You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘catfish’ tag.
From Charmworks.com
Last week’s crazy catfish car was a big hit. Therefore I embarked on a search for an even crazier item…a catfish crown! Alas, I foolishly wasted my blog researching time seeking a mad object which does not seem to exist (or at least remains unknown to the internet). Although I never discovered a jeweled catfish headdress, I did succeed in finding a surprising number of endearing catfish pendants, charms, and medallions. Thus, here is the resultant small gallery of catfish jewelry.
An elegant catfish charm from JC Hunter
I think this is a catfish…
Wels Catfish charms from England
Amazing Handcrafted Corydoras earrings available on ETSY from omostudios
Sterling Silver Catfish Charm
African cat fish, “lost wax” brass pendant (Ghanatreasures)
Hmmm…
I wish I had more to say about these lovely little objects. It seems like the catfish was sometimes a good luck symbol in ancient cultures (representing fertility, mutability,& plenty), and these little amulets and earrings make me think that the same continues to hold true even in our digital world. But, without knowing the jewelers’ intent, I can only present an interesting image gallery. It’s still pretty exciting though!
Alva Museum Replica Funky Cat Fish
The Bauer Catfish
What is the most beautiful shape? Obviously a catfish shape, right? Unfortunately, designers have been slow to realize this and they have so far failed to incorporate the beauty of catfish into home, work, and public contexts. Fortunately, however, this is all beginning to change. Bauer Ltd., a firm which specializes in customizing automobiles has finally realized that most Americans would prefer to drive around in a sleek and fancy catfish. They offer a service through which the discerning motorist can transform his boring Mazda Miata into a thrilling siluriform shape.
A Lime Green Customized Racing Catfish
According to auto-industry blogs, the designer of the Bauer Catfish actually looked at a catfish to craft the design. It is certainly a sleek and magnificent-looking vehicle! I particularly like how the eyes/headlights look, and I love the diagonal stripes on the sides. I looked at the Bauer website to try to find out some details to share with you about the custom cars, but sadly the technical details of the conversion quickly baffled me (it doesn’t help that I have been a pedestrian for so many years). It seems you can customize the cars with all sorts of souped-up racing engines, but unfortunately I could not find any way to install sensitive whiskers or tastebuds on the vehicle.
Just imagine if it had long barbels!
Of the top ten posts of all time, number five is my personal favorite. As you might imagine, it deals with catfish—those bewhiskered masters of freshwater survival. Catfish live on all continents (other than Antarctica—where they once lived) and they thrive in virtually every freshwater habitat worldwide. The siluriformes have even left freshwater and begun to reconquer the ancient oceans from whence all chordates originally sprang. They are a phenomenally successful family—one of life’s greatest success stories. When Earth life finally leaves home and blasts off into the greater firmament, I am sure catfish will find a way to tag along in our fresh water supply (assuming we can ever look up from our stupid I-phones and celebrity folderol for ten minutes to make such a thing happen).
A school of Striped Eel Catfish (Plotosus lineatus)
Ferrebeekeeper has featured all sorts of catfish posts: catfish in art, the politics of farm-raised catfish, colorful catfish, venomous coral reef catfish, even terrifying underworld gods that are catfish! There are upside-down catfish, and catfish which care, and even wild catfish living in Brooklyn (both at the beach and at the reservoir). Tune in later this autumn when we will go all celebrity chef and cook a delicious catfish! I guess what I am saying is that I really like catfish! I admire their astonishing versatility. The secret to their success is straightforward but hardly simple—they have a vast array of astonishing sense organs which allow them to thrive in environments where other fish are lost. Even if their habitat is dark, turbid, or chaotic—the numerous senses of the catfish (some of which are not possessed by humans) allow it to evade predators, find food, and carry on a social life which is often surprisingly elaborate. You can read all about these astonishing senses in Ferrebeekeeper’s fifth top post of all time “Sensitive Siluriformes: How Catfish Perceive the World.”
Merodontotus Tigrinus (The Zebra Shovelnose Catfish)
After you are done reading (or re-reading) the original post, I hope you will pause to reflect on how astonishingly beautiful and sophisticated life is. Most people I talk to initially dismiss catfish as lowly bottom-feeders (or possibly talk about them as delicious sandwiches), but they are magnificent organisms which live everywhere based on senses we are just beginning to understand. They are also related to us: distant cousins who stayed closer to the traditional ways of our great, great, ever-so-great grandparents the ancient lobe-finned fishes of the Silurian. But despite their adherence to a traditional aquatic lifestyle the catfish are hardly unsophisticated cousins!
