It was described as “a companion for the Creature from the Black Lagoon” when it appeared in Maryland, as “Frankenfish” when it was caught in Virginia and as the “freshwater fish equivalent of a tank” when it showed up in the Harlem Meer in New York.

There has been no end to the creepy descriptions of the snakehead fish, a slimy, toothy, large-jawed animal that can breathe on land and crawl like a snake, in the decades that it has popped up in freshwater lakes, ponds and rivers in the United States.

“These fish are like something from a bad horror movie,” Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton said in 2002 when she proposed a ban on the import and interstate transportation of the “voracious” live snakehead fish in the United States.

Snakeheads, which are not indigenous to the United States, have nevertheless cropped up in 15 states, even after the ban. And this week, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources announced that its turn had come: A northern snakehead, one species of the fish, was found for the first time in the state, reeled in last week by a man in Gwinnett County.