www.jeffthefish.com

“u just eat the last eggs of thats lizard now they are extinge”
[Source]

Good grief, everyone else is linking to this story, I guess I might as well too.  It is quite hilarious.

PZ Myers of Pharyngula fame tried to go to an early screening of the movie Expelled, and got kicked out! He’s in the freaking movie, but he’s not allowed to see it! I guess they want to put off getting caught in their lies as long as possible.

But check out this account of the incident, written by the writer of the movie.  Note especially the comments.  It’s slam after slam after slam.  Why don’t they just give up on this ridiculous movie?

I guess you should probably know that I love bichirs. They are a primitive air breathing group of fishes from Africa. I personally own six different species of them. I know what I’m talking about.

I found this while looking for videos of lungfish. It’s the worst video ever! The title is “My Pet Dinosaur an African Birchir a type of Lung Fish”. From the grammar and spelling in this video, I assumed that a child had made this, which would be excusable. According to the user’s profile, however, he’s 31 years old! Wow.

First of all, it’s “bichir”, not “birchir” or “bircher”. And SONOFABITCH they are not lungfish! Lungfish are lungfish! Yes, bichirs breathe air, but they aren’t lungfish! Bichirs and lungfish are not even in the same class. Lungfish, as I’ve said eight billion times this week, are more closely related to humans than they are to bichirs. This is an inexcusable mistake.

In the video, he also says that bichirs come from the Amazon river. Why the MOTHER EFFING HELL would an African fish be from the Amazon river? What an idiot! Maybe he has a debilitating brain injury. I shouldn’t judge.

He also says that bichirs use their pectoral and pelvic fins to walk on the bottom. I have six of them. I have never seen this. He says that you can’t tell a male from a female. Do some research, man!

Bichirs are ridiculously easy to sex, simply by looking at their anal fin, as shown above.

Last complaint before I show the video: He says that in the wild bichirs grow up to 4.5 feet long. Sorry, now you’re just lying. Maybe he’s confusing bichirs with real lungfish, some of which do get almost that big.

Seriously, don’t watch this. It’s eight minutes of your life you can’t get back.

I realize no one cares about my friend Steven the lungfish, but I love him. So here are two new pictures of him in his tiny apartment which is inside my own apartment.

Click to enlarge!

In this last one you can see a philodendron leaf that has fallen behind the aquarium.  So you can get a sense of how tiningtons he is!

Go see it!  I love you!  And Peter loves you!  You’re the most responsible man I know!

Occasionally people send me outlandish stories, and I take joy in debunking them. It’s easy enough to do, and it’s a lot of fun.

Today someone sent me this story and asked me if it could be true:

I was born and raised in the Philippines. We moved to the U.S. when I was 11-years old. This story took place in the Philippines when I was 7-years old. I can recall some of the stuff that happened to me, but not to the fullest. My uncle retold the story again to me later on when I got a little older. And then from time to time when we have family gatherings, someone in my family would re-tell the story again as it was a bit mind boggling!

The story started when my Dad and I went to visit his sister, my Aunt and my cousins in the province. My Aunt has 3-children; one is my age and the other two are a couple of years older than I was. When we got to their house, I remember my Aunt and cousins came running out of the house to greet us with such joy and excitement.

After the initial visiting, my cousins and I went outside to play Hide & Seek. My older cousin was the seeker while everyone else hid. My Aunt’s house was out in the woods. Her house was surrounded by mountains and trees after trees and tall grasses.There’s this belief in the Philippines that most Duwende’s [Dwarfs] lives in the forest or a place where there’s lots of trees. And if you cross their path, without saying “Tabi-Tabi Po Nuno” (MEANING: Pardon or Excuse me little people) they will cast you a bad spell. It all depends on the Duwende you came across with. Some are nice and some are evil. If you cross an evil Duwende, he/she can cast a death wish on you, some can give you warts all over your body and make you ugly and hideous, so people will be disgusted of you and don’t want to be around you.

