Ig’nce must be fought! This brings up the burning question… are fish farts as awful as dog and cat farts can be?
Ya know, I’m generally kind to animals. However, I’m afraid if I saw something like that, especially if it was angry and showing the teeth you described, I’d shoot the thing. Depending on how sober I happened to be at the moment, I might alert the media that I’d saved the planet from invading aliensl…
I don’t know why, Selkie, but I keep getting a mental image of the scene in Alien where the thing bursts out of the guy’s stomach.
You might want to consider a concrete tank…
Selkie, that is hilarious. I mean, pee-pants funny.
It would be funny even if I weren’t a fish person, but since I am a fish person, I laughed until my stomach hurt while trying to read this to my boyfriend. If Fish were mine, he would still be drying on the floor and threatening me with flatulence. I would have been laughing too hard to help him. And his reputation as a finger snatcher and flesh stripper would be sorely degraded.
Are you now tempted to visit his tank and make fart noises at him?
When I was but a young rogue, I used to watch “The Ren and Stimpy Show” which occassionally had a prominent segment on the mudskipper. It could live on land and had teeth, so it reminds me of your lungfish in a nostalgic sweet kind of way.
My point is, if your Fish is anywhere near as skilled as that mudskipper, then you have my respect sir, or maam. Even if not, you still have it. What I’ve read here today has been most entertaining and enlightening!
Pictures, schmictures. We need a .wav file.
Um – can that thing climb stairs?
Aw, Fish is adorable. I like critters that let you know when it’s feeding time.
I’m just posting to say that what caught my eye about this thread was the combo of its title and the OP’s name: a fish story, by a poster whose name means a mythological seal/human creature. Heh. 
I was gonna comment on this thread, but… nah.
Great Guinea Pig of Winnipeg, Selkie - not only does Fish/Termy/Teeth go after you in your sleep, he’s got internet access! I’m very, very afraid!!! 
Guys, I’m not sure which is funnier: Fish’s behavior, or your posts. Thanks for the giggles. 
After much discussion amongst the three people unfortunate enough to have handled Fish in the last couple of years, we’ve decided on a weight of eight pounds, more or less. I trust you all will understand that although I staunchly support scientific accuracy, my effort to find a volunteer who would catch and weigh him met with no takers. However, as Fish is currently very hungry, and I have yet to acquire some sacrifices for his dinner, another opportunity may present itself. Unless, that is, I’ve been wrong about his motives for leaving his tank, and all along he’s been heading to the office jonesing for an Internet fix. Do they make waterproof wireless keyboards?
Fish’s speed and mobility on land are startling, but although those thread-like fins are many times stronger than you’d expect, I doubt he has the ability to climb stairs. I suppose I can stash nervous visitors in the attic, if need be.
In the course of attempting more pictures, I also discovered that Fish’s eyesight is keener than I’d ever realized. One of his favorite hunting techniques is to hang motionless in midwater, evaluating his potential victims. I thought it would make a great picture. As soon as I bring out the camera, he drops to the bottom and waits until I put the camera away before resuming the hunt. He has no problem with my watching his behavior, only documenting it. Hmmm…
Still, I managed to snap a great view of the last thing many a goldfish, and one of Fish’s siblings, ever saw. Fish’s sibling, you ask? Why yes. I bought three tiny hatchling lungfish to increase my likelihood of keeping one alive. At the time, the received wisdom was that keeping lungfish alive in captivity was extremely difficult, and that even many public aquaria couldn’t keep them. This “wisdom” turned out to be hogwash, but it does segue into the story of Fish’s siblings. One of them met a banal death by drowning, and the other I promise to put in spoiler tags to protect the squeamish.
Beaucarnea: how did you know? Oh, that’s right - you’re a fish person! 
How do you drown a fish?
The last thing other fish, or fingers, ever see
Now that you mention it, he does look a bit like an Alien chestbuster, doesn’t he?
