By Patrick Cooney Do you often fall for farce over fact? Take a quick look at the following fish stories and see if you can discern the real from the ludicrous. Once you have decided on all 10, check out the answers towards the bottom. Leave a note in the comments (or take the poll)…
Category: Fun Fish Fodder
Funny fish: common names that aren’t so common
With fish make up more than half of the estimated 54,711 recognized living vertebrate species (animals with a vertebral column), coming up with common names for all of those fish species is quite a task.
Sympathy for the ugliest animal in the world
by Brandon Peoples Meet the blobfish, one of my favorite underwater underdogs. The blobfish lives in incredibly deep water (up to 4,000 feet!) off the coast of Australia, where it whiles away the days hovering over the bottom and eating whatever drifts in front of it. Blobfish aren’t exactly the most charming fish in the sea. Source…
Thanksgiving Fish: The Missing Ingredient
By Steve Midway As many of us in the U.S. prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday later this week, a litany of traditional foods comes to mind: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie. Indeed—in some form or another—many of these foods were present at the first Thanksgiving. However, conspicuously absent from both the traditional…
Top 5 Most Poisonous and Venomous Fish!
By Dana Sackett Many TV shows and nature guides have been dedicated to educating the public on the most poisonous and venomous spiders, snakes and even frogs, but what about fish? Unlike spiders or snakes, we rarely hear about which fish are the most poisonous (or venomous). This week we are dedicating our blog post…
The Swimming Dead: Videos of Zombie Fish
By Patrick Cooney Like an underwater horror show, I filmed dead fish swimming amongst the living last week in a coastal river of western Washington. Or at least, the zombie fish looked like they were dead. Nowhere is the “Circle of Life” more apparent than in a river during salmon spawning season. Years after leaving the comforts of freshwater…
Scary stuff!
by Brandon Peoples It’s a quiet autumn night. The full moon barely penetrates the thick, low-hanging fog. An unsuspecting group is returning home from their evening activities. They’re in a dangerous area, but they know they’ll be safe if they stick together and move quickly. They’ve been lulled into a false sense of security…
Topless Mermaid Protestor Misunderstands Scientists
By Patrick Cooney Mermaids misunderstand scientists that are presenting in hotel behind (source). In the 1980s box office hit titled Splash, a scientist nearly goes mad while attempting to advance his cause by exploiting a mermaid. As if making a reference to the movie, but in a complete reversal of roles, a topless mermaid took…
How Obama’s fish made me question my view of "species"
By Brandon Peoples Just what “is” a fish species? Etheostoma clinton may say, “…it depends on your definition of ‘is’.” Last year, researchers Steve Layman and Richard Mayden discovered five new species of darter—tiny colorful fishes in the perch family. They named the new species after “environmentally-minded” politicians, most notably Barack Obama (Teddy Roosevelt and…
Finding Nemo lied to your kids, and they will do it again in the sequel: Finding Dory!
By Patrick Cooney The Disney film, Finding Nemo, lied to your kids! Disney would simply argue that they altered reality to create a more entertaining storyline, but read below for the true story, and you tell me which you think is a more entertaining. Disney forced them to hide the truth! How Finding Nemo started:…
Doctor Fish: What seems to be the problem?
By Erin Miller Walking through a touristy district of Bangkok, Thailand, I saw a sign that read “Fish Massage: Only $300 Baht For 30 Minutes!” As always, my imagination ran wild. I pictured a carp, sprawled out across a massage table, cucumbers over his eyes, a steaming, damp towel over his forehead, relaxing as two…
The Adipose Fin: Old Mysteries with New Answers
If you are a fish, your fins are obviously critical for making a living. Fins provide a long list of essential functions, from generation of movement to stabilization, turning, stopping, and dynamic lift (to name a few). Yet only select families of fish—namely trouts and salmons and catfishes—possess a small nub-like fin behind their dorsal…
Anadromous, Catadromous, Amphidromous, Oceanodromous, or Potamodromous
By Patrick Cooney Can you say ‘potamodromous‘ and can you guess what it means? A) Mood disorder from eating too many potatoes. B) An aquatic dinosaur that crawled across land. C) A migration of fish entirely in freshwater. If you pronounced it like ‘poe-tuh-moe-droe-miss’, then you are off to a great start. But what about the…
New News for Old Fish
The coelacanth (pronounced ‘see-la-canth’) holds an interesting place in both ichthyology and the history of ichthyology. Many of us are familiar with the image of this large, speckled fish, easily identified by the thick lobes that characterize its fins. Surely it commanded a few moments of simultaneous intrigue and eyebrow-raising in Ichthyology or Evolution 101….
Top 10 Weirdest Things Found on a Fish’s Head
By Gus Engman and Patrick Cooney Have you ever looked at a fish and wondered, “What is that weird thing on its head and what is it there for?” Well here is our list of the ‘Top 10 Weirdest Things Found on a Fish’s Head’. Electrosensitive Rostrum: “That’s no banana, that’s my nose! Acha cha…
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