Creature Feature: Longhorn Cowfish.

The idea of "you can slap any word onto 'fish' and it's probably a thing" makes for a rather funny game. Triggerfish are subtle; there is a trigger there, but it's not obvious unless you're looking for it. Surgeonfish? Yeah, I don't get it, either, but I wouldn't trust it with open-heart operations either way. Squirrelfish do not look like squirrels - period. Then there are cowfish...

Source.

...yeah, that one works pretty well, actually.

Cowfish are members of the boxfish family, which are closely related to pufferfish. Yes, like fugu, these fish are poisonous. They are native to tropical waters; many of them can be found in the Indo-Pacific. They eat crustaceans, like fish and crabs, as well as plants like algae. The longhorn cowfish ( Lactoria cornuta) is the most popular.

Cowfish are best known for, well, looking like cows. They have boxy bodies and long horns coming out of their heads. Like cows, they are also tanks; the scales on this fish's body are fused into a tough shell. They are slow swimmers and grunt when captured. We'll cut the fish some slack because a mooing fish would be just crazy, and they look enough like cows without sounding like pigs. Moo.



Cowfish have another defense aside from looking like cows: if irritated, they excrete a nasty poison. It is called ostracitoxin and cannot be broken down as it is not a protein. It is hell-bent on destroying other fish, and is hemolytic to boot. It kills sharks. Even other boxfish are not immune to one PO'd cow. The meat is also poisonous. No cowfish steaks for you!

Good gods, cowfish are popular in captivity. They are available at Petco if the online search results are any indication.  This does not mean they are beginner fish - it means that you need to read directions. Cowfish are generally peaceful, easy-going fish that take their time and do not like stress from having a lot of tankmates.  Failing to acclimate them properly may result in poisoning your whole tank. Popular, but still not for beginners, so if you're a newbie, don't get a cow, man.

TIME FOR ZOMBIES! Thank you, Vice!

For your Saturday and Sunday viewing pleasure, here's a look at a topic that I've brought up numerous times on this blog: Zombies. I love Vice, so if something comes up that fits with this blog of natural goodness, expect a friendly cross-post.

The quest that our favorite druggie is on concerns the "zombie" potion mentioned in Wade Davis's The Serpent and the Rainbow. I have brought it up a few times when detailing tetraodontiform fish (such as fuuuuguuuu) and anything in the nightshade family.

As the documentary explains, our very notion of a zombie comes from Haiti. In The Serpent and the Rainbow, a Haitian shaman, or bokor, created an "undead" servant using a potent cocktail of macabre ingredients. Among those ingredients were datura (which contains scopolamine, the drug known for brainwashing people) and pufferfish poison (which has "risen the dead" several times). These two combined would theoretically make a "zombie" - a "risen corpse" that could be ordered to do a shaman's bidding.

I've made mention of everything in the documentary before. There have been entries on fugu and datura - look them up. Here's a little bit of extra FYI: TTX can also be found in triggerfish, and datura is related to nightshade, "devil's breath," and tomatoes. You will never think of tomatoes the same way again. You're welcome.

Spoiler alert: At the end of this documentary, we learn that the "weapon" Hamilton was given was made of inert substances. When it was taken to a lab for analysis, the powder did not contain any sort of poison except maybe some stuff found in cosmetics. Either this is one hell of a placebo (which I would not put past Haiti) or Vice just got duped. My money is on the latter.

While there is something to be said for a placebo effect, I think it's pretty obvious that Hamilton got trolled. No smart sorcerer/poison maker would allow his claim to fame to be taken back to the U.S. for analysis so easily. Could it still be a con job, even in its native Haiti? Sure. The way Crescent was behaving makes me think that he duped our intrepid reporter on purpose, however. The zombie poison is still out there.

Creature Feature: Ocean Sunfish.

'Sup.

If you are at all familiar with Japanese popular culture, you have seen this fish floating around. It is called, variously, Mola mola, ocean sunfish, mambo, "moon fish" in various languages and "just head" or '"swimming head" in others. That last one described this tropical fish pretty well: It's a giant head with fins.


Headfish is just a head.

The sunfish has almost no spine or tail to speak of, making all of those head jokes more than a little accurate. Instead of true tails, ocean sunfish have pseudo-tails called the clavus. As larvae, they have fins, tails and spines like their more infamous relatives, the pufferfish:


Now THAT is a sunfish!

It is also huge -a single adult sunfish can get over 6 feet long and weigh over a ton. A sunfish can also be up to ten feet from fin tip to fin tip. Ocean sunfish hold the record for the world's heaviest bony fish, even though most of that weight is cartilage. (For those curious, whale sharks are entirely cartilaginous - despite being huge, they have no bones!) They are harmless to swimmers, but, because they get so darn big, can be dangerous to boats.



Ocean sunfish have very odd skin. Not only is it rough like a shark's (which has denticles, not scales), it is also coated in mucus. It often shines in the sunlight, giving it all the pretty celestial names above. Its title of "mola," "millstone," comes from the denticles.


Mola also love basking; their skin is often riddled with parasites.

Sunfish eat jellyfish, Man o' Wars, salps and other such gooey things that float around in the ocean.( This is one of those species that thinks your plastic bags might be jellyfish, by the way, so please do not litter.) It is, in turn, eaten by orcas, sharks, humans (nobody really knows whether the ocean sunfish is poisonous or not) and sea lions. Sea lions are out and out sadistic to sunfish; they hunt the fish for sport, tearing off the fins and leaving the sunfish to die at the bottom of the ocean.


All I wanted to do was eat gummi bears...

As one would imagine, sunfish are hard to find in captivity. They, along with whale sharks, are particularly popular in Asian aquaria. The shot at the top of the page is from the Monterey Bay aquarium in California. They require a lot of space, rounded, deep tanks, and, if housed with other, more aggressive fish, hand-feeding. As more and more sunfish are accidentally fished out of the ocean, these captive specimens will become more and more valuable. (As of right now, there is no certainty of the sunfish's conservation status, but at least the captive sunfish aren't eating plastic bags.)