Something's Fishy... Trivia Quiz

Answer: Seahorse

The word 'seahorse' literally derives from 'hippocampus' - the Greek for 'river horse' - and they are exceedingly poor upright swimmers with bony plates instead of scales. They lack teeth and instead slurp up very small prey whole with their flexible heads.

It's a well-known, but intriguing, fact that male seahorses carry their offspring in external brood pouches. After a long courtship dance - in some species longer than a day! - the females inject on average 200-2000 of them into these pouches with a specialised ovopositor. It takes between 9 and 49 days of incubation in the carefully maintained pouch before these tiny babies will be released into the big wide world without further parental support. Alas, as few as one in a thousand seahorses will survive for six weeks or more -- their laggard nature, need to constantly eat and popularity for use in Chinese medicine or as souvenirs have all proven to be tough hills to climb.

Answer: Catfish

Whilst catfish are named for their whisker-like barbels, many species lack prominent barbels. These barbels are typically used as acute sensory organs for taste and touch. Catfish are also typically scaleless with the ability to communicate with one another through sounds generated either from the pectoral fins or swimbladder.

There have been over three thousand identified species of catfish and there have even been catfish fossils found in Antarctica that date to forty million years! They're highly diverse not only in their environments but also in their features: for example, the Mekong giant catfish can be ten feet long whereas the South American parasitic candiru is so small it lives in the gills of other fish. To demonstrate another example of diversity, the flathead catfish prefers consuming other fish - even other catfish - nearer the water's surface, whereas the yellow bullhead is a bottom-feeding scavenger which consumes foods like insect larvae, minnows and carrion.

Answer: Bat ray

Bat rays are dorsally dark brown or black and are ventrally white venomous fish that tend to live between coastal Oregon and the Gulf of California. They breathe through the tops of their eyes in holes known as spiracles and are ovoviviparous, giving birth to up to ten live young hatched within the mother. To avoid bringing a swift end to the already strained mother, the pups' stingers are coated in sheathes which eventually drop off after being birthed.

Whilst these mobile creatures have been known to gracefully glide and jump above water, they also hover over the ocean floor, seeking out burrowing crustaceans. Once their prey has been located, they expose them using their wing-like pectoral fins to blow away the sand; they then crush and grind their prey with their flat plate-like teeth. Oyster growers used to trap these rays, believing them to be the culprits for many lost profits: crabs were ultimately considered the more likely perpetrators. One subsequent response was to place the seed oysters in mesh nets while they matured, protecting them from whichever predator was consuming them.

Answer: Frogfish

Using aggressive mimicry, frogfish beguile would-be predators by using an esca - a bait - attached to the illicium, a fishing-rod like appendage. They then very quickly create a large amount of suction pressure in their mouth and gulp up their prey whole! They can be found in tropical and subtropical regions in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans and the Red Sea.

Well, they can be found in those locations, but that doesn't mean you'll easily do so. The frogfish is so named because its skin and squat posture resemble a frog, but its skin in both colour and texture can also be modified to better camouflage its environment. They can uncannily resemble the ocean floor, algae formations, sponges and even sea urchins.

Answer: Bull shark

Bull sharks are members of the Carcharhinus genus, which derives from the Latin for 'shark'. They can be found in both fresh and saltwaters and typically live in shallow waters and rivers in diverse locations including Nicaragua, the Ganges river and Australia's Gold Coast. They have a diverse palate and will pretty much take what they can get - they can consume echinoderms, crustaceans, turtles, birds and dolphins amongst others. That said, they sometimes bite off more than they can chew - their documented rare encounters with hippos have tended to favour the hippos.

The fish we've considered so far have all had a significant resemblance to their respective animals, and the bull shark particularly lives up to its host animal's aggressive temperament. The International Shark Attack File in 2019 identified the bull shark as one of the 'big 3' threats to humans, as they are often found where humans enter water and have teeth designed to shear rather than hold. That said, they also asked people to maintain a healthy perspective on sharks, noting that their data indicated an average fatality of one a year, ten times less than fireworks.

Flipping back to the human fatality figures a second -- in 2016 hippos were estimated to kill 500 people a year in Africa. Perhaps "Jaws" needs a hippo remake...

