What The Fuck Is Happening With This Fish

One of the strangest tales in Icelandic folklore concerns a creature called the Loðsilungur, or the furry trout. The trout, as you might imagine, looks like a fish covered with a white shag of fur, which it allegedly evolved to stay warm in Nordic waters. The people of Iceland, especially the men, knew not to eat the furry trout. If a man did eat a furry trout, he would suffer the unfortunate fate of becoming pregnant and delivering the child through his split scrotum. In the early 1900s, the legend of the furry trout somehow migrated to the United States, where various humorists assembled and mounted furry trouts to gift to unaware museums, a prank that, I think, stands the test of time.

There is of course no such thing as a furry trout, in Iceland or America. But now a country famous for its development of some of the most ridiculous, bizarre, and frankly alarming animals has stepped in with a furry trout of its own. The fish in question is a new species of ghost pipefish called Solenostomus snuffleupagus , named for Sesame Street 's Mr. Snuffleupagus, which it resembles quite closely. (One can only imagine how a Philadelphia-based marine biologist might have risen to this naming occasion.)

The scientists who described S. snuffleupagus gave it the common name of the hairy ghost pipefish, according to a paper in The Journal of Fish Biology. This fish lives in waters off Australia, which might be the world's most consistently excellent producer of strange animals, such as the platypus and the cassowary. But even by Australian standards, this fish looks crazy.