The Fish Had Fur, Part 2

Allegedly i was said to be covered in fur, was said to be poisonous when eating, or was said to have other strange effects when eaten. Um we talked about Marco Polo's secondhand reports of a giant furry fish found dead in a river near the Chinese city he called Keen Sai. We talked about possible explanations for reports of fish covered in fur, if there is in fact anything

these reports are based on. So, for example, the possibility that Marco Polo's furry fish could have been maybe a half remembered report of a decomposing river dolphin, or the idea that some reports of furry fish or fish with furry patches could actually be observations of fish with parasitic infections,

such as a water mold called saprolegnia. But today we wanted to start with some more weird reports of furry fish from across the ages furry fish and fish like creatures, So I think the first one we should do today is the Japanese furry fish. And this one is mentioned in a book that I brought up in the last episode.

It's a book by a British cryptozoologist named Carl Schucker called The Beasts That Hied from Man and Shooker sources this claim of this bizarre creature to a book called The World in Miniature Japan, which was published in the early eighteen hundreds, edited by an author named Frederick Shoberl, and this book records a claim that goes like this. Okay, So the book says there's a river in Japan and it's full of strange creatures that measure about four to

five feet in length. They have scaly bodies like fish, but their heads are covered in hair like a human's hair. And these creatures don't sound like a type of fish strictly because they can allegedly leave the water and move around on the banks of the river. And from here I'm going to quote from from shooters summary on the banks of the River quote where they fight or engage in boisterous games with one another, emitting loud cries as

they disport in a singularly rowdy, unfish like manner. However, there rombusteous behavior swiftly transforms into savage aggression if they spy any people unhesitating lee attacking and killing their hapless human victims by disemboweling them. Yet they do not devour their bodies afterwards. Okay, so a weird report as usual. There are at least a couple of options you can start with at the get go. One is that this

could just be imaginative storytelling. Somebody is telling a yarn based purely on, you know, combining elements out of their imagination. But it could also be some kind of distorted account of something somebody saw in nature. I guess if we want to consider possibilities of of imaginative storytelling, you might want to look for similarities to other types of known beasts, monsters,

or creatures from the local mythology. Yeah, and this made me turn to a couple of different things that but one that certainly came up with the Japanese uh Nno, a sort of mer creature described, at least in some accounts, is a huge fish with the head of a beautiful woman. Uh. She's often said to be protective of humans and warns them against dangers. So, in a way, sort of the opposite of of other models of a mirror creature or a siren or what have you. Um and and this

is a pretty famous creature in Japanese mythology. In fact, it's even been brought to life in the in the films of Miyazaki. If you've seen Nyazaki's Panio. Uh, this is kind of a cute take on the idea of a ningyo. Yeah. I was reading about the ningyo in an excellent book that I actually own a copy of. It's called The Book of Yokai, and it's by a folklore scholar named Michael Dillon Foster. The book is out

through University of California Press. Uh And if you're a fan of of Japanese monster legends, I highly recommend this book. It's really good. So a few facts from Foster's telling on the ningyo So, first of all, though the word ningyo is sometimes translated to English as mermaid or merman, it literally just means human fish. And so, Rob, do you remember how in the stories we talked about in the last episode, how the shaggy trout of Iceland and

Marco Polos were bard of the furry fish. They were both said to be poisonous or to kill people who ate them. So Michael Dillon Foster notes that there is a classic medicinal encyclopedia of Japan that notes that the bones of the ningyo, which I think it just reports as if it were any other mundane animal. It's like, yeah, here are the animals you can find. One of them is the ningyo, this half human half half fish. If you take those bones, they can be made into a

poison quote with wonderful effect. But he notes even more stories on the other side of the scale, stories of the ningo having exactly the opposite effect. We're eating their flesh or even just looking at one of them sometimes can guarantee you a long and prosperous life. M hmm.

That's an interesting detail because on one hand it sounds like medicine in general, right, I mean, there's so many different properties of the natural world that you take it a certain way or under certain conditions or in certain quantities and it's beneficial or potentially beneficial, and then in other quantities or situations it can be deadly totally or

different parts of the same animal. Again, I want to be clear, we're not actually saying that, like the bones of a mermaid will make you live forever, don't but Mermaid based on anything you hear in this episode. But I just mean, yeah, yeah, I think you're correct that the logic of it follows the logic of a lot of real properties of of medicines you would find in nature. But there's one thing I wanted to mention that's in