Grandpa?
An Illustrated Haiku from the strange depths of the Internet
Today (August 8) is International Cat Day, a holiday which honors our beloved feline friends. The domestic cat descended from the African Wild Desert Cat in the depths of prehistory and has been revered (though not universally) ever since. Cats have been portrayed both as gods and as monsters by artists. They represent beauty, grace, friendship, happiness, and love. They represent bad luck, witchcraft, endless hunger, and cruelty. Humans cannot get enough of our bewhiskered predatory friends and their odd dual natures. Additionally, cats dominate the worldwide web–the hive mind conglomerate which has become so central to human activity (and upon which you are presumably reading this post).
Old Fashioned Catfish Charm from eBay
I am personally celebrating International Cat Day with a rabbit fur mouse for Sepia Cat–my beloved middle aged tabby who sleeps purring on my legs (when she is not committing war crimes against mice). To celebrate on this blog, however, I am giving you a whimsical gallery of cat/fish hybrids which artists draw as puns to represent the siluridae. When I was a child I loved these kinds of endearing mixed animal cartoons (and they deeply influenced the Zoomorphs—a line of mix-and-match animal toys I designed). I hope you enjoy the chimerical fun—but more than that, I hope you are especially nice to your catfriends on this, their special day!
Cartoon Catfish by Steven Wallet
Stock Illustration by RobinOlimb
Tabby Sabertooth Catfish by Kennon9 (Deviantart)
Felix the Catfish
A Catfish Aisha from Neopets
Catfish Envy (Masami Teraoka, 1993, woodblock & etching with hand-tint)
Masami Teraoka is a Japanese-born artist who addresses contemporary issues and mores with ancient Ukiyo-e artistic style. The results of this fusion are not only visually stunning but frequently droll & ridiculous as well. Here is a mixed woodcut/etching print titled “Catfish Envy” which has been hand-tinted by the artist. A risible middle aged samurai is trying to snorkel his way up to a contemporary international femme fatale who, in turn, is embracing a wily catfish. The young woman seems contemptuous of the old fashioned warrior–who looks quite out of breath and rattled. The catfish is an enigma, but he seems to have shades of the mythical Namazu–the earthquake-causing catfish god who lives beneath Japan (and who sometimes represents wealth caused by corruption). There is something distinctly nouveau riche and jaded about that catfish. The beautiful lady snorkeler has a disdainful and mercenary light in her eyes. Even the tradition-bound samurai seems like he might be a bit lecherous and silly (although we sense that the lecherous, silly, tradition-bound printmaker sympathizes with him). The juxtaposition of the centuries-old technique, the old-school sexual/class moralizing, and the modern sporting equipment earns this print a place of high distinction in the annals of catfish-themed art (even if it might be somewhat lacking in egalitarian humanist values).
Gafftopsail Catfish (Bagre marinus)
This amazing looking fish is a gafftopsail catfish (Bagre marinus). It is an Atlantic Ocean catfish which lives in coastal waters off of North America from the Caribbean up through the Gulf of Mexico north to the mouth of the Hudson. As you might guess from its intimidating Fu Manchu mustache and barbed flavor savor, the gafftopsail catfish is a formidable predator which eats crustaceans and smaller fish. The fish has a sinister forked tail, a wavelike hump, and a jaunty dorsal spine looks like a sail (and gives the fish its common name). Additionally like most saltwater catfish, the gafftopsail catfish has several venomous, serrated spines.
The largest gafftopsail catfish ever caught weighed an impressive 4.5 kg (10 pounds), but generally the fish are much smaller. They usually measure about 43 cm (17 inches) in length. Male gafftopsail catfish are solicitous fathers. When the female lays her eggs, the male fertilizes them and collects them in his mouth. He carefully protects the eggs until they have hatched, and thereafter his young take shelter from predators inside his mouth until they are old enough to set out on their own.
This story is from yesterday and the exiguous details, alas, mean that it will be brief–yet it is too remarkable not to mention (especially considering our longstanding love of catfish here at Ferrebeekeeper). Yesterday (June 17th, 2014) an Italian fisherman, Dino Ferrari, caught a huge Wels catfish (Silurus glanis) in the River Po. The great fish weighed 118 kilograms (260 pounds) and measured 2.6 meters (8.6 feet) in length.
