Sunday, October 10, 2004

Toxotes Jaculatrix

I'm going to end my animal appreciations by giving a mention to the Archer Fish, undoubtedly the Batman of the fish world. Who's crazy idea was this? A fish that eats flies by shooting them out of the sky with jets of water! It's just completely unfeasibly unbelievable; no one could have predicted this, it's like finding a gerbil cooking omlettes, or a platypus playing chess. God most definitely has a sense of humor, and a lot of time on his hands. The archer fish must be looking smugly around at all the other underwater daughters and wondering why they got such a bum deal. Talk about superpowers; they're camouflaged so as not to alert the flies, they can squirt a jet of water over 2m, accurately to 1.5m, and they can leap 12inches into the air! These babies are the Inspector Gadget of the aquatic world! The most impressive feat of these fish is that they take into account the refraction of the light passing through water as they aim. They're not even born with this skill, they have to learn this arithmetic ability, which I'm sure they do as I've never seen one with a calculator. Maybe we should see if they can handle a GCSE maths paper?