By Any Other Name

 

Even the scientists didn't know what they were looking at when they netted the little critter off the coast of Vancouver Island. It looked like a dang tadpole in the salt sea, only less attractive. Finally one took the pencil out from behind his pocket protector and mined for earwax, squinted, reached all the way into the recesses of his considerable education and said "Aw, I know what that is. That, there, is a bony-eared assfish."

 

As soon as he said it, of course, everyone realized it had to be a bony-eared assfish. The thing about a bony-eared assfish is it makes you wonder what other kinds of assfish there are. Are there semi-flammulated assfish? Gibbous-bellied assfish? Stippled or morose assfish? I looked it up.

Well, what the hell. The only assfish is the bony-eared one. That doesn't really seem fair. Just the one assfish. Seems like calling it an assfish is bad enough and the bony-eared part is just piling on. Not that it's that great-looking a fish. It's bony and flabby, all at once. Wouldn't it have been more polite to lump it in with the other bottom-fish?

 

Nobody actually knows how the bony-eared assfish got its name. Yes, it has an anus. But no cleavage, per se.

 

There is some speculation that it has to do with the Greek name for the species, bestowed upon it in 1887 by German ichthyologist Albert Günther. He didn't take the oppportunity to name it after himself, and who can blame him? Anyway the Greek name means something like "bristly cod," which is sensible. But in Greek the word sounds like the word for "donkey." Or ass. And since everyone who was anyone in the late nineteenth century could get a chuckle out of a good Greek pun, Assfish it was.

 

We're not that familiar with the bony-eared assfish because, one, it is distinctly uncharismatic, and two, it's at the dang bottom of the ocean, and we're not. Like a number of other critters in the vicinity, it travels up to the surface at night for snacks. And back again before daylight. It has the distinction of having the smallest brain-to-body-weight of all the vertebrates, and it's not like it weighs much. The best it can do is get half a notion. Like, I've got half a notion to go up to the surface when it gets dark. And half a notion is all it takes.

 

You've got to give it credit, though. The biggest migration, by numbers of individuals, in the world is the migration of critters from the bottom of the sea to the top and back again, conducted nightly. And how does the little bony-eared assfish the hell know it's nighttime? There's no light down there. How much darker can it get? But in its tiny little brain it knows. The bony-eared assfish knows.

 

So, respect due.

 

But the poor bony-eared assfish is no beauty. At its best, at the bottom of the ocean, it is a sort of bristle-headed flaky thing with a skinny tail. At least there it is relatively sleek, but when it rises, and the pressure decreases on it, its cells swell up until it is a goobery mass of sad jelly, still with the skinny tail. And then it sinks back down to its previous ugly-but-not-gelatinous fish state.

Operating a brain takes a lot of energy and if you don't need your brain for any more than popping up to the surface and back again you can let it devolve over time. As it happens, we know our own human brains have gotten smaller in the last 10,000 years. And things are happening in a hurry, now. Speculation is that since we're now storing information outside of ourselves, in books, online, etc., we can get by with smaller brains. I know mine can't manage an article over 2,000 words anymore and I'm lost if I have to remember a password. TL,DR. Precious few of us know enough Greek anymore to be able to properly disparage a tiny assfish.

But assfish don't care. Assfish keep making more assfish.

The lack of good lighting probably helps.

Note to Uncle Walt: So long, and thanks for all the assfish.