A strange transmissible cancer is spreading through the catfish in this lake
For more than a decade, there's been something fishy going on in a lake that straddles Vermont and the province of Quebec. It involves cancer, a kind of catfish, and — possibly — clues about how tumors metastasize.
A puzzling disease has been moving through catfish in a lake that crosses the border between Vermont and Quebec, raising questions that go beyond the fish themselves. According to a monitored public feed from NPR News, researchers have been tracking the phenomenon for more than a decade and are now looking at whether it could offer clues about how cancer spreads.
The report describes a transmissible cancer affecting a kind of catfish in the lake, a rare and unusual condition in which cancer cells move from one animal to another rather than arising independently in each case. That kind of spread is highly uncommon, but it has drawn scientific interest because it may help researchers better understand how tumors metastasize in general.
The lake, which straddles the U.S.-Canada border, has become the setting for an extended scientific mystery. The feed summary does not provide details about how many fish are affected, how the disease is moving among them, or whether the outbreak is limited to a particular area of the lake. It does make clear that the issue has persisted for years, enough to keep scientists studying the strange pattern.
Cases like this can be important because transmissible cancers are rare in nature. Most cancers remain confined to the individual in which they develop. When a cancer can spread directly between animals, it gives researchers a chance to examine how abnormal cells survive in a new body, evade immune defenses, and continue growing. Those are the same broad processes that scientists study when trying to understand metastasis, the stage of disease in which cancer cells spread from one part of the body to another.
The NPR report says the lake’s catfish are offering possible clues, though the summary does not spell out what those clues are or which scientific teams are leading the work. Even so, the unusual setup — a shared body of water, a border-spanning ecosystem, and a cancer that appears to pass between fish — makes the case stand out.
This article is based on a monitored public feed and summarizes the available details without additional reporting. Source attribution: NPR News.
Source: NPR News - https://www.npr.org/2026/07/22/nx-s1-5901135/transmissible-cancer-catfish-melanoma-tumors
