Goliath Tigerfish

WE’VE MOVED! COME AND SEE US HERE YOU BIG SMASHER!

Don’t worry it’ll only attack you if you’re wet… meet the goliath tigerfish of the river Congo.

... and this is the eating end

He’s a smasher isn’t he! One learned friend of The Proceedings described him as ‘…the fiercest fish that swims. Let others hold forth as advocates for the mako shark, the barracudas or the blue fish of the Atlantic. To them I say ‘Pish and Tush’’. Strong words I know, and I can only apologize that such offensive language has been used in front of lady folk, however I felt it prudent to establish just what a vicious brute he is.

A huge bollard of darting fishy muscle, the goliath tigerfish is quite simply an eating machine. Those teeth are set into a hard bony jaw so that when it snaps its unbelievable gob shut they interlock like a set of shears. If you happen to have rolled up your trousers for a paddle in the Congo it would be clever thinking to keep the noise down, as the goliath tigerfish’s sense of hearing is absolutely tip-top, a small bone connects its ear to its swim bladder which acts like an amplifier. The other rather brilliant news about this highly-astute uber-strong swimming set of gnashers is that they shoal… in huge numbers. Attacks on humans have been reported but not verified.

goliath tigerfish: not very cuddly

Though there has to be a bit more than ‘bitiness’ to get you into The Proceedings of the Ever So Strange. You see all around the world wildly different creatures look a bit similar. One reason for this is that there are only so many things in the world that make a sufficient supper. What’s more evolution only has what it’s given to work with… much like the Royal families’ portrait artist. The foot of an elephant contain the same bones as the foot of a mouse. The neck of a giraffe has exactly the same amount of vertebrae as that of Winston Churchill. Combine this fact with there are only so many meal tickets in the wild, you get animals that aren’t closely related who look remarkably similar… like the anteaters, the aardvarks and the pangolins for example. Evolution has come up with the same answer to the same question, just in a different place. Convergent evolution as learned types call it. Why all these musings I hear you cry, well put simply the goliath tigerfish is Africa’s version of the river Amazon’s renowned piranha… and indeed it is incredibly similar… just much much bigger.