I love them so much because they’re about as sharp as a baseball and their anatomy is ridiculous to the point of them literally being classified as plankton for years because they just sort of get blown around by the ocean and look confused, but because they lay more eggs than ANY OTHER VERTEBRATE IN EXISTENCE, evolution can’t stop them
Why is no big predator coming and gnawing on them?
Their biggest defense is that they’re massive and have super tough skin, but they do get hunted by sharks or sea lions sometimes and they just sort of float there like ‘oh bother’ as it happens
Even funnier, because they eat nothing but jellyfish they’re really low in nutritional value anyway, so they basically survive by being not worth eating because they’re like a big floating rice cracker wrapped in leather.
Perfect example of “survival of the fittest” NOT meaning being some hyper aggressive, muscular manly asshole. This creature fell upon the complete opposite combination of traits and just rolled with it and evolution was like “well, it’s working, somehow".
reminder that this is what they look like when they hatch and they are smaller than a housefly
…..But they reach up to 800 pounds in barely over ONE YEAR.
Photographer caption: While on a recent trip to Katmai National
Park in Alaska, I had the pleasure of watching brown bears feasting on
salmon that were moving up river to spawn. The bears all seemed to have
different strategies or favorite places to fish. This older female
preferred the mouth of the river where she would “snorkel” to catch
them.
Photo by Christopher Brinkman (Columbus, Ohio, USA); Brooks Camp, Katmai National Park, Alaska, USA
This photo is a submission from our 14th Annual Photo Contest. We’ll be announcing finalists in the coming weeks!
I’m not going to give advice on this because releasing goldfish (a species of carp, I’m assuming that’s what you’re referring to) is majorly bad news bears and you should actively discourage your friends from doing so. Pet fish are often invasive and should never, ever be released into the wild.
From somebody who lives in a Great Lakes state: please please please please please please please please do not do this. Carp fuck. shit. up. Sorry for the language, but they really, really do. See, carp are big, sturdy fish and what they like to do as adults is root around the bottom of the lake and tear up all the weeds. They outcompete all the other fish and destroy spawning places- sooner rather than later you have just carp. In Illinois, we have electric field barriers in place in our canals to stop carp from getting into Lake Michigan because they’re such an unstoppable detriment to our ecosystems. If your friend wants to do a good deed for fish, donate to an aquarium or fish conservation fund- maybe one that helps spread awareness of the dangers of invasive species to local waters.
In a never-before-seen phenomenon, a fish commandeered the body of a jellyfish for protection. Although it is common for fish to swim through jellyfish tentacles to avoid predators, this particular defense mechanism has never been seen before.
As if you needed another reason not to dump your pet fish into an
outdoor waterway, new research from Australia finds that the humble
goldfish can actually be a destructive force when released in the wild.
Researchers have been struggling for more than a decade to control
goldfish in the Vasse River, southeast of Perth. So Stephen Beatty and
colleagues from the Centre of Fish and Fisheries at Murdoch University
spent a year tracking the invasive fish.
The recently released study
found that goldfish — yes, the little guys that kids win at fairs by
tossing a ring around a milk bottle — can grow up to 4 pounds and travel
more than a hundred miles a year…
There's a Mirror on the Wall 