Word: catfish
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Some noisy fish, Interior vows, make a sound like a click beetle just by snapping their heads sharply upward. At night off the Florida coast sea drums parade, crying "wop, wop, wop." Meagres sometimes sound like a hurdy-gurdy. You can hear a South American catfish "growl" for a hundred feet when he breaks water. Even Homer's fabled song of the sirens is fishy to Interior: it was probably just a shoal of weakfish warbling their weed notes wild...
Last December a lungfish from a pond in British East Africa was placed in a large tin can filled with wet mud. This creature, something like a catfish, something like a small eel, struggled through the mud to the top of the can occasionally to breathe air; but as the mud dried and hardened, the lungfish was held fast at the bottom. Six months later, the can reached its destination, a biological supply house in Chicago. The can was opened, the cylindrical mold of dried mud delicately picked away, the lungfish removed. It was alive. The fish, gaunt from...
...thousands of different types of fish, only five can produce electricity. Best known of these is the electric eel (Electrophorus electricus), a brownish-grey, snake-like creature that is not an eel at all but belongs to the carp and catfish family. Especially abundant in the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers in South America, electric eels have six electricity-generating organs extending lengthwise through their tails, which make up four-fifths of the eel's body. If a man or animal touches an electric eel, he will be mildly shocked. But if he were brash enough to grab both...
...practitioner of absentee ownership, Publisher Shutts soon had gathered on the side a rich law practice, shortly found himself a rough & ready millionaire of whom 0. O. Mclntyre delighted to write: "A visiting Duchess once asked him his favorite dish and he replied it was the Ohio River mud catfish...
After talking to the discoverers, Diver Brown said, "In my opinion it's nothing more than a large fish-maybe a catfish." He had a razor-edged, eight-foot harpoon prepared. In Washington, the Bureau of Fisheries said it might be an alligator gar, which reputedly grows, sometimes, to be 20 ft. long. Other guesses: water-logged tree trunk, sunken barge, eruption of subterranean gases throwing up leaf accumulation, devil fish, sturgeon, or Old Blue, the legendary giant catfish of the Mississippi who every so often gets stuck in a canal lock or nudges in the bottom...