Fish with 'human' teeth caught in North Carolina

Fish with 'human' teeth caught in North Carolina(bbc.com)

27 points by Nevaeh 4 years ago | 25 comments

pvaldes 4 years ago |

Let me guess by the title... a super common Sparidae?

Yep, nothing strange them. Every marine biologist, alive or past, know that sea breams that eat mainly shells have this set of teeth to tear and crush.

A much more interesting trivia is that this animal is hermaphrodyte so the journalists have lost their only chance to write something like 'mutating bisexual fish with human teeth and wearing a prison uniform, discovered'.

chansiky 4 years ago | |

  > that eat mainly shells have this set of teeth to tear and crush

I was thinking when I saw the images that there must be some sort of convergent evolution going on. I would love to know what the similarities in our mastication patterns are with these fish. I wonder if our purported history with consuming bone marrow have anything to do with this similarity?

pvaldes 4 years ago | | |

The entire family is like a bunch of Darwin's finches. The predators of fish and squid have four big fangs. The eaters of tiny crustaceans and algae eaters have a comb of needles, and the predators of limpets and clams have incisors and molars (Take a look also to the grinding teeth like cobblestones at the bottom of the mouth).

david-gpu 4 years ago | |

> this animal is hermaphrodyte so the journalists have lost their only chance to write something like 'mutating bisexual fish

I've heard bisexuality defined as sexual attraction towards both males and females. If your species is hermaphrodite, you arguably cannot be bisexual because there are neither males not females to be attracted to.

brailsafe 4 years ago | |

This strikes me as an awfully cynical take. Most people aren't marine biologists it turns out.

crazydoggers 4 years ago |

This article is making it sound like this is some new amazing find. These fish are well known… there’s even a town named after them!

Yes, the teeth look human. Convergent evolution:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution

mas-ev 4 years ago | |

I'm conflicted when it comes to things being reposted and framed at new on the internet.

To many it is new. However, it's not new to me so it feels more click baity.

crazydoggers 4 years ago | | |

I’m all for introducing people to knew things, and reading about things I didn’t know about before, but this is just not honest reporting. It’s designed to get passed around on Facebook and if they make it seem ordinary, people won’t pass it around.

They’ve taken a Facebook post, and editorialized it specifically to make it sound very special.

If you wrote the same article about someone catching a salmon would you say “the fish was identified as a salmon”?

They also could have easily said “these fish are common in coastal waters, and caught and eaten all the time” but they purposefully left that out.

gala8y 4 years ago | | |

What surprises me is that BBC is offloading content from FB and making it their 'articles'/'news'.

At the bottom of the 'article' there is a snippet:

> The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. View original post on Facebook

From top of the page it looks like standard news piece, filed under World / US & Canada. The 'article' does not mention that "it’s weird, but a known fish" as @aikinai stated in another comment. All of this is troubling.

Gee..., you can be on BBC, too!

grendelt 4 years ago |

All sheepshead I've ever caught (Galveston, TX) look like that. They regularly swim around below the piers and use those teeth to eat/bite off barnacles on the pilings. Not sure what's newsworthy here, BBC.

timonoko 4 years ago |

Most terrifying fish to catch, because bites fingers off. But edible.

bryanrasmussen 4 years ago | |

but this may the only chance you have to actually reply "because it bit my finger so" to the question "why did you let it go?"

timonoko 4 years ago | | |

Best way to avoid problems is to let it bite on something. It latches on for few minutes and then you can try to kill it. Triggerfish especially has such an alien anatomy that it starts snapping fingers when already in the cooking pot.

simmerup 4 years ago |

Is that not a photoshop? The teeth look like they blur into the mouth

aikinai 4 years ago | |

It’s real, but not sure why it’s news. It’s weird, but a known fish. There are a lot of photos if you Google sheepshead fish.

pvaldes 4 years ago | |

This is its normal aspect

Farfromthehood 4 years ago |

Common fish. They eat shellfish. They taste like crab.

headmelted 4 years ago | |

The shellfish taste like crab or this merdonkey does?

McMiniBurger 4 years ago |

can humans use those teeth as replacement?

pvaldes 4 years ago | |

Not. Even if we could solve the rejecting issues (and we have fully solved the technology for breeding sea breams since decades), they are too small. Not really suitable for adult people.

And not useful for children, that would lost and replace their teeth in any case.

The structure of the teeth root is also different, and the mandible is much more acute triangular than ours. Not useful to replace part of a missing mandible in my opinion. Specially when you can just made a ceramic piece of the right size and shape and do a bone self-transplant.