street Bridge over the canal.

“They came down toward Whole Foods and I said, ‘What’s going on?’ and they said, ‘That guy on the bridge caught a three-eyed catfish.’”

Far from seeking publicity for his catch, Mr. Hunter said, the fisherman seemed annoyed by the attention. “One lady came up to him and she was going on about how the Gowanus is polluted and he was like, ‘Leave me alone,’” Mr. Hunter said.

With the fisherman’s permission, Mr. Hunter said he touched the fish’s third eye.

“I poked it to see if it was real,” he said. “It looked kind of glossy, kind of like a cataract eye. But it felt like an eye.

So now, in addition to the warnings not to drink the water or to go swimming in the Gowanus Canal, we can add “and watch out for mutant fish.”

Thanks to Irwin Bryan for contributing to this post.