The Grumpiest Fish in the sea

I’m often asked how I choose the animals I write about. I choose different animals for different books for all sorts of different reasons, but let’s talk about how I chose the creatures in my Strangest Thing in the Sea. It’s a book about weird sea creatures, and if you know anything about sea creatures, you know they can be really, absolutely the weirdest. There were SO MANY I wanted to include, but I could only choose thirteen.

I had my favourites on a “definitely include” list. Then I tried to pick one animal from the various ocean zones (open ocean, coral reef, swampy, estuary, deep sea, etc.) and one from the various animal groups (crustaceans, glowing in the dark creatures, squidy-thing, biggest, smallest, etc), which meant that every creature I did include had many direct competitors. Which was the weirdest deep-sea creature? The oddest thing that glowed in the dark? So much weirdness to chose from.

This guy was always on my “definitely include” list: the red-lipped batfish. I don’t think I need to explain why. He belongs to the shallow water+odd swimmer+lumpy & grumpy category, or SW+OS+L&G. You might think that would be a narrow category, but it’s not.

Batfish, frogfish, stonefish, pufferfish—they all could fit into the category. But back to red-lipped batfish.

They usually live in shallow waters and are very odd swimmers, mostly because of their very odd bodies. They have “legs” which they use to “walk” along the floor trying to attract a mate with their pouty red lips and hoping to catch dinner with their hairy nose.

FACT CHECK: Fish don’t have hair. The hairy bits are thread-like bits of skin, sort of like skin tags. And that isn’t a nose. Its a fleshy lump called an illicum that apparently sends out attractive chemicals to lure tasty little fishes.

What a looker!

However, if you’ve read The Strangest Thing in the Sea, you’ll know that the red-lipped bat fish is not included. Even I’m surprised! It lost out to a competitor who also lives in shallow waters, also is a terrible swimmer, also is lumpy and grumpy, and also has hairy skin tags. The Hairy Frogfish!

Here’s the hairy frogfish in my book (above) and the real-life version (below).

At first glance, I know this seems like I made the wrong decision—surely those red lips win the weird award every time!

So let me explain how I fell in love with the frogfish.

Frogfish can be tiny. They come in every colour of the rainbow. They can be mottled, warty or hairy. They have excellent camouflage. But no matter their shape or colour, they are ALWAYS grumpy.

Frogfish are even weirder swimmers than red-lipped batfish, if you can even call it swimming. Most frogfish lack the swim bladder that helps fish stay afloat and buoyant. Which means frogfish can only really blob along the ocean floor. Sometimes it looks like they going for a grumpy stroll on their fat fin feet.

Sometimes they just get pushed along by the ocean currents. The video below shows a frogfish pretending to be a tumbleweed (at best) or a piece of floaty garbage (at worse):

And like tumbleweeds and blowing garbage, frogfish often get caught in ridiculously awkward positions: pinned in between corals, falling off ledges, getting such in cracks.

I could go on . . . I have a whole image file on my computer filled with frogfish fails. So awkward, so clumsy, so adorably dorky, and always so very, very grumpy!

But can you really blame them for being grumpy? Look at this guy below: blotchy with lichens and crusty sea debris, doing the sideways splits. How did he even get into that position? Life is not easy for the frogfish.

Now, if you know anything about my books, you probably know I love a humble hero. The lumpy and lowly, the unloved and unappreciated—those are my kind of creatures.

However, frogfish are not quite the bumblers they pretend to be. These awkward fishy tumbleweeds are secretly stone-cold killers. Let me explain.

Frogfish are ambush predators, which means they are very, very patient. They find themselves a bit of coral or a weedy patch that offers some camouflage, then they wait and maybe wiggle the fishy lure dangling from their forehead. (I could write a whole piece about these fishy lures—and maybe I will—but at the moment, you just need to know that frogfish have a worm-like lure on their heads that they can wiggle at will.)

In any case, when a fish eventually comes too close, the frogfish opens its jaws and . . . . it’s as if the fish just evaporated. Disappeared. You didn’t even see it happen, because the frogfish has the fastest gulp in the Animal Kingdom! That’s right, this fishy bumbler has the fastest mouth in the world! Think of any predator from land or sea, and yes, the frogfish has a faster bite.

I could explain just how fast frogfish vacuum in their dinners, but I think this video gets the message across better than I could.

Can you imagine being a little fishy, thinking you were about to eat a tasty worm, and then suddenly the world goes dark?

Fastest gulp in the world. That’s quite the unexpected talent from such a tumbleweed bumbler.

So which fish do you think is strangest in the SW+OS+L&G category—the frogfish or the red-lipped batfish? I made my decision, but you decide for yourself. Check out the links below if you want to learn more about these strangest fish in the sea.

Want to know more?

Check out the videos below from Animal Logic. Enjoy!