Saturday, December 15, 2007

Lumpfish love isn't free

Who knew lumpfish could stir passions so? After yesterday's post on lumpfish, Jón Baldur Hlíðberg from Iceland sent an email saying lumpfish caviar is great, and kindly shared his fantastic illustrations of the fish of Iceland, including this lovely male lumpfish (right).

As if that wasn't enough on lumpfish, the astute Wolfman Jack noted the risks of fishing lumpfish in a comment to yesterday's post...just as I was ready to get some lumpfish caviar thanks to Jón's note. And I didn't get just one or two lumpfish items, the prolific Greg Laden featured lumpfish as "cool and odd" on his great blog, and the blogfish hit counter went nuts on Friday, partially due to lumpfish traffic. We scored over 5,000 unique visits on Friday, a blogfish record. Thanks all for stopping by, and since you seem to like odd sea creature stories I'll try to find more for you.

Now if you really want to know more about lumpfish, they are cold water fish that guard nests of young, some have suckers on their bellies that allow them to cling to rocks, Webster's online dictionary tells us that the word "lumpfish" is used 6 times out of 100 million words written or spoken in English, and the lumpfish is also known as paddlecock or lumpsucker.

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