I have a Redbubble now!!! I plan on adding more but I’m pretty proud of this collection I just finished, inspired by vintage stickers à la
Sandylion :3
well, pretty much all catfish come equipped with venomous spines, but owl grip strength is so insane that a large owl can literally break any bone in your body with its feet so I think the edge goes to the owls on this one
I would like to politely remind Dr. Wunjy that you really have to go out of your way to get talon’d by an owl and there are no extant members of the owl family that are large enough to consider humans viable prey, but there are 4-6 species of catfish that grow large enough to eat live humans at two that have been officially documented as doing so
Exhibit A: The Kal River Goonch Catfish, which has developed a taste of water buffalo calves and small humans.
Exhibit B: Th Piraiba, which lives in the Amazon River and occupies nearly the same ecological niche in the river as the great white does in the ocean:
The catfish family also has the Candiru, which by comparison looks positively laughable:
-Except that it’s a catfish that’s learned how to be a leech and is a flesh-eating parasite that is infamously attracted to the smell of urine, and there has been more than one incident of them swimming up a man’s urethra!
Unless you know of an ass-burrowing owl, the catfish family is definitely much, much scarier.
Gallus I come here for funny stories, and then you give me things like this and I am TERRIFIED.
WELL TOO BAD BECAUSE I’VE GOT MORE HORRIBLE MEMBERS OF THE CATFISH FAMILY TO SHARE WITH YOU!
This friend of ours is the Wels Catfish, native to Dreary Old England, but it’s been introduced to parts of Europe where they have devastated the local ecology by eating LITERALLY EVERYTHING and forming a 100% Wels-catfish-cannibalism based food chain in it’s place, like a reservoir in Italy, where this 256lb specimen was caught
There was a rumor of a Wels caught that had the remains of a Nazi inside it, but unfortunately it was a Hoax. Wels only live to be about 60 years old in captivity and 20 in the wild, and while a Wels is certainly has no problem eating any carrion if may swim across, they have never showed an interest in eating live humans. …They do attack live humans who swim too close to their nests. Watch where you go swimming in Europe in springtime.
The Electric Catfish of north Africa is capable of producing a 400 volt shock, more than enough to stun a healthy human and kill the old or infirm.
There’s a popularly circulated ‘fact’ that the ancient Egyptians used the shocks as a treatment for arthritis but I haven’t been able to find a good source on that, so tell me if you know something about that. What I can verify is that the electric catfish is apparently a somewhat popular choice of aquarium fish for 'experienced’ aquarists, and if hand-raised from a young age, can be taught to be hand-fed and do tricks for treats. It can also decide to shock the shit out of it’s keeper for shits and giggles and send them to the hospital or morgue.
Now, while all catfish have spines on their dorsal and pectoral fins, only about half of catfish (1,600 species) have venom glands, and I couldn’t find any records of someone being *poisoned* by a catfish. I did find records of one man who was killed by the dorsal spine of a catfish: In 2004, a man fishing in the Amazon landed a Redtail Catfish, and while wrestling it into the boat, got stabbed by it’s dorsal spine and died. See, while the Redtail isn’t a venomous species of catfish-
-They are VERY LARGE.
That first blunted prong of the Dorsal fin under the human’s hand is a flesh-covered 5-inch dagger, which the unfortunate man took at exactly the wrong angle, and suffered a cardiac puncture.
“My mother boils seawater. It sits all afternoon simmering on the stovetop, almost two gallons in a big soup pot. The windows steam up and the house smells like a storm. In the evening, a crust of salt is all that’s left at the bottom of the pot. My mother scrapes it out with a spoon. We each lick a fingertip and dip them in the salt and it’s softer than you’d think, less like sand and more like snow. We lay our fingertips on our tongues, right in the middle. It tastes like salt but like something else, too—wide, and dark. It tastes like drowning, or like falling asleep on the shore and only waking up when the tide has come up to your feet and you wonder if you’d gone on sleeping, would you have sunk?”
[image description: top photo shows three piles of salt in a golden color, white, and a sandy tan. bottom photo has the same three salts in glass jars. end description]
