#bowfin

[t00thpasteface]

fish from lecture: bichir, bowfin, and gar

[antiqueanimals]

Florida Wildlife; vol. 11, no. 11. April, 1958. Illustration by Wallace Hughes.

Internet Archive

[vintagewildlife]

Bowfin By: Tom McHugh From: Natural History Magazine 1977

[bethanythebogwitch]

Fish at the state fair (booth set up by the state department of natural resources to raise awareness of ecological issues. Hopefully they get to live in a bigger tank normally)

An alligator gar. They used to be native to the state but were extirpated.

Gar gang rise up (alligator and longnose gar)

I think this one's a smallmouth buffalo but I'm not positive

I had somehow never heard of these before. The people there said it's a bowfin.

Big old catfish. Flathead I think

[sandpaperoctopi]

fish friends (not to scale)

[fish-daily]

Can you draw a Choupique?

fish 34 - choupique/bowfin

[typhlonectes]

Bowfin (Amia calva) 

The bowfin is a bony fish, native to North America. Common names include mudfish, mud pike, dogfish, grindle, grinnel, swamp trout, and choupique. It is regarded as a relict, being the sole surviving species of the Halecomorphi, a group of fish that first appeared during the Early Triassic, around 250 million years ago. The bowfin is often considered a "primitive fish" because they have retained some morphological characteristics of their early ancestors. The closest living relatives of bowfins are gars, with the two groups being united in the clade Holostei.

Bowfins are demersal freshwater piscivores, commonly found throughout much of the eastern United States, and in southern Ontario and Quebec. Their preferred habitat includes vegetated sloughs, lowland rivers and lakes, swamps, and backwater areas; they are also occasionally found in brackish water. They are stalking, ambush predators known to move into the shallows at night to prey on fish and aquatic invertebrates such as crawfish, mollusks, and aquatic insects...

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowfin

Images: Ryan Hagerty/USFWS, USFWS, and Stan Shebs CC

[jojoseames]

Skulltober day 17: bowfin

Ink, 7 x 5 inches JoJo Seames, 2023

[thatnostalgiccarp]

Critter fact #27:

The Bowfin (Amia calva) was recently split into two species, the Ruddy Bowfin (Amia calva) and Eyetail Bowfin (Amia ocellicauda). The two species are most reliably distinguished by range and skull structure.

[itsdetachable]

Remember, no matter what some idiot sport fisherman tell you, Bowfin are native to the Middle and Eastern US and are FRIENDS

Snakeheads are INVASIVE bc they are native to Asia and while they are also a variety of Friend they do not belong in North America.

Some idiots will say that Bowfin are Bad or even EVIL because they eat the Preferred Sport Fish (bass, pinkish, walleye) especially the babies that fit easily in their mouthsand that they do so Ravenously and Decimate the Population!

This is False. Bowfin eat fish of all kinds because that is what living things do. It's in their job description. Bowfin also don't decimate populations - they eat as much as they need.

Also, something some sport fisherman won't tell you when complaining about the "dog fish" is that many lakes are stocked yearly with young sport fish. These can include species not native to the area, like Smallmouth Bass, Pike, Walleye, etc. Stocking large amounts of sport fish into a lake will obviously have a cascading effect on other fish populations - what they see as "BOWFIN DESTROYING SPORT FISH" may simply be Bowfin taking advantage of the sudden influx of food and population growth.

Anyways, Bowfin are fantastic, interesting fish that don't deserve hate. They can breathe both in the water and In The Air! They can survive on the ground for a while as long as they are kept moist and will even be able, within reason, to amble back to the water (I've seen it personally).

Bowfin deserve love and respect.

P.s. in the US Snakehead, regarded as an invasive species, should be humanely killed when they are caught and not released back into the water.

[thewormsingularityisnear]

[tenth-sentence]

And it is in fresh water that we find seven genera of Ganoid fishes, remnants of a once preponderant order: and in fresh water we find some of the most anomalous forms now known in the world, as the Ornithorhynchus and Lepidosiren, which, like fossils, connect to a certain extent orders now widely separated in the natural scale.

"On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" - Charles Darwin

[antiqueanimals]

Reptiles, Amphibia, Fishes and Lower Chordata. Written by Richard Lydekker and others. Published in 1912.

Internet Archive

[vintagewildlife]

Bowfin By: Renaud / Jacana Press Agency From: Éditions Rencontre Cards 1975

[spearxwind]

Hi! I found a very cool fish photo and wanted to share! It is freshwater so idk if u know what it is but I sure don’t 😂 so was wondering if u maybe knew plus it looks awesome regardless so here have feesh

Yee I'm not super familiar with freshwater fish but I'm pretty sure that's a giant snakehead! They're really cool and there's a lot of insanely cool pictures of them :3 (though most of them are as trophies since people fish them a lot)

Here's more pics of some rly pretty ones I have saved

(the last one Im pretty sure has the saturation cranked up insanely high, but its a really cool look nontheless)

[tetrapodomorpha]

i love you lungfish i love you sturgeon i love you paddlefish i love you mormyrid i love you bichir i love you arowana i love you arapaima i love you electric eel i love you catfish i love you lamprey i love you bowfin i love you gar i love you freshwater freaks i love you evolution's most wonderful and most unique children i love you so-called monsters