Back to playing Hide & Seek. My cousin was the seeker and everyone hid. I wanted to hide where my cousin couldn’t find me. So I saw this VERY BIG tree, what seemed to be like a hundred year old tree. Around it, I found a little hole and that’s where I hid. Without thinking and forgetting what my elders told me about Duwende’s, I forgot to say what we’re supposed to say and hid a long time in the tree. After what seemed to be forever hiding, I came out of the hole and went back to where my cousins were. They said that they have given up looking for me, since they didn’t find me anywhere.

That evening before dinner, I started not feeling too good. I remember the shivers, the many trips to the bathroom vomiting and after that I can honestly say that I don’t remember what else happened. But my Dad and Aunt told me that I was practically in a comma for 3-days. They said that in some cases, I was hallucinating. I would sweat heavily, laughed, cried and sometimes I talk to someone in front of me as if someone was there. But there was no one there. They even took me to a local hospital, but the Doctors couldn’t tell my family what was wrong with me.

So my Aunt asked her kids what we did outside. My cousins told my Dad and Aunt, that all we did was played Hide & Seek. They said that I was gone a long time and that they couldn’t find where I hid. My Dad and Aunt then knew that maybe I was a victim on an evil Duwende. They took me to an Albularyo (Witch Doctor) to find out what was wrong with me. As my Dad explained to me, he said that as soon as they brought me inside the Witch Doctor’s house, the Witch Doctor knew that I was being played or something evil was in my presence.

The Witch Doctor lit a candle. Took a tub and poured about an inch or two of water in it. Then she mixed a few drops of some special oil that comes from a plant with the water. While chanting in some weird language, she took the lit candle and poured the melted wax in the tub with the water and oil. As she poured the wax, a figure started to form. My Uncle said that the melted wax on the water formed a huge tree with the hole. Inside the hole was a human (which was supposed to be me) and around me was about 4 or 5 Duwende’s. Some where just standing there staring at me and some looked like they were throwing something at me.

So the Witch Doctor had advised my family to take me back where that big tree was and to say “Tabi-tabi po Nuno” and bring some fruits for offerings. That same day, my Dad and Aunt took me to the tree and excused me from any wrong doings and brought with them plenty of fruits. All I remember was waking up the next day without any recollections of what had happened to me!

So she hid in a hole in a tree, and then she got sick. The most obvious explanation is a spider bite. I did a quick Internet search and found that the Philippines has a spider called Latrodectus hasselti, whose bite induces symptoms very reminiscent of the girl’s description: “headache, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, pyrexia [fever], hypertension and in severe cases, paralysis.” She also said that she didn’t start feeling sick until dinner time. This makes sense, since the spider’s “venom contains neurotoxins, but works very slowly”.

So much for the curse. What about the figure forming out of candle wax? Classic pareidolia. Try pouring candle wax into a glass of water. It’s like looking at clouds. You can see whatever you want. And the description she gives of the figure, with so many separate entities, makes it sound even more like a jumbled mess onto which her family projected their preconceptions. Also note that she’s retelling her family’s description of the wax figure. She does not actually remember seeing it.

Here’s another very important aspect of the story:

My uncle retold the story again to me later on when I got a little older. And then from time to time when we have family gatherings, someone in my family would re-tell the story again as it was a bit mind boggling!

It’s a fact that human memory is highly unreliable. Every time we retell a story we change the details without realizing. Typically the stories become more and more patterned after what you believe. So if you have a story from when you were 7 years old that’s been retold for years by several different people, you can know for certain that it has changed significantly from the original account.

So here we have a spider bite and pareidolia, interpeted in light of a belief system that includes vengeful forest gnomes, which has morphed over the years after being told and retold by multiple people. See how easy it is!

I guess by now everyone has heard about Moko the dolphin down in Ray Comfort’s hometown, New Zealand. Some dudes were all trying to rescue two pygmy sperm whales (Kogia breviceps: what an awesome animal), when all of a sudden, here comes Moko. She says a few words to the whales, and they follow her out to sea.

