Some people put rubber duckies in their bathtubs, others floating aromatherapy candles.

For two days, James A. Holt had a catfish in the guest bathtub of his Orlando home.

It wasn’t just any catfish but what they thought was a rare, born-in-the-wild, albino channel catfish 27 inches long — one worth saving from its most serious predator: man.

Albino catfish are rare in the wild because they stand out in a lake like a halogen spotlight. Usually they’re eaten by something larger before they grow more than a few inches.

The Holts’ efforts to find it a safe haven were fruitless. And, just maybe, unnecessary.

Holt’s son, James R. Holt, caught the fish in the small lake that borders his dad’s back yard.

The younger Holt, 16, is a catfish fancier and has six tropical species, including an albino channel cat, among the other tropicals in his nine aquariums.

When he saw the fish, his first thought was to save it.

“He was swimming all around the surface eating all kinds of things, so I cast out a line with a piece of bologna on it and he bit,” he said. “I didn’t want to see him become a dinner. . . . This is the biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

While the fish swam in a bathtub filled with lake water oxygenated by six battery-powered bait-bucket aerators, the elder Holt started phoning places such as SeaWorld and Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World to find the fish a safe haven in an aquarium large enough to give it at least a sense of freedom.

“Nobody returned my calls,” the elder Holt said.

The chances of an albino born in the wild, experts say, are so remote that the Holts’ fish probably was produced by a fish farm and stocked in the lake.

The Holts decided they had no choice. The fish had to go back into the lake and take its chances on landing on someone’s dinner plate.

Ironically, that’s probably the only reason it was born.

“Most likely it came from a fish farm,” said Frank Chapman, a professor of fish biology at the University of Florida. “They sell them to these places where you pay to catch your own fish.”

Or it could have been an aquarium fish that was dumped into the lake.