Do snakeheads bite or attack people or pet dogs?
No= northern snakeheads are a very shy fish and I have seen no evidence that they would attack anything larger than they are. Every radio-tagged fish that we tracked was hidden when we approached, and we saw very few fish in the turbid, weedy waters of the Potomac River, despite being within 1 m of most. Two of our radio-tagged fish were found guarding young, and I approached each nest once per day for a period of two weeks, netting a few of the young each day to determine their growth rate. I was never attacked by the adults. In fact, I rarely saw the guarding adults, who would emerge only after I remained perfectly still for over 10 minutes. Yet, a man honestly asked us one day if it was safe for his five year old son to play on his lawn, beside a retaining wall that was several feet above the water line. I’m hesitant to say definitively that there is no danger of a snakehead biting a human. Northern pike and muskellunge are known to occasionally bite feet or hands being dangled over