the Book of Yokai. So there is this one classic tale about the nemeo U. There is a fisherman who catches one of these things and then cooks it and then offers it to a friend, and the friend doesn't want to eat it because he's weirded out by the fact that it has a human head. You know, even though it might taste like delicious fish and the muscular parts, it's got a human head. So he's like, yeah, I don't know, So he takes it home with him, and

his sixteen year old daughter eats it. I don't know if some details are lost there, if she's just like not squicked out by the human head like he is um, but she eats it and then as a result, she lives to be eight hundred years old and spends her life as a kind of superhero Nun, traveling the country doing good like a like a fish, human cannibal, holy hulk, and she eventually enshrines her body in a cave by

the sea. UM. Speaking of of Yokai, I do have to mention for anyone out there, and also speaking of Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli Films, there's a wonderful film titled pomp Poco that came out from Studio Ghibli many years back, and it is It is a film about Tanuki's, about magical Tanuki's, and there's a there's a full English dub of it. I think you can you can watch this on HBO Max if you subscribe to that um or you can watch it in the original Japanese. But it

is it's absolutely fatless. Do not be scared away by the fact that it is um a film about magical Tanukis who do magic with their testicles. Uh or as it is translated into into English, they are raccoons using their raccoon pouch, but we know they're testicles. Um. It's it's a wonderful film. It's totally it's totally for for kids and adults alike. It has a strong environmental message. And there's a whole sequence in it where the tanukis because it's not just Tanuki's in it, there are also

fox spirits. And then there's a sequence where the Tanukis create a yokai parade. They take on all of these fabulous yokai forms, all of these various classic ones you may have seen in illustrations, like the giant skeleton and you know, the umbrella creatures, that sort of thing. Uh.

And it's just absolutely gorgeous. So I highly recommend that film if it's one of those you've you've kind of shied away from because you weren't sure if maybe if it translates, um, you know, to a non Japanese audience. It absolutely does. It's just a beautiful film. Clancy Brown does one of the voices. Really, I haven't seen that one, but now I want to check it. Out, Yeah, at

least fast far to the yokai parade. But anyway, going back to that description from the book of this creature in the in the river who has a head full of hair scales like a fish on this body. I mean, you can see how that that's sort of similar to the neo tradition, but I'm not sure there's actually any connection. There might just be a few superficial similarities. It's hard

to tell, you know. Speaking of fish at yokai, there's another yokai called amaba A, which looks very much like what we just talked about, except throw in a bird's beak and some slightly different feet. And I was reading about this, and interestingly enough, it became something of a mascot for COVID nineteen pandemic measures in Japan um and you'll see posters that say like stop COVID nineteen and

will be a picture of this creature. I was reading about it in this uh Anthropology Today article by Claudia Merley titled a Chimeric Being from Cayushu, Japan um and this is the quote from it. Quote presented as a mascot but viewed as an icon of protection. This uncanny little Yochai from southern Japan in the pre modern Edo period addresses our lives as they are caught in a suspension of our usual temporal and spatial dimensions. A monster,

a hyper object, and an art effigy of our pandemic present. Okay, anyway, it's also cute creature. It is very cute. It's got like, yeah, it's got the cute bird face, the fish scales, and then just like a big old, luxurious mane of hair. But anyway, whatever the similarities to these other legendary beings

of Japanese mythology. Regarding this one story from from this book The World in Miniature Japan, Shoot Shooker asks, you know, if these stories are based at least in part on real observations, could there be anything that we could figure

out they might be talking about? And he passes on an interesting guess that was suggested by a curator of mollusks at the Royal Museum of Scotland who's named David Heppel, and Happel says, what if these stories were laid by show Burl in the hun are based on observations of

the northern fur seal or Calorinus or sinus. A seal might kind of fit the bill um, so the stories would have had to have been translated from the sea coast to the river somehow, because fur seals don't usually you know, they're not going to go all the way up the river. I don't know. They mess around in the river mouth, but um. But otherwise a fur seal

could partially match the description. It's not scaly, but it does have flippers, so in body it is what Shugar calls superficially fish like, but it is pretty close to the right size to match this story. It does have the notable whiskers on its head and of course fur on its body. They do definitely come out of the water and romp around real good, so maybe possibly UM.

