#slenderfish

I've been gone pretty much a full week, I know. I'm not actually particularly sorry since this blog is at MY convenience, but I feel apologetic enough that I'll make sure to get one out every day this week. In fact, I'll even try to make all my posts kinda Halloween themed this month, so you should all be very, like, happy. (That does mean we're kinda abandoning lotic oct, but whatevs. I didn't rlly follow it well either way.)

Now, onto our topic. This one isn't rlly a species; it's act an order. I figured I'd do knifefish, even if they are kinda some of my least fav fish, since they've got exceptional electroreception and electrogenesis capabilities, and there's not many freshwater species more Halloween-y than zappy ones. (At least not in most people's mind, but I'm saving the more Halloween-y ones for the end anyway, kk?) Now, I bet once I mentioned electro-anything in fish your mind immediately went to electric eels, and you're right! Electric eels actually aren't eels but rather knifefish. Now, you're asking "Well, what on earth is the difference, Finne?" It's pretty obvi, act. Eels spend at least part of their life in saltwater, even if it's just spawning. They also have caudal fins and dorsal fins. Knifefish spend their entire life in freshwater, maximally entering brackish water, and they've got an anal fin, which extends to the placing of pectoral fins on a typical fish. Knifefish act move by waving the anal fin, like you would a ribbon, and keeping their body completely still.

As Sargasso September winds to a close, it's important to get these little fellers into this blog! (In fact, Sargasso September is what made me create this blog.) Like a whole bundle of Northern Hemisphere eels, such as the American Conger Eel and the European Conger Eel, the American Eel spawns in the Sargasso Sea. This here presents a bit of an issue because the Sargasso Sea was formed by Atlantic gyres, meaning it's also the location a whole heap of trash swims on over to after it gets dumped into the ocean; that, of course, meaning they've got some spawning issues. That combined with the overfishing they faced in the past, you might be wondering, "Why, Miss? Shouldn't they be a fair bit past threatened then? With all those threats and all?" I'm glad you asked! See, though the American Eel has a complex life cycle, a factory is pretty quickly able to solve that, so around two million of these mucus-y fellers are produced yearly for bait though the number in the wild is incredibly low.