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18 jan 06 Is a fish that has evil-looking teeth but CLAIMS to be a flounder, actually of the non-flounder persuasion? teehee. what my mom is referring to here is a discussion she and i had a few weeks ago. i described a crispy whole flounder i had at a thai restaurant, including it's evil-looking teeth, and my mom didn't believe that this creature could be a flounder. her powerful and razor intuition told her that the only fish who had teeth were sharks, baracuda, and pike. my mother's extensive knowledge of pike-teeth are based on her experiences in northern minnesota, where there were fish-centered family vacations. i remember one time in particular: my mom had a migraine headache, and was asleep in the cabin. i had just returned from a boat outing, and carried three large, slimy, toothed, and live northern pike, dangling from some metal fish-capture device. i wandered in proudly, and she said "oh god, take the fish away!" i will always remember that line. mother and i discussed fish and teeth some more. i told her that i was reasonably sure that all fish had teeth. she was incredulous. i later retracted this. but it was and is my contention that most fish have teeth, whereas it was and is her contention that most fish do not have teeth (including flounders). she thought that perhaps the thai restaurant at which i'd had the conspicuously toothed flounder had indeed served me something else, perhaps a pike or a baracuda. according to a few web sources that i read a few hours ago and don't have the URLs handy (convenient), "most" fish have teeth, whether these be sandpaper-like ridges or big shark fangs. even goldfish have "tooth-like" structures fused to their jaws to help them grind up stuff. well, "fine line", i can hear you saying, between tooth and tooth-like-structure. and it's true -- it all depends on what our definition of "tooth" is. fish don't have "teeth" the way humans and other mammals have teeth. they aren't powerfully rooted in the jawbone like ours, nor are they permanent -- fish keep growing new ones that replace the old ones. straight from the flounder's mouth: Most fish have teeth, but some do not e.g. seahorses. Bony fish have a wide variety of teeth, their structure is similar to ours. Shark and rays have a lot of different types of teeth and they are very different growing out of the skin, not from sockets in the bones. - UK nat'l aquarium the flounder seems to have a bit of a grammar/punctuation problem, despite being english and having been college-educated in marine biology. but nevertheless we take his word as bond. but despite all of this "fine line between a tooth and tooth-like object" talk, a normal person is going to look at a goldfish, which has "teeth" in the back of its throat in the form of sandpaper-y ridges to grind up food, and say "that fish does not have teeth". ie, there are no pointy things jutting out from behind the lips. on the other hand, no one is going to look at a pike or baracuda (or a flounder, for that matter) and say "those pointy things jutting out from behind that fish's lips are not teeth". we have to consider a jury of reasonable non-marine biologists, and their standard for a "common law fish tooth". based on that definition of a tooth (what 99% of non-insane people are going to agree looks like a tooth), some fish do and some fish don't. i can't find a picture of a flounder that proves they do indeed have teeth, but i found this: Flounder are ambush predators and their feeding ground is the soft mud of the sea bottom, near bridge piles, docks, and other bottom incumbrances; they are sometimes found on bass grounds as well. Their diet consists mainly of fish spawn, crustaceans, polychaetes and small fish. flounders have teeth, mom. sheesh. i think she had in her mind the picture of a silly, innocous, flat creature that is eaten on a plate, as opposed to a mercenary predator of the deep. halibut, i'm told, can present a significant risk to fishermen when hauled aboard the decks of fishing boats. they can be as big as 600lbs and 8 feet long, and can easily break legs with their flagellations. |
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