As to the the stories about the aggression, again, it's hard to tell if this is based on anything, whether that would be part of the original observation or just

an embellishment um with with these fur seals. While they can by northern first, seals do not seem to me to be especially noted for aggression towards humans that they don't have like a disemboweling vertical And of course when you get into disemboweling, and you know, any kind of account of animal um attacks, Like, there's so many additional factors, like did you see this animal disembowel somebody? Or was there a body found and these animals were nearby? You know,

this could be the result of scavenging of decomposition. Uh, there's so many additional factors to consider, but those are not factors that necessarily impact the myth making in any given scenario, right, So it's hard to tell with this story. I think this is one where it's it's difficult to get a sense of whether this is based on something somebody saw or whether it's more imaginative. But but yeah, I like to think that somebody saw some seals and

then just just went wild. I mean seals, like some other creatures will be discussing here. Under the right circumstances, they can look very cute and and noble, but in other situations they can be quite alarming. Uh. If I was in the water once, um, this was what was?

This is one of the Wayian islands, and there were some some seals in the water, and of course humans were trying to stay away from the seals, but occasionally a seal is just coming in and then you're you're right next to it, and it can be extremely alarming, especially if they're leopard seals. Don't don't go swimming with those, yeah, yeah, seals.

Seals can be quite quite alarming. And then even if, certainly if you've seen footage of of them them froligging about on the on the shore, as alluded to in these potential accounts off seals, then you can imagine how people might decide, you know, it's best to stay away from this. This looks like a situation that might end in disembowling. You know. One more funny story that comes

from Shooters book. While we are on the subject of the Royal Museum of Scotland, where that that curator was who had the idea that maybe the story is about seals. The Royal Museum of Scotland also has in its collection a furry fish taxidermied and mounted on a wooden plaque, just like our patron saint big Mouth Billy Bass. And in fact you can look up pictures of this one. It might have been the episode art for the first episode.

I'm not sure, um, but but anyway, it looks a lot like the photo The hoax photo that we talked about in the last episode where that guy claimed to have caught a shaggy trout in Wisconsin. Yeah, it kind of looks like it could easily be some sort of weird folk art pillow. It looks very soft, very luxurious. Yeah, it's clearly a fish, but it is covered in thick, luxurious white fur, again like the forearm of a polar bear. Alas, this is not a genuine furry fish but another hoax.

The text that is underneath the fish, the mounted fish says that it was caught in the Lake Superior off the is to Ontario and uh and was mounted by a taxidermist named Ross c. Job And it again repeats that allegation we talked about in part one from the other hoax, that the fur is an adaptation to the extreme cold of deep Canadian waters, which almost makes me wonder if it's this is sort of intentionally a joke

and is meant to be understood as a joke. Well, yeah, I mean, like the taxidermy as a as a craft and ultimately an art form is going to give way to artistic creations, and we see that throughout the world of taxidermy. Whether you're talking about jackalopes or squirrels and chipmunks that are made to be drinking tea, that sort of thing. But at least not everybody was in on the joke, because Shugar explains the story of where this came from, like how it ended up at the Royal

Museum of Scotland. Apparently the museum acquired it when a woman brought it into them after she bought it in Canada, thinking it was real, it was a real animal, and then she brings it into the museum and says, hey, I want to know more about this fish. Can you tell me about the furbearing trout. Once she found out it was a hoax, she donated it to the museum. Well, you know, the preservation of hoaxes is also important, absolutely

because it will help us. It helps us realize what's real and what's fake, and the story of our sorting all of this out, all right, So at this point I thought we might turn to the Americus because we, uh more specifically, we're gonna look increasingly towards Central and South America. I was reading the work of folklore's Carol Rose. She has again those two wonderful tomes of of you know, encyclopedic tomes of mythological and folkloric creatures that I often

turned to. And in it, as she mentions the Hoga, this is described as a lake monster in the traditions of Mexico, known in South America as the andura. And this was apparently described as a giant fish creature with the head and ears of a pig and quote extremely long barbs or thick whiskers around its mouth. It also had things. It could also shift colors from red to green to yellow, and it was described as a ravenous

beast to be feared by humans. Oh, I like this, So giant fish body, head and ears of a pig, barbs or whiskers on its face, fangs can change colors, might attack humans, right uh And and of course this instantly brings up a different couple of different possibilities, you know, some that are definitely within the fish world. And we'll get to some some real life fish that could potentially match up with some of these descriptions in a bit. But also we're reminded of other, uh, non fish, but

fish like forms that we find in the wild. Now. Some of these accounts are based on the writings of of Ambrose Pare, who lived fifteen ten through fifteen ninety. There's a French surgeon, and he mentioned the Hoga legend in his book Monsters and Marvels, writing quote, its head and ears are not different from a terrestrial swine. It has five whiskers a half a foot long, or they're about similar to those of a big barble. It's flesh is very good and delicious. The fish produces live offspring

in the fashion of a whale. If you contemplate it while it is disporting itself swimming in the water, you would say that it is now green, now yellow, and then red, just like the chameleon. It keeps more to the edge of the lake than elsewhere where. It feeds on leaves of a tree called Hoga, from which it took its name. It is very toothy and savage, killing and devouring other fish, indeed those bigger than it is.

