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Have you seen this post?

You probably have. It currently has over 120,000 notes, largely because of this addition.

Of course it's going to get reblogged, this kind of unsourced factoid does numbers on here. But something about it wasn't quite right.

A bit of searching turned up the origin of the "fact".

Alright, so it's someone who posted this on reddit 4 years ago and somehow ended up in the search hits. And the post confuses the electric eel (from South America) with the electric catfish (from the Nile, which the Egyptians would have known about).

Reminder: this is an electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). It is from South America. (image from Wikipedia)

And this is an electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus). It is from the Nile and would have been familiar to the ancient Egyptians. (image from Wikipedia)

And then of course people were speculating in the notes to that post about trade routes between South America and Egypt. Excellent scholarship everyone.

At this point I was ready to call it another made-up internet fact that gets reified by people repeating it. But something was still bothering me.

An ancient Egyptian slab from 3100 BC. What could that be...

Oh.

The Narmer palette. It's the goddamn Narmer palette. (image, once again, from Wikipedia)

So where is this "angry catfish"?

It's not the Egyptian name for the electric catfish.

It's... Narmer. It's Narmer himself.

Narmer's name is written as above (detail of top middle of the palette), using the catfish (n`r) and the chisel (mr), giving N'r-mr. The chisel is associated with pain, so this reads as "painful catfish", "striking catfish", or, yes, "angry catfish" or other similar variants, although some authors have suggested that it means "Beloved of [the catfish god] Nar".

So.

Where does this leave us?

It would appear that this redditor not only confused electric eels with electric catfish, but also confused a Pharaoh's name with the name of a fish. And then it got pushed to the top search hits by a crappy search engine and shared uncritically on tumblr.

In short, "the electric eel is called angry catfish" factoid actually literacy error. Angry Catfish, who ruled upper Egypt and smote his enemies, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Also the Arabic name for the electric catfish is raad (thunder) or raada (thunderer).

References

Afsaruddin, A., & Zahniser, A. H. M. (1997). Humanism, culture, and language in the Near East: studies in honor of Georg Krotkoff. Eisenbrauns.

Clayton, P. A. (2001). Chronicle of the Pharaohs. Thames & Hudson.

Godron, G. (1949). A propos du nom royal. Annales du Service des antiquités de l'Egypte, 49, 217-221.

Sperveslage, G., & Heagy, T. C. (2023). A tail's tale: Narmer, the catfish, and bovine symbolism. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 109(1), 3-319.

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Frederic Remington (1861 – 1909). Louis Brown’s English Setter. Oil on canvasboard.

Coeur d’Alene Art Auction

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So rn the US government is starting to defund the National Parks Service, and while this is a bad thing largely because it's mainly being done to open up the possibility of oil drilling in a lot of those areas, I think it also needs to be said that no the National Parks Service was not just there to "protect natural wonders" or whatever. It was there because a lot of those places are incredibly important land to a lot of Indigenous Peoples and if you give it special status that means you can't live on it you can make the natives leave easier because they get arrested if they don't. Like I am very much not in favor of this change as it is being done but I don't think we should respond to it with wholehearted praise of the National Parks System either. Please know the history of the land you live on and visit.

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Egg wash really makes a difference when baking

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“it’s okay, lil fella! c’mere! it’s just us, the limp bizkits!”

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They named the other two kids Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno Mechanicus????

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Dog

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Major human pastimes:

frying dough

classifying things and then arguing about the classifications

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Hummingbirds Living in a Hive Found for the First Time

In a remote mountain cave in Ecuador, hummingbirds were discovered sleeping and nesting together.

By Rachel Nuwer

Published Feb. 14, 2025Updated Feb. 17, 2025

Hummingbirds are tiny and delicate, but don’t be fooled: They are among the most aggressive birds in the avian kingdom. Their territorial fury is especially aimed at other hummingbirds. Competition over a patch of flowers or a mate often results in high-speed aerial chases, divebombing and beak jousting.

So when Gustavo Cañas-Valle, an ornithologist and birding guide, stumbled across a cave full of hummingbirds nesting and roosting together in Ecuador’s High Andes, he could hardly believe it.

“I thought, ‘This looks like a colony,’” Mr. Cañas-Valle said. He added, “They were like bees.”

He documented 23 adult birds and four chicks, all of the subspecies Oreotrochilus chimborazo chimborazo, commonly known as the Chimborazo hillstar.

Mr. Cañas-Valle’s discovery, described in the journal Ornithology in November, may be the first documented example of hummingbirds that nested and roosted communally. It is also notable that he found the birds engaging in both these behaviors in the same space — something that even highly social species from other bird families tend not to do.

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sorry for the screen recording but this fucking tiktok

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This note was written by a child who was listening in on a bunch of artists discussing art and life.

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Polite for cheese