Answer: Butterflyfish

The family Chaetodontidae derives from the Greek for 'hair' and 'tooth' and reflects the butterflyfish's comblike teeth used to scrape small prey like fish eggs or sea stars from the reef. A minority of butterflyfish are obligate corallivores - meaning they must eat living coral polyps to survive. The Chaetodon trifascialis, for example, will only eat Acropora hyacinthus coral and will go into significant decline without that food source.

As coral reef health has decreased and its effective habitat has shrunk, the butterflyfish has faced greater difficulty in thriving. Its vibrant colours have also been attractive to those seeking an addition to their aquarium; they are, however, a challenging fish to keep even among expert aquarists, with a majority of suitable species having special care requirements with their food often needing to come from their natural habitat.

Answer: Sea robin

The name gurnard comes from the onomatopoeic croaking sound the fish make when captured or above water, and sea robin derives from their orange colouration. In the same way a robin can walk, these fish have the strange tendency to walk on fin rays protruding beneath their body. They can use their pectoral fins - like how a bird uses their wings - to help propel them through the water and disorient prey as the bat ray does.

Sea robins can be found in tropical waters around the world and prefer shallower coastal regions where they can eat a wide array of prey. Their armoured plates are really more of a guard against the immense gravitational pressure from being under 200m underwater than as a protective aid against any specific predator.

Whilst not ubiquitous, in the 2010s gurnard also became a more popular fish in Britain after its use by chefs such as Rick Stein and Samantha Clark in gourmet cooking; the increasing difficulty in sourcing affordable and popular sustainable alternatives like cod and salmon also acted as a contributing factor to this sea change of opinion.

Answer: Parrotfish

One look at the parrotfish and you'll see right away why it was named as such! According to divers, they're also easily heard - it uses its extremely hard, beak-like teeth to scrape and crush coral polyps and extract their algae. They pulverise the coral and leave it undigested as white sand. Whilst, on the face of it, this seems as though it ought to be bad for the coral, marine biologists argue that the benefits of clearing the algae outweigh the physical damage done to the reefs in the process.

The parrotfish's ability to change its sex has caused researchers a great amount of difficulty categorising the exact number of species. In 2019 there were around 80 documented species, but over 300 had mistakenly been identified in the past.

Due to its protogynous hermaphrotidism, most parrotfish start out as females and change sex when it is needed: there is approximately one male to every six to twelve females. It is the males which sport the most vivid colours, which, unfortunately, has attracted human attention as much as their females.

Answer: Flying fox

The flying fox has quite a confusing identity - it shares its name with the bat that often lives in eastern regions and it is often visually confused with the Siamese algae-eater or Siamese flying fox. If that weren't enough to boggle one's mind, there's also a false flying fox - the Cambodian logsucker - which is a small south-east Asian river fish. The flying fox, in contrast, tends to thrive in the rapids of the Thai-Malay peninsula and some of Indonesia's larger islands.

In 2018, the flying fox's sex was unknown; there were no direct signs of its sex that could be observed in captivity, nor have any attempts to breed these animals in captivity succeeded. Whilst they prefer an algae-rich diet when young, they are omnivores and in captivity will eat flake food, spinach and bloodworms, amongst other things.

Answer: Deep sea dragonfish

The deep sea dragonfish truly and madly do live deeply: the Stomiidae family they come from live an average of 2,000 feet below the surface. They are able to generate light in one of two ways; the first of these involves the use of a unique organ at the back of their eyes that can illuminate prey in what is otherwise a very, very, dark place. The red light falls out of the vision range of most prey, keeping it hidden as it plans its attack. Their bioluminescent lure - which instead uses the more perceptible blue light - is more effective as a tool for bait or communication with other dragonfish.

This abyssal creature also has the rather disturbing quality of being able to open its mouth to at least 120 degrees, consuming its prey whole. Scientist Nalani Schnell also added that the creature's flexible head joint - a rare adaptation among fish - allows for extra manoeuvrability in swallowing large prey.

Yes, perhaps the inclusion of a 'dragon' fish was stretching the theme a little. But, such a strange creature deserves its moment in the spotlight.