So now everyone’s like, “WOW DOLFINZ R SO SMART”, but I think there’s more (or maybe less) going on here than meets the eye. As I so eloquently stated over on Skepchick:

Here’s the thing: my mother LITERALLY believes that dogs and cats can understand English.

Once, while driving she passed a dog running in the street. She stopped, rolled down her window, and said to the dog, “Go home!” and drove away. I said, “Dearest Mother, canines comprehend not such lofty terms.” “Yes they do,” she responded.

She used to say to her cat, “If you come and sit on my lap, I’ll give you some food.” And he would sit on her lap.

But come on. She probably had the food waiting for him, and he came for the food, which happened to be on her lap. But try convincing her of that.

So I think there may be a similar, but less obvious, explanation for this. I just have no idea what it could be.

Or maybe the ocean is a giant water cooler populated by chatty Kathies. ‘Evs.

Welp, turns out I’m not the only skeptic! I think people are quick to take these stories at face value, because come on! How cool would it be! But it would also be cool if Caridina multidentata could reproduce in freshwater, but no rational person believes that, right?

The Woodland Park Zoo is having a contest to name their new baby gorilla! The only problem is that the name has to be African. I think I was able to successfully come up with an adorable workaround, however:

Dr. Tintytongue G. Cuddleable from Africa!

If it’s from Africa, how on earth could it NOT be African? I win!

Editor’s note: Just an FYI, my Filipino Friend does not approve of this name.  She wants to win. 

My boss just came up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “No one likes you because you’re fat.”

I cried for 25 minutes.

I like the premise of this article about eco-friendly fisheries, but they said some pretty stupid things. Here’s the part that made me the angriest:

“It is also possible to select types of fish that provide much more food while consuming less. The catfish, for example, originally an African freshwater fish, provides one kilo of fish for every 800 grams of food it consumes. The rest of its growth comes from the warmth of the water in which it swims and the air it breathes. The catfish is a lungfish.”

OK, what? “The catfish” is orignally from Africa? Do they think there’s only one species of catfish? It occurred to me that maybe they meant that all catfish came from a common African ancestor, which radiated and spread throughout the world. But no, the earliest known catfish fossils are from Argentina. They have to be talking about one particular species of catfish, but it’s stated as though there is only one species. ARGHH THAT MAKES ME MAD!!

And then they say that catfish are lungfish? When I read that, I ran outside, approached the nearest, baddest, biggest, toughest looking dude, and said, “I SLEPT WITH YOUR WIFE!!” Why did I to this? It’s simple: I didn’t want to look like a complete idiot when I started crying blood.

Guys, lungfish are lungfish! I get that you’re trying to convey that some catfish can utilize atmospheric oxygen, but they are not lungfish!

But wait, there’s another article that upset me slightly less. It describes a study that proposes the idea that hiccups may be an evolutionary throwback to breathing with gills. Scope this out, bros:

“Such brotherly creatures would be, you guessed it, frogs (more specifically tadpoles or any gilled amphibian or lungfish). “

That sentence doesn’t quite make sense. Yeah, uh, my favorite food is Japanese food (more specifically, spaghetti and other kinds of desert).

And then they briefly describe the theory of evolution:

“As anyone who has taken basic high-school biology can tell you, Darwin’s theory of evolution states that the most complex of today’s life forms, like the human being, evolved from the most simplistic of life forms, like the tadpole, millions of years ago.”

Well, yeah…kinda…? I guess that is what someone who has only taken basic high school biology would tell you. Are humans the most complex of today’s life forms? I’m pretty sure that’s debatable. We are not the pinnacle of evolution. But tadpoles are definitely not the “most simplistic of life forms”, and we did not evolve from an animal like a tadpole. In fact, frogs and humans both share a common ancestor in the Devonian, around 375 million years ago. The lobe-finned fish whose lineage produced four legged animals produced both frogs and humans. Evolutionarily speaking, frogs and humans are equally advanced.

Anyway, blah blah blah go home.