#fish

[im-a-loaf]

@ghostertoasted you core. us core, even

I witnessed something wonderful on my walk today.

We went down to the park, where the lake drains under a footbridge into a stone-lined gully that someone generous might call a creek. Usually it’s a trickle at best, but it poured last night, and the water was still moving pretty briskly. 

As we got closer, I heard kids yelling, so we went over to have a look. I was nervous, because earlier this summer we’d seen a mother cat and her kittens hanging out a few times in the (then bone dry) spillway. We hadn’t seen them in over a month, but I didn’t want to think of them being there when the water started coming down.

Instead, when I looked over the side of the bridge, I saw a skinny kid (maybe 8-10 years old) carrying an enormous catfish clasped in both arms.

The catfish had to be the length of this kid’s torso, and it was flopping around trying to escape, but the kid doggedly kept climbing over mud and slippery rocks until he reached the lake and chucked the fish in. And behind him came… another kid, holding a fish.

When the lake flooded, it must’ve washed a bunch of these catfish downstream, where they collected in pools. Now the water levels are starting to go down, and the fish are trapped, doomed to dry up and die. Not on these kids’ watch. As we watched, they rescued four fish, and one of the adults present said there were at least six left. The kids showed no sign of stopping. This is the kind of thing you love as a kid, a life or death mission you can throw your heart and soul into while getting gleefully covered in muck and slime. I was tempted to offer my assistance, but this was their Quest, and I did not want to impose.

When we continued on, the Great Fish Rescue was still going strong. Godspeed, kids. In a time of such great discord and meanspirited behavior, you will live on in my memory as a beacon of goodwill. 

[amnhnyc]

Not only is the whale shark (Rhincodon typus) the world’s largest shark—it’s also the world’s largest fish! Growing up to 40 ft (12 m) long and weighing more than 40,000 lbs (18,144 kg), it’s often regarded as a gentle giant. Don’t be alarmed by its colossal mouth: This slow-moving species is a filter feeder, gulping down small marine animals like shrimp and plankton. It can be spotted in warm waters around the world, traveling thousands of miles each year to find food.

Did you know? Sharks and their relatives have been swimming in Earth’s oceans for about 450 million years. That's long before there were humans, dinosaurs, or even trees!

For more fun facts, check out All About Sharks on OLogy, the Museum’s science website for kids—and everyone else!

Photo: Muhammad syaran, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

[embersnail]

Well everyone... Here's the next fish plush!

It's an Oranda Goldfish! Of course, it is not 100% biologically accurate-- I have taken creative liberties to make him work well as a plushie :)

I've been working on getting this design perfected to my liking with my manufacturer for months, and I'm so happy to get to share it now! He's very chubby and squishy IRL, and the scruffy head is absolutely adorable IMO!

If you're' interested in getting one, please fill in the interest check form linked below! Even if it's just a "maybe" I'd really appreciate hearing from you :)

P.S. Tumblr is getting this info first before my other socials get posts... Because I love you guys the most <3

[wacca005]

Escapism ✨🌙✨

[notbenne]

Okay. But we still don't know how the electric eels were called. The south American electric eel is also called "poraquê". That comes from the tupi language (indigenous native language of some ethnic groups in south America and probably most common dialect in Brasil before Portugal came to fuck it up to us). In tupi the electric eels were called "poraké", "the one that puts you to sleep". Because you would fucking black out after dealing with the eel.

So the right answer to the question "what electric eels were called before electricity?" Is "the one that puts you to sleep".

You guys probably can search "poraquê" and find out.

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.

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

Here's some fish and two cephalopods that I dreamt of last night. I was looking at a beautiful large aquarium and saw many pretty scapes and animals! The tank mostly consisted of shallow freshwater fish, but on the very rightmost side of the tank there was a noticeable deepening where "deep sea" creatures lived in darkness, in the same very big tank. I think these I remember best:

The fish in the first picture were all rather small and freshwater animals, even that funny turtle-wrasse fish, which was only about the size of a fist. The orange fish and the black vertical fish were both schooling fish, the orange fish stuck close to a patch of moss while the black fish were floating in groups of 3. The spotted black fish was territorial and a single one was chasing other fish around. The straight-shelled ammonoid-looking cephalopod and the thorny squid were deep sea animals! Inside the squid's suckers (which it only had a single row of) it had retractable teeth or hooks, kind of like the hooks of a colossal squid! It bore great resemblance to a reef squid. Also a "deep sea" animal, the fish on the right of the squid (I can't even begin to properly call it anything) chased an aquarium scraper on a stick that I was trying to use to clean the big tank and even nearly leapt out of the water in pursuit.

At some point I was also looking at another tank with sharks in it! That's when I saw that coppery shark with rocky patterns on its side. It had a species name, which I read from an information plaque, but sadly I no longer remember.

[shiftythrifting]

Submission from @etchetcetera

[the-east-art]

FISH VASE FISH VASE FISH VASE

[draconym]

Not a big fan of what melatonin has been doing to my dreams lately.

[corrodedparadox]

My other car is a rainbow trout

Stickers

[casioaty]

Well if the shoe fish

[vicshush]

[ID: Art of a red bass fish in profile. Handwritten text above and below read "This too shall bass [heart]". /end ID]

this too shall bass

[omatoxin]

fish song

[comeguessmethisriddle]

well? can you?

[protectoursharks]

The shape of a fish's caudal tail can tell you a lot about how fast the fish moves! A rounded tail is the slowest and a lunate tail is the fastest! The lunate tail has the most optimal ratio of high thrust and low draw, making it the fastest.

Ichthyology Notes 2/?