#baby caviar

[littletealseal]

Was bored waiting for my phone and computer to charge, so I decided to draw more bby Caviar, he and I are very alike! We chew on everything

[cosmicwhoreo]

Can I interest you in some guppy Black Pearl art in these trying timez? (with a hint of Grand Reef Cookie, of course!)

believe it or not, I had these doodled before the update! Granted, bp was colored slightly different than now, but it's easy to fix that with pixels~! Frankly my ideas on how my shining grandpapa Grand Reef haven't changed much! In fact, I think the conformation that bp has (or had) sisters helps me! All that really changed is that merbabies leave the reef at a certain age to go with their pod of siblings to their kingdom and be a good citizen or whatnot-

AND BECAUSE I'M ME~

Yes, I know logistically there is no way in HELL these two would have ever met as kids; But that's what AUs are fooooooooor~~~~ SO SHUSHH

[vanillablankcanvas]

Caviar

Daughter of John Dory and Sable.

>>>Not part of my canon storyline.....

.....but I reallllllyyyy wanted to know what a child between them would look like.

Let's call it an alternative timeline. ;)

Then the name Caviar sprouted in my head and it was so perfect I HAD to draw her. I mean come on how perfect is the name? Caviar is fancy and expensive like a sable fur coat and they're fish eggs... and a John Dory is a kind of fish... get it? :D

Little things about her

Has John Dory wrapped around her finger. To him, she can do no wrong.

As a kid she was a real tom-boy and into mud and bugs and stuff, much to Sable's dismay.

She strives to be the best at everything she does.

Puts a lot of pressure on herself.

Joins lots of clubs and events so her name is everywhere.

@jorjafrozen This one's for youuuuuuu

[chococheesecake-21]

This is the first panel and I will be working on the next one soon.

I love how this came out, especially the last frames he's a mood.

[vegan-nom-noms]

Homemade Vegan Caviar

[should-be-sleeping]

Sprouted Caviar

[bedforddanes75]

HOT GIRL, POP GIRL, RICH GIRL, I'M A BITCH GIRL, FAST GIRL, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN GIRL, YOU A SWERVE GIRL, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU, GIRL? YOU JUST WANNA BE ME.

[meowmeowmessi]

messistas can try to give this a positive spin as much as they want but this is the fumble of the century the kind of disastrous decision making skills at club level that i was talking abt there's no coming back from this

[mayo-in-the-escalator]

"Close up! BAP BAP-" *pulls out a ridiculously big hammer*

I love them sm and jackstauber music fits their vibes sm aaaa

[luvxiem]

what r the chances i run into a quildren on sky LMFAOOOOOO

[thoughtfulseason]

it’s not even funeral yet and i’m crying

[cosmicwhoreo]

POV: You just called him a wee lil' baby man

also, don't think I ever posted this 'ere-

watch me make it both somehow

[chococheesecake-21]

Panel 2: the boardwalk

the next one might take more time I'm sorry <:]

[vegan-nom-noms]

Homemade Vegan Caviar

[superiorsturgeon]

out of curiosity, why do you like sturgeons so much?

A chance to info dump about my favorite fish…?!

I grew up in the Great Lakes area of North America, where fishing is pretty popular but everyone knows that fish populations aren’t anything like “the good old days” when people took out huge numbers of fish while messing up their spawning sites. I got pretty into fishing when I found out that I could catch bluegill in the surrounding farm ponds, and once in a while my family took me to an isolated fishing cabin for vacation, but for years I never encountered a wild fish bigger than a kilogram or two.

BUT THEN…

I found out about sturgeon! They were HUGE fish that had once lived in the rivers and lakes all around my home, and better yet, fish almost exactly like modern sturgeon had existed all the way back in the Cretaceous period alongside the dinosaurs, and they STILL EXIST TODAY!!! The fact that small numbers of these huge dinosaur fish still existed made them seem almost like a real-life lake monster/cryptid, except that we had proof of their existence!

Furthermore, there’s just nothing else like them. Sturgeon get big. Like, REALLY big. The record for the largest sturgeon was almost 11 meters/24 feet long, which is colossal for freshwater animals. They have armor plates of bone running down their sides, and at the same time they don’t have bony skeletons. They also have a crazy mouth structure, which allows them to actually pop their jaws out like a tube and suck up food. And on top of all of this, the adults are absolute tanks. I’ve seen skin nearly 8mm thick, and it’s so tough that people make leather out of it, and they occasionally lose fins or even entire gill plates and just keep on swimming! (I found out about that last one when I tried to wrestle a big female out of a river and my hand went straight into her gills. She didn’t seem that bothered by it!)

For a long time I filed sturgeon along with Alligator Gar, Giant Mekong catfish, and Yangtze paddlefish as a semi-legendary fish that may still exist, but I was never going to see except possibly in an aquarium, until I enrolled in graduate school. For those unfamiliar with grad school in the US, it typically involves both high-level classes as well as an independent research project the student designs and carries out with help from an experienced professor. When my mentor asked what kind of thing I wanted to study, I tossed out “sturgeon” as one such possibility, expecting to hear that I would probably have to limit myself to more common/accessible species.

I was blown away when she said “Actually, I think I know a guy…”

For the next several years, I got to ride along collecting wild adult sturgeon, gathering eggs, and raising the baby fish in a lab and in a hatchery. I was holding something that I had thought of as a semi-mythical lake/river monster in my own hands! I got to see a river choked with giants as big as 2 meters long, and I got to hold a 5-centimeters mottled baby whose armored scutes were still sharp and possessed the little arrowhead shape and big black pectoral fins that remind me of Mickey Mouse ears! In the video below you can even see a little heartbeat! (Don’t worry, this little guy was returned to the tank soon after to recover from his anesthesia!)

Sadly, I didn’t find anything super groundbreaking in my research, but my experience DID land me a job working in sturgeon aquaculture! If you’ve ever had caviar that wasn’t poached, it probably came from a sturgeon farm, and if you want to see a lot of big fish up close, this is a good place to do it! I probably personally handled more individual sturgeon than there are wild fish in several sturgeon species. In addition, while the wild broodstock I mentioned above might reach 2 meters and over 50kg, the sturgeon I dealt with at the farm would easily double that, and there were a LOT of them! I got to see sturgeon behavior that had never been recorded in field guides, and even a few crazy one-in-a-million mutations like the infamous “ghost” sturgeon!

I even got the opportunity to cook my own sturgeon meat (Yeah, I basically turned into the Touden siblings from Dungeon Meshi except for sturgeon instead of RPG monsters). I got pretty good at making smoked sturgeon, but the meat is also good on the grill or baked, and people have been cooking them in various ways for centuries.

My favorite part of the job was physically wrestling the big fish! Sturgeon are easier to grab than other fish with the right know-how, but a human-sized fish often has its own plans for the day and won’t always cooperate. I was pretty good at moving the adults by the time I left that job, but it was still a wild rodeo every time!

Even more exciting was how we spawned each new generation of sturgeon. In the wild, they form massive spawning runs in big rivers that in the past would be enough to tip small boats, but in a lab or farm we have to use other means. I’ll spare you the details, but I am one of a small number of people who have surgically extracted eggs from a live sturgeon and sutured them back up to swim another day.

The tldr of this essay is that sturgeon are a big, crazy-unique fish that have been around a long time, and I’ve spent a lot of my career handling and working with them. There’s just nothing like them for a fish nerd and they’re damn cool!

(Clip art not mine, I think @sturgeonposting drew or shared it!)