We reside beside the sea and enjoy taxidermy, and if our lives or at least our collective bent could be expressed in a single intersection, stuffed fish wouldn't be too bad a choice. Piscine taxidermy has always intrigued; I am leery of penetrating its silvery mysteries but still the question remains- is that fish skin or are they just from-scratch reproductions?
Blink once for yes.
BELOW: ANTICLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Puffer fish have everything sorted. Fuck with them and they'll inflate themselves to 10 xs life size and then what, fool? Exactly. As fugu, they can send you into comprehensive paralysis if you eat them after your chef has argued with his jump-off on the phone while gutting their slippery little carcasses, courtesy of tetrodotoxin. NEXT I think this is an orange roughy.
Blink once for yes.
BELOW: ANTICLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Puffer fish have everything sorted. Fuck with them and they'll inflate themselves to 10 xs life size and then what, fool? Exactly. As fugu, they can send you into comprehensive paralysis if you eat them after your chef has argued with his jump-off on the phone while gutting their slippery little carcasses, courtesy of tetrodotoxin. NEXT I think this is an orange roughy.
CENTRE This is a juvenile Dealfish, the Oarfish's less glamorous cousin. You know- one of those 'seas monster' fish that get dragged from the shallows by hooting mouthbreathers convinced of their status as plesiosaur and/or herald of the Rapture. Someone always immortalises that shit on the front page of the local rag between accounts of youths smoking drugs/fornicating in sand dunes and Councilor X denying reports he ever supplied methamphetamines to youths during parties at his summer house in return for sexual favours because he's a highly-respected member of the community and regularly plays golf with a lot of those teenagers' parents. BELOW RIGHT A gurnard, I presume, although they're not this lurid in life. Gurnard are beautiful both inside and out, particularly in beer batter.
ABOVE The actual Oarfish, which do tend to wash up into the shallows throughout Otago and end up in the meaty paws of passing mouthbreathers (see above). Their flesh is apparently gelatinous and unappetising but who the fuck eats an Oarfish?
 | LEFT Trumpeter and Tarakihi. Local and delicious. BELOW Some sort of shark and an Eagle Ray, one of the most beautiful cartilaginous fishes. I've seen them floating like opium dream denizens over the drop off at the edge of coral reefs, both in Phuket and Northern Australia. Their entire bodies are expressive, as though everything they perceive and feel radiates outward through their wings. If there are angels in my heaven, they will look like this. |
Apologia: some of these images are a wee bit out of focus but the light sucked, we didn't have a tripod and the place was swarming with unsupervised juveniles; blame the parents.
 |  Flying fish once whizzed past my nose as I sat in an open boat off the coast of Arnhem Land in Australia. We made eye contact as they passed by- they don't have eyelids so it's hard not to. Difficult to know what impression was made. |
I might have been the most stunning hominid that particular Cypselurus pinnatibarbatus had ever laid eyes on. Or I might just have been slightly less evil than a spanish mackerel, slightly more evil than a moonfish.
| RIGHT This is a sunfish (Mola mola). They grow to enormous size, eat jellyfish, don't possess a tail and spend a lot of time swimming on their sides, so that one eye regards the sky while the other gazes into the abyss. Which goes some of the way to explaining the expression. Does the abyss look back into the sunfish? Everything about the sunfish is bizarre and incredible and a look at its Wiki page will make you question everything you thought you knew and possibly precipitate some sort of existential crisis. |  |
BELOW This is a moonfish. I love the moonfish per se and this image, which I cannot stop using in the sidebar.
| If you feel reproach in this Marlin's gaze, you're probably right because even as you're reading this sentence there are a goodly number of sunburnt arseholes strapped into white vinyl chairs with their testicles bathed in coconut-scented tropical sweat while the boat they've hired at considerable expense reverses toward one of this mighty fish's compatriots, giving them the impression they're reeling it in like the highly-consequential alphas they so undoubtedly are. |  |
Very occasionally some dickhead will manage to get a Marlin's bill stuck in them somewhere- social Darwinism, righteous karmic effectuation or mere arbitrary thermodynamic exposition? I like them all but favour the first option closely followed by the second because of values best expressed in the equation Marlin > dickhead.
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