That is why people pursue it, hunted and kill it, because if it entered into the conduits, it wouldn't leave a single one of them alive, whereby the person who kills the most of them is most welcome. Wow, now I've seen connections here between this legend and that of

the furry trout. But I can't help but wonder if if this is indeed a natural creature that is being described here where it's the echo of a natural creature in in myth and legend, then perhaps we're talking about an otter, because certainly you know their their otters have found throughout the America's In South America you have the the the giant otter, the South American giant otter, which is is quite quite a specimen. They can look really

intimidating their apex predators. They've been known to charge at boats uh and um. And then even outside of this environment, you look at a North American and Central American otters and you know they can still be very ferocious, very territorial, and if you take them outside of that cute context, they can be quite impressive. Yeah, Rachel and I were having fun googling pictures of South American giant river otters the other day, and they very much embody the spirit

of uh he protect but he also attacked. Yeah, yeah, they can look very ferocious. I found a wonderful photo of one eating a fi and it has this this bloody fanged mouth uh and uh and has this kind of almost humanoid looking, uh you know form to it, Like it looks like some sort of a squat creature just hanging out in the water eating it's it's bloody prize. Yeah. It looks like flipping on a dime between adorable goobery

dog face to just like beast from Hell with bloody jaws. Yeah. Yeah, And I think I mentioned before there's there's an old novel by Jeffrey Household, the the author of Rogue Mail, uh titled Dance of the Dwarfs that it has has a very terrifying otter creature in it. Um. It's it's kind of an outdated novel. It has some very colonial and um and and macho ideas in it, but the like the central concept, the central monster encounter, and the

contemplation of of unknown terrors is quite well done. That was the one where the has giant otters that are at first mistaken for humans. Yeah, and I mean I main character begins to think he can reason with them and like leave gifts for them and communicate with them, and then pretty late, too late in the novel, he realizes that this is not possible, that it's a giant river otter creature that is hunting him and will kill him. Now, as far as their place in Mexican lore, I was

reading Otters in Mexico by Juan Pablo Gallo. This came out in six and the author points out that the Mexico is home to three otter species, though their numbers have declined in modern times. They were known to the Aztec and Mayan people's. One popular Aztec ruler was even known by the nickname Autosotal, meaning the spiny one or the otter. And they're there are also emblems of of this otter in Aztec art, and it's it's quite ferociously.

It was kind of like a kind of like a lion um, but also you know, has these kind of aquatic dragon like qualities to it. Now, the the Mayans knew them as tuzula, or the dog of the water, because certainly, when you know, when you start observing an otter, if you if you don't already have a firm classification in mind, you might ask yourself, well, what is this creature that in many ways is like a fish, in other ways is like a dog? What is this thing? Or in k or yeah, may you may even describe

it as having pig like features. Sure, now you look at other cultures and they encounter similar scenario, similar category confusions regarding the otter. The old Anglo Saxon name for the otter essentially meant water snake, and and to the Celts it was water dog. So again we see that interpretation.

And apparently there was debate among um Celtic clerics as to whether the flesh of an otter was fish or meat, which would be vitally important if you were determining what could be eaten uh during Lent, and there were there were even some monks, the Carthusian monks of de Gen, France. They were forbidden to eat meat at all, so they only ate the meat of the otter as they determined that this was fish. Oh no, now this may you may well wonder, well, what does otter meat taste like?

And perhaps some of you out there know for certain and can and can shime in on this, But you'll find various claims online that it tastes rather gamey. I was also reading about it in a dove in pure arcs Microscopic Analysis of feather and hair fragments, which cites older texts about the taste about the about the taste

of sea otter. Apparently the Alouette people of the Bearing Sea described otter meat as having the taste of mud and in older times did not eat it, as they equated the otter body with the human body and used as a reference point for human biology. And apparently if you did hunt and kill the otter for food, you

had to appease the person of the otter. So there was this idea that it wasn't only like a physical resemblance, there was perhaps some sort of like spirit chull connection um that had to be appeased if you were to consume of this flesh, like a like a ritual justification