Dino Ferrari proudly displays the 260 pound fish he caught
Although Wels catfish are no match in size and substance to the extraordinary giant Mekong catfish, they are clearly large fish. They also live in a huge swath of Eurasia from England to Kazakhstan where they prey on everything from tiny gastropods to big waterfowl like ducks (although they also eat carrion). The Wells catfish was originally native to central Europe, but thanks to introduction programs by misguided human anglers it has spread both east and west. I wonder what Mr. Ferrari baited his hook with to catch this monster—a piglet?
Nerodia rhombifer overpowers a catfish (photo by David Sledge)
Here is a dramatic photo of a snake killing a catfish. The snake is a nonvenomous species, the diamondback water snake (Nerodia rhombifer) which is commonly mistaken for the venomous cottonmouth–even though the later is less common. The reptile captured the fish by force and brute tenacity (and it succeeded in swallowing the fish even though the catfish’s head was bigger than its own). The amazing photo was captured by a gifted photographer, David Sledge, who had the further gift of being in the right place at the right time in order to catch a match between two formidable animals. The Daily News reported that, “Mr. Sledge was walking along a bayou just outside Sugar Land a suburb southwest of Houston, Texas, when he witnessed the remarkable struggle between predator and prey.”
Honey Bundt Cake (Wayne Ferrebee, 2013, oil on panel)
I’m sorry we have been stuck on the lugubrious story of Oisín and Niamh for so long. To make up for it, here is one of my own paintings…and it isn’t just any painting: in fact it is a special painting which symbolically represents this blog. If you let your eye wonder through the composition, you will recognize many of the familiar themes and topics of ferrebeekeeper. Space is represented by a golden planet with Saturn-like rings, and by a rocket. Additionally, the entire composition takes place in outer space (as does everything–if you think about it). Against a backdrop of nebulae and swirling galaxies a domestic turkey takes wing and a school of belemnites (long vanished mollusks which are related to squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish) use their own jet propulsion to swim among the stars. A blue Chinese ewer made of porcelain floats in the bottom left corner beneath a swarm of eusocial bees which are issuing from a gothic beehive on the back of a great green river catfish. The goddess Hecate, the strangest and most evocative chthonic deity of ancient Rome brandished torches and a venomous serpent. Growing in the nothingness beside the witch goddess, a poisonous monkshood represents gardens (and poisons). In the center of the composition is a fearsome Andrewsarchus—the largest mammalian land predator. The mighty (albeit extinct) beast bears an ornate cobalt cake plate with a great glistening honey bundt cake. The wheat in the cake represents agriculture (as do the turkey and the bees), but beyond that, the cake’s toroid shape hints at larger cosmological mysteries. Taking a step back, the painting is composed of colors and it is itself visual art, the symbolic representation of humankind’s enduring search for meaning.
I have left politics out of the composition as a matter of good taste. Also trees did not make it into the painting because who’s ever heard of a tree in space?
CD Catfish (Tim Vogelaar and Joel Smythe for “Nashville Catfish out of Water”)
I suspect that ever since the color of the year was announced to be radiant orchid, my readers have only been asking themselves one question: “Are there any purple catfish?” There are many imaginary purple catfish in the arts and in fantasy (and in a world of fluorescent lights, all sorts of things can take on a lavender hint), but there is also a real purple catfish! Native to the clear flowing streams of Guyana, here is Centromochlus reticulatus, also known as the purple oil catfish or the driftwood cat.
Centromochlus reticulatus (image from msjinkzd)
Centromochlus reticulatus is a shy and retiring catfish which likes to hide by day in driftwood and come out at night to feed on whatever tiny invertebrates or other foodstuffs they can find. The adult fish are extremely tiny and measure only 1 inch (2.7 cm) in length. Like many little catfish, the fish may be shy and nocturnal but they are also social and friendly with each other. Indeed aquarists report that they can sometimes be seen coming out to feed in little pseudo-schools where they frisk and dance in happiness at being together. Their most distinctive traits are the handsome honeycomb spots on their backs, their long whiskers, and cute all-black eyes (which are covered in adipose tissue and “lack orbital rims”). Because they are so furtive, their wild range is somewhat unclear: although they are most common in Guyana’s Rupunun River, they reputedly also live in various nearby South American waterways (including the northeastern tributaries of the mighty Amazon).
Young Centromochlus reticulatus
The little fish are not exactly a Pantone dream color: younger fish are a demure purple/pink (although in older specimens the purple may fade somewhat). And yet I find the tiny lavender catfish to be very endearing.
ferrebeekeeper 