There are fish with a bird name but not too many birds with a fish name. Is something fishy going on?
Here are 10 fish, some quite strange, that have a “bird name.”
1. Peacock Bass
2. Parrotfish
Parrotfishes are a group of about 95 species. Many are colorful and often seen by scuba divers near reefs.
Photo by: Ewa Barska
3. Eagle Ray
Eagle rays are a group of cartilaginous fishes in the family Myliobatidae, consisting mostly of large species living in the open ocean rather than on the sea bottom. The image below is a Spotted Eagle Ray.
4. Avocet snipe-eel: This fish uses the names of two different birds.
5. Cuckoo wrasse
6. Bombay duck. This is not the name of a duck – it is the name of a lizardfish. Seems they can not decide if it is a bird, lizard or fish.
Photograph by Hamid Badar Osmany
7. Sea Raven. Sea ravens are in the family of scorpaeniform fishes. They are bottom-dwelling fishes.
8, Sea robins or gurnard, are a family of bottom-feeding scorpaeniform fish.
9. The pelican eel, Eurypharynx pelecanoides, is a deep-sea fish rarely seen by humans. In this case it is easy to see how it was named.
10. The turkey moray (Gymnothorax meleagris),also known as the guineafowl moray. Seems they are stuck on naming it after a bird of some kind.
David Burdick http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/htmls/reef1490.htm