of the kill. Yeah. Now, Russian fur hunters who encountered uh these people in these traditions, they apparently tended not to eat the otter either, though some writers have compared it to tasting favorably the flavor profile comparing favorably to lamb uh So, Yeah, a lot of these seems to depend on preparation and who's who's judging it, But it does sound like it tended to taste kind of gamey um and uh and wasn't to everyone's liking now, Otters

also pop up in Norse and Scottish mythology. In Norse traditions, Uh, the god Loki kills the dwarf Odor, while the dwarf was is in the form of an otter Uh. And in and then the Scottish tales tell of the of an otter king who had grant wishes and travels with this kind of royal guard of seven black otters WHOA I like that, and Rose makes mention of this particular

otter as well. Um uh dobehr chew Uh. This is the the Otter King, a fearsome, monstrous otter, also known as the King of the Lakes, and it is said to not only hunt animals, but to hunt human beings as well. And there's apparently a gravestone in County light Trim that's said to depict or to or may have once depicted a fatal encounter with this monstrous otter, with the King of the Lakes. And I look up a picture of it, and Uh, I can't make much out

of it. It It looks like it's very much degraded over the years. But supposedly this may have once resembled an otter murdering somebody now it appears to be very like and encrusted. Yeah. Now you'll find other monstrous otters and otter like forms and folklore from around the world, including some Native American traditions such as the te hold Stody from navajoed or Asians, which is apparently kind of a

combination of an otter and a bison. And and this being had a son, and when this sun was abducted by the spider woman, the creature shed tears, and these tears caused a great flood. So again, you know, we always have to, you know, acknowledge that there's a fair amount of creativity and myth making going on that is not directly connected to observations of the natural world. But I do love the idea that at least some of this may be due to just observations of the weirdness

of the otter. And then and then how this category confusion is then uh is then launched into the realm of legend and lore because again I mentioned that the the giant otter is an apex predator. But but this is this is often the case with with any otter species, like they tend to not have have have any enemies in the wild. Except for human beings. So they're they're they're pretty, they're pretty tough little creatures, and sometimes not little at all. They are they are wonderful, goobery marvels

of nature. Uh And and while the otter is quite real, I guess to bring it back to furry fish. I don't know if we've directly said this so far, but maybe now it is time to break the bad news, which is that, really I think there is no such thing as a furry fish, or that there there might only be if you're really willing to be generous and loose with your definition of furry right, because I think all of the reports we've talked about so far are either known hoaxes, or they are stories that could be

some combination of just like imaginative creative storytelling or misremembered reports of other types of animals where there's some other explanation that seems more likely than the idea of a fish covered in fur or hair of the sort that we're used to seeing covering the bodies of mammals. And I think we can be pretty certain of that because of an understanding of evolution and file out. Genny fur is a trait of animals that developed along a totally

separate lineage from fish. That doesn't mean that fish can't have some bits on their bodies that can resemble for, but they're not going to have mammalian fur. And so I think that should bring us to a section we should do here about the biology of fur. What is for? And where do we find it in the animal kingdom?

And why do we find it there? Uh? And and I think that the first question I've got to start with, because this is one of those things that's like a question that's popped into my head a million times that I've never looked it up to confirm our fur and hair the same thing or are they different? Did you have an intuition on this? I mean I always assumed

that that fur is a matter of perspective. Yeah, yeah, the hair on the top of your head is essentially fur, but we just treat it differently, think about it differently, and label it differently. You are wiser than I was. I For some reason, I was thinking there's got to be some kind of biological difference. Not really. I mean, so fur is made up of hairs, and hairs are filaments of protein, primarily the protein keratin. In the case

of of mammals, primarily alpha keratin. Some people might make an informal descriptive distinction between hair and for reserving the term fur for like short dense coats of hair that cover the whole body of an animal. But there's not really a fundamental biological difference between a dog's fur and the hair on a human's head. It evolved from the

same ancestor, and it's pretty much the same stuff. Though within that range, of course, these hairs can take very different forms and serve different functions, and I'll explain more of that in a minute. So fur is one of the primary traits of mammals. As an animal class, mammals are usually defined by the facts that they are warm blooded animals that give birth to live young, secrete milk, and possess fur, though some mammals, such as whales, have

evolved to lose most of their hair. In fact, there is broadly uh strong biological truth to the simple observations that even a child would make to see the distinctions between birds, reptiles and mammals. Right, you know, if you ask a kid what is the difference between them, I might say, well, birds have feathers, reptiles have scales and mammals have fur, and that's probably correct with of course, you know the exceptions about whales and cases of that sort,

but yeah, broadly that is true. Those are major differences between these classes of animals. So I was reading an interview that had some interesting stuff in it that was for Scientific American an interview with the mammalogist Nancy Simmons of the American Museum of Natural History. A mammalogist is a zoologist who specializes in mammals. This was done by by Kate Wong in the year two thousand one, and UH.

