RSS
Home
Fish with Human Teeth: A strange sighting along the Texas coast
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Strange fish found on the Texas coast
Sightings of strange creatures abound. The images included in this article are thought by some to be some form of Pacu , Sheepshead or Snapper. According to experts, Pacu are a South American fresh-water fish that have been sold in North American pet stores. Sheepshead are found in the Atlantic and Gulf waters and are generally around 5-8 inches long, although larger specimens have been found. Snappers are marine fish, found typically in the world's oceans and seas, but their teeth are generally sharp and their fins farther back along the spinal region.
There are many images of Pacu, Sheepshead and Snappers online. Pacu are skinny and tall, dark with pugnacious mouths and can reach lengths of over 3 feet. They are known for the resemblance of their teeth to humans. They're generally pleasing asthetically, hence their original appeal to suburban pet stores. Sheepshead are known for their hardy nature and difficulty to catch, due to their dentiture (their front teeth look like sheep's teeth) and the hardness of their inner mouths. Snappers are leaner and meaner, with a sharp set of teeth and are tenacious predators to smaller fish and marine animals. But the images of these fish barely resemble the specimen found washed up on the Corpus Christi coastline on August 16th, 2009. Although bitten in half, this fillet was easily 8-10 inches long with 3 rows of teeth and serrated fin spines that bear little resemblance to its more portly and traditional southern Pacu cousins or its similarly predatory Snapper kinfolk. Complete, it would have been a sizeable morsel for a shark or whatever creature ended its days.
Aquarium Pacu
The mundane Pacu, Sheepshead and Snapper images found across the net seem sanitized for viewing, while the creature a man showed me on the beach in Corpus Christi evokes archetypal echoes of some primal, oceanic cousin, lean and built for deep waters and terrible predators. His seemed singularly ferocious but perhaps caught up in an oceanic transitory phase, its state of half-eatenness indicative of a fierce and desperate chase, a quick snap, life's terminus and dissolution under the waves, flotsamed and found, bound for an ignoble internet end.
There are a number of sites featuring amazing fish with human teeth. The appearance of this fish in the gulf of Mexico is interesting and perhaps linked to global warming and oceans and seas in transition, as fish typically found in tropical waters find themselves in subtropical waters inhabited by other species themselves in transition, as is the ocean and world around them. The lean and efficient design of this fish seems to rule out its full membership in the Pacu family, and also some placid migration from an aquarium to a waterway and, eventually, to the Gulf. The human-like appearance of its teeth and fin placement and type also seem to rule out its membership in the Snapper family. However, it does seem to bear more than a passing resemblance to the Sheepshead family, and perhaps its appearance is indicative of some movement of the species along the coastlines of North America due to warming conditions in the subtropical latitudes.
A fellow explorer of the Unknown
Creatures out of their depths find it difficult to survive in waters where they are no longer able to fulfill a particular ecological niche in their level of the food chain. The interconnected chains in the food web have perhaps mixed and merged in some places, placing competing creatures in direct and confused opposition for the same resources. It makes sense on a planetary level for the multiple and overlapping biospheric transitions currently plaguing the planet to reproduce themselves at all levels of plant and animal life.
I told the man on the beach that I would research the creature and post his online, to become what I soon found to be yet another in what is currently a relatively sparse collection of strange fish with human-like teeth.
His fish was wild, primal. If this fish is related to the Pacu or Snapper families, it is some unknown type. It seems to be a Sheepshead, one of worthy size and comportment, if it's half-eaten condition is any indication of the life it lived beneath the waves. Whatever kind of fish this is, it's appearance is testament to the strange and wondrous nature of Creation and, like other fish out of their natural waters, this strange denizen of the oceans now making its home in Texas coastal waters is in for a hard time, but may be indicative of even harder times to come. Edited for content on 8/18/09.
Strange fish found on the Texas coast
Related Articles:
Comments
.jpg)
