#weird fish

Voyagers Story Color!

Once upon a time, Error snooped in on Othertale, and left the portal open, alongside a banana peel. Color slipped on it, down the Multiversal Stairs and into the Sea Of Stories. Long story short, he's fishing for the time-being and the souls are delighted to be on an adventure.

what's this one cause I have questions

1; is it edible

2: fun facts about it

THAMK YOU

That is a flying gurnard (Dactylopterus volitans)!

To answer your first question, they are edible! They're steadily becoming a more popular food choice because they have a relatively low oil content.

I did a quick search around the internet and collected some blogs and websites to discover unusual fish species for mermay inspiration (and because fish are fun)

Doing a clownfish mermaid is great, but what about doing a fish you only discovered that day? Let's see what we can reel in with these sites.

Tumblr blogs!

@herpsandbirds offers amphibians, reptiles, birds, and a bunch of other unusual and awesome critters including fish!

herps and birds fish tag

for a truly random experience, browse @hellsitegenetics to see what aquatic wonders are hiding in our posts.

You could also browse the entire tag of #ichthyology, the study of fish

Creature Websites!

Now to sail off tumblr to some of the sites I've browsed in the past, designed to introduce you to new species across the planet. I've narrowed these links down to fish sorted entries, but please browse the rest of the sites for fun as well!

My favorite for many years, The Featured Creature! Make sure to open every article to see the fish in question, as the article previews don't always show that each post has many beautiful photos of beautiful fish

Another archive with dozens of pages of fish spotlights! Check out activewild and see what you can sea

A classic! Check out articles and species spotlights of National Geographic

There's also lots of smaller blogs with only a page or so of fish. Coffeeandcreatures, thewildlife.blog and many many many more!

Start a new bookmarks category, pinterest board, or image folder and just start throwing fish in there. Your ocean of ideas will never run dry.

Not an artist but desperately want to see an obscure mermaid? You can ask me to tackle it! Just make sure you've browsed my mermay tag to make sure I haven't done it in years prior.

Request a mermaid here!

If you're an artist and you used this list to discover a new species, let me know! I love seeing what other people find interesting.

Today's animal of the day is Peter's Elephantnose Fish (Gnathonemus petersii)!

Photo credit: Gerhard von der Emde

Also known as the long-nosed elephant fish or the Ubangi mormyrid, this species of freshwater fish can be found in slow-moving rivers throughout western and central Africa. This is named after German naturalist Wilhelm Peters, who did a lot of exploration of the Zambesi River during the 1840s, which is one of the rivers where this fish is commonly found. They are usually dark brown or black in color with two white stripes near their tails andgrow around 9 to 10 inches long. As their name suggests, they have a large protrusion on their snout that kind of resembles the trunk of an elephant. This "trunk" isn't actually their nose, but is instead an elongated barbel growing out of their chin. However, like an elephant's trunk, it helps them sense their surroundings since it is covered in special cells called electroreceptors that send out a faint electrical field, which the elephantnose fish uses to sense where things are in its environment, similarly to how sharks and platypi do. Like many other animals that live in murky water, their vision is pretty poor, since they rely mostly on their other senses.

Photo credit: Joachim S. Müller

This ability is incredibly useful, since they prefer to live in rivers with very low visibility and lots of submerged logs and branches for them to hide in from predators. They're also most active at night, when the visibility is especially low. Not only do their "trunks" help them navigate their surroundings and not bump into things, but it also helps them find prey as well as mates. Their diet mostly consists of worms and other aquatic invertebrates that they dig up from the river bottom.

Photo credit: Tennessee Aquarium