This brings up an interesting question, which is did the mammals that existed at the same time as dinahs oars have for now At the time of this interview, UH, Simmons didn't know the answer to this question, because, of course, it can be difficult to know a lot of things about the soft tissues and outer coverings of long extinct animals.

Hair doesn't generally fossilize, so the paleontological evidence is sparse, though of course, you know, you can learn some things from special fossils that might preserve a kind of imprint in in some kind of UH. Substrate or soil, or from genomics, maybe you might be able to learn some

things about the deep past there. I was reading a more recent article, uh in National Geographic by Riley Black from fourteen that highlights at least one fossil find that does make it pretty clear that at least some mammals had for by the Mesozoic period, because there are some impressions of fur left stamped in a in a fossilized piece of mud. So I think we've learned a little bit more since uh this interview is just talking about But another thing that's brought up here is the question

of what are the origins of for? And I think it still seems to be the consensus of of evolutionary biologists that hair evolved in correlation with indo thermi, commonly

known as warm bloodedness. That we've discussed some ways that the terms warm blooded and cold blooded, at least when used as a binary, can be a little bit misleading, But with that caveat, mammals and birds regulate their internal body temperature through metabolism to keep the body at a stable, relatively high temperature compared to what is achievable by so called cold blooded animals like reptiles and fish, And there

are a number of big evolutionary upsides to endothermy. Endothermy allows more powerful and sustained muscular activity, so athletic stamina that is not really available to so called cold, cold blooded creatures. It allows more freedom to occupy different kinds of environments, and it even has some very very interesting

and less obvious advantages. One of my favorite is the hypothesis that maintaining a stable high body temperature is a major guard against fungal infections picked up from the picked up from the environment. So these fungal infections just cannot tolerate the hot bodies of birds and mammals. I think this came up when we were talking about some of the you know, sort of the fungal hell of the

post KPg extinction period. But while endothermy gives you all these superpowers, you know, lets you be much more of an athlete, has stamina, sustained muscular activity, more freedom in what kind of environmental niche you can occupy, it comes with big costs, great energy costs. You need to eat more to maintain that metabolism to keep keep the heat on. And so if you imagine you're designing an animal that maintains a stable, high internal temperature that exceeds the temperature

of the environment. This means that you're going to be constantly fighting against the fact that you're losing heat through the skin and the breath and everything. It's just going straight out into the air. And that heat is very energetically expensive. So one obvious solution is to get some insulation. Just like you would if you know you're losing too much heat at the walls of your house, you can line them with insulating material to try to keep the

heat trapped in. This is believed to be probably the primary function, definitely one of the primary functions of fur insulation against heat loss, for keeps precious body heat inside by trapping a layer of warm air close to the skin. Insulation seems to be especially the role of what might be called underhair. So if you imagine a the fur coat of an in of of a mammal, this whole body is covered in for you might see like sort of longer, glossier, stiffer hairs up on the top, and

then underneath them sort of shorter, finer hairs. Those those underhairs are especially helpful with insulation. Um. But of course, while insulation might be the primary driver of the evolution of for there plenty of functions. For for example, what are those other hairs up on the top doing. Well, they might do some insulating too, but also they provide a couple of various kinds of physical protection. So hair

can literally protect the skin against cuts and scrapes. It might not seem like it offers that much protection, but it does something. Um. But also those outer hairs, often called guard hairs, these can have a kind of more oily texture. Uh. Those can help repel moisture, keeping the

insulating underhairs from getting wet. Yeah. Like, if you you look at a cat or I guess a dog too, you you kind of get a an education in the various uses of the hair, because there's a lot of difference between like what the whiskers of a cat are doing, uh, compared to the like the belly hair of the cat, which is its main purposes. Uh. Well, of course, to to insulate, but also to to tempt the human hand closer to the belly, where will then be attacked by

the sharp, sharp teeth and the sharp clause. Well, I like that you mentioned the whiskers because that highlights another totally different but also extremely important evolutionary adaptation of hairs,

which are hairs that provide significant sensory information. These are sometimes known as vibrasy v I B R I, S, S A E. So these would be hairs that are equipped with some kind of tactile receptors or nerve cells that help the animal sense something about its environment with these hairs, So the whiskers on a cat or a great example, or the hairs on a naked mole rat,

