Why only cats or dogs? These guilty fish deserve to be shamed too!
fish
People found themselves petrified with fear and overwhelmed by paleontoligists' recently shared findings about the 100-million-year-old hagfish slime's capabilities. This eerie, eel-like creature sounds like it swam and slithered right out of a feverish nightmare. If you're curious to learn more about why you'd never want to see one of these in the wild, check out the original article that sent everyone into a frenzy, here.
Sometimes you see something and with your whole heart and soul you wonder "what the hell is that?" Thanks to the pool of geniuses over at r/whatisthisthing, mysteries like this are posed and solved every day. May the internet make it so that we'll never have to not know anything ever again. Okay, except maybe when you find mysterious items in your dad's toolbox. Maybe it'd be best to not know the truth behind those.
For 55 years, the Natural History Museum in London has run annual competitions for wildlife photography, and the finalists for the 2019 competition have just been announced. These photos of wild animals in their natural habitat are truly breathtaking, as are the skills of the photographers. Out of 50,000 entries, this collection of photographs made it to the finals - and we can see why!
Animals are cute and funny; we can all agree on this, right? Good. Now we've gotten that out of the way, here are the winning photos for a competition for the funniest animals. I don't know how long the photographers had to wait to capture these moments, but the waiting certainly paid off because these photos are the best thing you'll see all year.
On Sunday night, the ocean running alongside the East Coast Road in Chennai lit up with sparkling, luminescent water. Eyewitnesses were shocked and delighted to witness something so magical-looking and dubbed it 'sea sparkle'. But what they saw wasn't an undiscovered phenomenon - it's called bioluminescence and it actually occurs in many living organisms. That doesn't make it any less amazing though. Here's what 'sea sparkle' really is.
We've got some seriously bad news for fish-lovers. According to a report from nonprofit Oceana, over 20% of 449 fish that they tested were mislabeled, exposing some pretty serious "fish fraud." This is a staggering percentage, especially when considering that less than 1% of fish is tested for fraud. There's a huge chance that the expensive fish you're ordering while dining out is cheap - or even, according to this related Twitter thread from a biology professor, dangerous. There are fish out there that will hurt you to eat. And, as @AwesomeBioTA's class discovered, some of this "fish" is almost too disgusting for words.
Humans have interrupted a lot of natural processes. Highways divide forests, and dams interrupt the migration routes for fish. But that isn't to say that we haven't found solutions to some of the problems that we created. Wildlife bridges have been built over highways allow animals to cross the highway safely. And in a recent Twitter storm, the public has rediscovered an amazing apparatus that scientists released in 2014 which helps salmon migrate. It is called the Salmon Cannon. And as you can imagine, everyone is obsessed with it.
Via The Toronto Sun
As society plummets ever deeper into the pit of despair, from which there is no chance of returning, a beacon of light shines in the distance.
There, at the bottom of the pit, lay the 2017 Carponizer Carp Calendar.
For the those unfamiliar, as undoubtedly many of you are, the Carponizer Carp Calendar is an erotic calendar that features models wearing nothing but a carp. Think of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue if all the women were holding a giant carp. Sexy.
The Toronto Sun reports, "The weird calendar was the brainchild of Hendrik Pohler and it’s getting a five-star rating on Amazon."
They're not lying. But the Amazon description is the real money. According to Amazon, the calendar is “one of the most extraordinary ideas of how this magnificent fish can be presented in an appealing setting,” managing to “courageously” make each month a little better. It boasts 12 “magnificent” caprs to create 12 “formidable and unmissable images.”
“Whether for yourself or as a tasteful gift: the 2017 Carponizer Carp Calendar will not only make men's hearts beat faster.” (The sentence just ends like that so we’ll never know what else this calendar does in addition to making men’s hearts beat faster). “
Wow. Nothing says tasteful gift, like calling your sexy fish and bikini girl calendar tasteful in the description.
This is pure peak 2016.
via Amazon
Via @cctvnews
Looks like that box of fish sticks in the back of your freezer is going to stay there.
Space World, a Japanese theme park, shutdown their ice skating rink attraction on Sunday, because as it turns out, most people don’t consider skating around dead fish to be a winter wonderland. The theme park froze 5,000 sea creatures into the floor of their skating rink, thinking that attendees would enjoy the challenge of navigating an ocean graveyard. Space World called it “Freezing Port.” We call it “A Nightmare.”
Freezing Port received a slew of complaints from visitors and animal rights organizations. One Facebook user said, “You have no soul.” While another simply, and more practically, said, “This is the worst attraction educationally.” Apparently, only a select few found Space World's Facebook advertisements with captions that read “I am d... d... drowning, s ... s... suffocating” funny and not horrifying.
Japanese skating rink with 5,000 dead fish frozen into ice forced to close after animal rights outrage (pic via @SpaceWorld_info) pic.twitter.com/etWQZAE3VT
— CCTVNEWS (@cctvnews) November 28, 2016
“We were shocked to hear the reaction as the ice skate rink was very popular since it opened two weeks ago,” Space World manager Toshimi Takeda told to CNN. “We had an unprecedented number of visitors.”
“We are sorry for the project and decided to close the rink.”
CNN added the park will “unfreeze the skate rink to remove the fish, hold an ‘appropriate religious service,’ and then reuse them as fertilizer.” Cool.
So there you have it. Theme park buys locally-sourced seafood, freezes it into their skating rink, and holds memorial service for the fish after learned that people don’t like ice skating on dead fish. Welcome to Monday morning on Planet Earth.
Via Fish Love
Why are celebrities like Miriam Margolyes or Emma Thompson and her husband Greg Wise posing naked with dead fish? To save the fish, of course! Well... not the ones in the pictures obviously but some of their relatives. 
This isn't really a new practice. It's part of a non-profit called Fish Love which is aimed at raising awareness of unsustainable fishing practices. Their goal is to teach people how to choose more sustainable fish to eat. Fish Love has been around since 2009 and has photographed many other celebrities in the past like Gillian Anderson and Helena Bonham Carter. 
The newly discovered spider called the dolomedes briangreenei hails from, you guessed it, Australia. One of it's species, whose name is Brian, was presented at the World Science Festival in Brisbane.
He was named after Professor Brian Greene, cofounder of the World Science Festival and a string theorist. 
Brian (the spider, not the string theorist) uses vibrations in the water to fish. Robert Raven, Principal Scientist of Arachnology at the Queensland Museum told Mashable:
These spiders sit there on the water and then all of a sudden an insect will hit the water and the spider races out to get it, grabs it, dives under the water and then swims back to the shore and starts eating it.
It eats insects, fish and toads up to three times it's own size. Apparently its bites aren't that dangerous but the fact remains; now even the water is not safe from spiders.
Via Metro News
Zoe Jackson must have thought she really found someone special on the dating website Plenty of Fish. That's why when he broke up with her she got revenge by leaving a bunch of dead mackerel in her boyfriend of three months, Gerard Brogan's hot tub. He discovered it days later but caught the culprit by reviewing CCTV footage. 
He found Jackson (pictured above) on camera acting fishy with a large trashbag near his hot tub at night. She has been ordered to pay for the repair of the hot tub and we can only guess that Brogan will stay away from online dating for a while.
