Fish Fry Day Video: Tigerfish Snatches Swallow Out of Mid-Air

Here’s a new wrinkle to the aquatic food web – the first documented record of fish preying on birds in flight. Meet the African tigerfish and one unlucky barn swallow.

We discovered the amazing film on the website of the journal, Nature. But it stems from a new article in the Journal of Fish Biology that confirms what residents living near Mapungubwe National Park, near the border of both Botswana and Zimbabwe, have been reporting since the 1940s. During their study, the researchers report at least 20 cases of airborne tigerfish bringing an abrupt halt to a swallow’s flight.