you know, this underground dwelling animal. But then of course hair and fur can play huge roles in survival and reproduction just through changing the appearance the outward appearance of the animal. So coloration and patterns on the fur can play a role in everything from hunting and camouflage, to providing warning signs to potential predators, to mating and fitness displays. I'm reminded in all this is well of of things that seem like hair that may look like hair and

other animals but are not. For instance, if you look at the it would appear to be eyelashes on like a ground hornbill um, which is a which is a bird. Uh if you don't know what you're looking at, you might think, oh, look at those look at those beautiful eyelashes. Look at those hairs on the bird's face. Well they're not hairs, their feathers, but they do serve a similar purpose to u to some of the hair that might

appear around the eyes of a mammal. Yeah, and so there is definitely some convergent evolution across the animal classes. I mean, one thing that's true is if you go way way back, far enough back, it does seem to be true that feathers on birds, which is of course, are derived from their dinosaur ancestors. Um for on mammals, which is probably derived from some kind of dermal structures on proto mammals like the synapsids, and then the scales

on reptiles. Those all probably have a common genomic ancestor. But that goes way way back. So the truth is fish don't have fur because they are on a totally separate evolutionary line there, on a different branch of the tree of life than than the mammals that developed the fur that we're familiar with today. But the fact that fish don't have for does not mean that there are

not some there might be too many negatives there. But anyway, what I'm saying is some fish really look like they have for And so I figured, now we should talk about some fish that have um interesting examples of external features fibrous coverings or something like that that look like fur.

And we have to add here that when we say fur, we're gonna go ahead include like the broader spectrum of fur also meaning hair, because some of these fish are described are are more described as having things like beards or more like hair. But in all cases we're even with something that may uh seem like for to some observers. Right, So, the first example I want to mention is the wonderful, the glorious, the hairy frog fish, also known as the

striated frog fish. The scientific name is Antenaria striatus. This is a predator within the frog fish family, which is Antenarity and the frog fish family are ocean dwelling carnivorous fish, which I believe we discussed to at least to some extent in our episodes about the sargassum the seaweed, Right, yeah, we did, because there's one type of or at least what we were focusing in on one type of frog

fish that makes its home in the sarcasm um. A lot of them don't live so close to the surface, but they are these are these are fascinating little fish. Uh I was. I get to visit the aquarium in Malle and they have some frog fish uh there that you can look at, and they're just they're all so wonderful because they often they're often this weird mismatch of a looking a little bit gross but also sometimes super colorful,

like like bright oranges, you know. And then they'll have these like little grumpy little faces that in many ways seem more humanoid than fish. Like they you know, they look like little goblins, like little brightly colored grump as goblins that live in the sea. About human faced fish, yeah, yeah, Well the hairy frog fish is a beautiful grump as

goblin um. So these are there are These are a species of frog fish that grow up to something like about twenty centimeters or maybe twenty two centimeters in length maximum, and they tend to live along the bottom of the ocean on the seafloor, sort of walking along like we described with other frog fish species um. But the hairy frog fish or striated frog fish in particular, is matted in these bizarre looking fluffy appendages that truly do look like hair. It's like a big wad of she bag

carpet just sucking down fish on the seafloor. Now, this is not actually hair or fur. These fibers you see covering the outside of the hairy frog fish are a dermal appendages known as spin ules um. They seem to be used primarily not for insulation but for camouflage. So the hairy frog fish is an ambush predator, and it what it wants to look like something other than an

ambush predator. It wants to maybe look like some kind of other massive organic material, maybe blend in with a coral reef, look like just some kind of thing sitting there stationary in the environment so that fish will get close to its big dangerous mouth. And uh, and it's worth looking up videos of its hunting strategy. You can find these pretty easily online. I found a good clip from a documentary by the Smithsonian Video Channel, and you

can see this critter. It works. So the hairy frog fish sits there and waits in this mop of spinules, and then when prey fish are close by, it can suddenly expand its mouth cavity by a factor of about twelve, creating this powerful vacuum force that sucks in the prey and a split second. And so these creatures are in many senses, truly fearsome predators. I've I've read it claimed at least that they can prey on other fish that

are about the same size as them. And I have to say this, the one that you shared a photo of, it looks like it crawled out of Google deep dream. You know, it has this wild it's appendages are yes, it's quite psychedelic in multiple ways. So yeah, it's it's got that abstract quality like it was a hallucination by a machine elf. But also it is a long haired hippie. Uh So this is not a furry fish, not in the true sense of mammalian fur. But I think this

