Wakes With the Fishes

Shhh. Don't tell the Flying Spaghetti Monster.



From LiveScience.com, a site I'll be visiting often now that I've found it, comes a catfish:

These particular eel catfish, Channallabes apus, live in tropical swamps in Africa, where most of the water is confined to small, acidic pools.

"There's probably more food traveling on land than in these small puddles of mud," said Sam Van Wassenbergh of the University of Antwerp in Belgium. "That's probably why this fish has specialized to go out of water to search for food."

The catfish pick up speed in water and flop onto land, where their flexible vertebral column lets them move around like a snake. They also have a special organ for breathing air without using their gills, although scientists don't quite know how this works.

In water, eel catfish suck in water to capture their prey. But because air is less dense than water, this trick is less effective when hunting on land, and these fish have developed a different approach.

Once they find their terrestrial prey, usually a small beetle or insect, they lift their head and mash at the creepy-crawly with their mouth.

And there's even video. How cool is that?