#fishshaming

[brockalope]

My Bristle nose is a real ass! He is currently eating my clam!!! and in his zealousness he threw all my substrate on my newly planted staurogyne repens and as you can see in the picture tore up my baby amazon swords. Think this guy is getting re homed to pay for the clam he destroyed. Enjoy it while you last bud. 

[sidhebeingbrand]

GATHER ROUND, CHILDREN, for it is time to learn about the TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF KEEPING LUNGFISH

[FIG 1] Above: a photo of an African lungfish in all its intelligent and highly evolved glory. No, I’m kidding: lungfishes found their niche about a hundred million years ago and stayed there. They have external gills as babies, but those wither away as they mature, leaving them air breathers. They are also dumb as rocks. They hunt by patting around in dirt and much with their noses and their highly sensitive pectoral and pelvic fins*. Once they find something that is probably prey close enough might as well bite it and find out, they take a deep gulp of sand, muck, water, and potentially some unlucky invertebrate. They grind up their mouthful of whatever with the two bony plates that serve them for teeth**, swallow the good bits, and spit the inedible bits out through their gill slits, or what would be gill slits if they had gills and not lungs. 

These canny predators are excellent at distinguishing prey from -  no, I can’t even finish that, they’re so dumb

*The lungfish’s four, foot-like appendages are probably why their taxa are considered a sister group to the Tetrapodomorpha, which as everyone knows is latin for ‘Ridiculous womble-beasts’ 

**The bony mouth-plates of a lungfish are brutally strong and driven by jaw muscles that can effortlessly crack the shell of a snail, clam, crayfish. The bite is powerful enough that even a casual, exploratory bite can draw blood from the forearm of a loving and careful keeper who was just trying to readjust your damn filter goddammit fish you are so dumb oh god don’t fling the fish across the room he doesn’t know any better take it like a gem breathe deeply until he lets go fuck fuck fuck fuck ow. 

The hunting behavior and eating habits described above lead us to- 

[FIG 2] an accurate and detailed scientific illustration of what I and my roommate saw when we got home from a coffee run. 

Pictured you will see a 30 inch lungfish specimen (name: Q’apla, sex: lungfish are nigh impossible to sex we don’t actually know) who at some point took a giant inhale of whatever was around him, got a mouthful of blue-green algae strand, and shot half of it out his gills while the rest draped insouciantly out of his jaws. This left him in a state not unlike an adorable but not very bright toddler who has sneezed a strand of spaghetti out its nose. 

Roommate: “Oh my god” 

Your reporter: “What do we do? We can’t just yank it out, can we?” 

Roommate: “It’s not very strong, we can probably cut the part out of his mouth: /fetches long tweezers

Your reporter: /promptly calls the vet, is left on hold. 

Roommate: /Gently breaks off the excess near the lungfish’s mouth

Lungfish: /CANNILY DETECTS MOVEMENT NEAR MOUTH! PREY DETECTED! 

Algae: /is sucked into lungfish’s mouth like the grossest strand of spaghetti

Roommate: “Well at least now it’s all inside his throat.” /Gently, gently tugs at string of gunk hanging from the gill-slits until the lungfish splits it out

Your reporter: /is still on hold, shrugs and hangs up

Roommate: “Oh my god, my fish is so dumb.” 

Your reporter: “I’ma tell tumblr.”