is about as close as fish get. This is a beautiful, shaggy creature, a predator for the ages. Now here's another example of of of something we might well classify as a furry fish, and that is the bearded obie or pelagic gobi, an Atlantic species of gobi. That it's it's something sometimes called the bearded gobie but then you also have the bearded eel gobi, which is also sometimes called the bearded gobi. And the names here refers to barbels

under the chin and lower jaw, so barbles. And I think that the quote I read earlier um from that monster book mentioned barble slightly in describing the physiology of of of a purported creature. But barbles are slender whisker like sensory organs, such as those found in catfish. Uh. They are not, of course real beards uh. And they can be found in various places on a fish's head. But when they pop up under the chin, certainly you can understand our urge to say, oh, well, this this

creature looks like it has facial hair. Um. And you see some examples of the bearded gobie, and boy, it does it looks like it has some sort of like a neck beard or a chin strap see Everett Coope. Kind of a beard going on. I'm inferring this fish's theological opinions yea, from its facial hair. Yeah. Now, these are technically mandibular or mental barbels, and generally they're present to aid in low visibility food searches. So even though

they might look like they're not doing anything. They are helping the fish define food. Okay, so you could say that in a way, these are um These are a case of something like convergent evolution with the mammalian vibrasy, right, the you know, the the sensory hairs that might be like in a cat's whiskers or something. Uh, these whisker like organs. Again, they're they're not exactly hairs, but they

do a similar thing their sensory input. Yeah. Another example of this is the beard fish of the genus Polymyxia. These are found in tropical and subtropical waters of the Atlantic, the Indian, and the western Pacific Ocean. They live in the deep and they have these two elongated barbels like underneath their chin, and that's where they get their name. So it's a it. It looks like a totally different sort of beard, but you can understand why it was

referred to informally as the beard fish. It looks more like the like I don't know, Romstein fan who has his his goatee in one long braid. Yes, yes, it does look like like a braided gotee kind of a situation. Yeah, very cool look for a fish. Now, these are just a few examples, you know, the most probably most the most obvious examples of fish being compared often by name, to beards and fur. But obviously you're gonna have barbells

occurring with the wide variety of fish. You're also gonna have other stuff going on with their fins and other appendages at times, and they're there are numerous situations where one might look at such a creature and say, oh, well that if I'm going to compare that to my own body and the bodies of of terrestrial creatures, then I might well say that that creature looks furry, that creature looks hairy, or that creature looks bearded in some fashion or another. Yes, this catfish has a weird beard

and mustache. Yeah, And we can imagine how like that kind of thing, through the echo chamber of of of of oral tradition and storytelling and history, could take on the form of like increasingly hairy or increasingly bearded fish. And then what happens when that account runs into say,

accounts of otters and seals and so forth. I mean, I think ultimately that's that's where I end up landing and thinking about all of this is that you you probably have just multiple things going on in the oral tradition and then ultimately in the written tradition as well, um, and they end up converging and running into each other, and you end up with these, uh, these often elaborate

reinterpretations of what is going on in the natural world. Yeah, totally. So. There is truly no such thing as a genuine furry fish, but there are a lot of fish out there with with glorious shagginess of various kinds. There's some wonderful uh aquatic and semi aquatic mammals, the otter and all that. Uh So you know, once again, nature is stranger than fiction. Yes, now, we of course we'd love to hear from everyone out there who has any experience with accounts of harry fish

and and these other creatures that we've discussed. If you have accounts or encounters with with otters, I would love to hear about them, because otters, I mean, even here in Atlanta, in a very urban environment, they are otters around. They're like I one day, I was picking up my my son from school and there's an otter just because there's a body of water close to the school. And apparently otters lived there. I had no idea that's metal. Yeah,

I think it's a golf course, so there. I don't know how metal a golf course otter is, but stealth otters their golf ball retrieving otters. Yeah, so yeah, let us know if you're you know what, if you have any intimidating encounters with with with with otters, we'd love to hear about that strange fish that appear to have you know, interesting bar bowls or things that look like beards or for if there are other great examples from folklore and legend and uh, you know, in different traditions

of send them in. We'd love to review them. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you will find them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. We do core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we do an artifact. On Wednesdays, we do listener mail. On Mondays we do a rerun over the weekend, and then on Friday's we do a little bit of weird how Cinema. That is our time to set aside most of the serious matter and discuss a weird film huge thanks as

always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com Stuff to Blow your Mind. It's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio. With the iHeart Radio you up Apple Podcasts or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.