I read the OP to my son, and the one thing we agreed on (in between howling with laughter) was our inability to figure out how you sleep knowing this thing can crawl out of its tank, scurry across the floor and strip flesh from bone. Then I scrolled down and saw that this had already happened, AT NIGHT, and the only thing that saved you was a penchant for clean carpeting. I have to ask: if you are a guy, how do you get women to spend the night if they know what this fish can do? And how DO you sleep? Do you set up motion detectors around the tank?
Yikes! That thing is scary! Though I bet my betta would be all like, “I’m gonna kick your ass!”…right before he turned into an Fish snack.
He is very impressive, in a OMG OMG OMG RUN FOR YOUR LIFE way!
He looks like an adorable sock puppet - you know, the kind where your fist makes the face? Fake adorble-ness, I presume?
misnomer: I love you. No one ever understands my username.
One more post tonight, before I pass Fish’s tank en route to my nice cozy bed. Oh wait. My nice cozy bed is currently covered with stuff from the room we’re painting, which means I get to sleep on the sofa next to Fish’s tank.
I’ll answer the other questions tomorrow, but to answer kittenblue:
My last boyfriend was allergic to the furred household residents, so sleeping at my house wasn’t an issue. Any future boyfriends will be of the type who (a) think Fish is a force of nature whose presence should be treasured, and (b) who are secure enough to let their girlfriend protect them in the event of an escape. (Too bad about the cute fish geek at the local pet store who not only owned two lungfish, but even bought one that had de-fingered its previous owner. Alas, he was only a few years older than Fish, and that felt like robbing the cradle).
As for how I sleep at night, see, Fish doesn’t scare me. Although he’s certainly capable of inflicting massive tissue damage, he’s more likely to flee than attack while out of water - at least, up until the point where I try to make him do something he doesn’t want to, like crawl into a box before being dumped back in his tank. Then, and only then, do I have to be seriously worried, and judging by this last experience, my primary danger would come from asphyxia due to excessive laughter. The six pound cat, although fearless, is also very smart. The Greyhound? If she could be bothered to crawl out of bed, all she’d do is alert me to the fact he was loose before resuming her nap.
Now Buddy was another story. Buddy’s now terrorizing the great barrier reef in the sky, but at the time - when Fish was a mere seven inches or so long - he was the Thing in Selkie’s House that everyone rightly feared. Buddy was a full-grown Synanceia verrucosa stonefish. Don’t let that rather tepid description of what happens to a victim fool you - stonefish are something nobody should mess with without a thorough understanding of what they’re taking on.
To give you some idea, the local wholesaler fish importers had no fear of handling sea snakes, cone snails, blue ringed octopus, and some decent-sized sharks, but they would never knowingly import a stonefish. The nature of shipping fish internationally, however, meant they would sometimes receive fish they hadn’t ordered. If that fish happened to be a stonefish or a scorpionfish, the reaction was always the same: Call Selkie to come and get it. And tell her SHE has to catch the #%#%ed thing out of the tank (which inevitably would be filled with lionfish, any one of which could have sent me to the ER). I accumulated quite the collection, and had tanks scattered around the living room and kitchen. The scientific names were often a hoot. My personal favorite was “Inimicus diabolus.” You can’t tell me the person responsible for that moniker wasn’t having fun. All of them were in the typical small sizes, around two to four inches long.
Buddy, however, was special. His previous owner understood what he had, and had owned him for five years before he (well, techinically, his girlfriend - personally, I’d have kept the stonefish and dumped the girl) decided it was time to put some “pretty fish” inside the tank, which meant Buddy had to go. Stonefish have enormous jaws, and he’d swallow anything put in a tank with him. At over eight inches standard length (about ten inches total length) he was in a size and weight class that made him potentially lethal, especially in a country where the antivenin was not available.
Being a responsible owner (bless his heart - so often stories about dangerous pets involve irresponsible owners), he refused to let Buddy go to anyone who didn’t appreciate the risk they were undertaking. So he opened the Chicago phone directory, and started calling pet stores, beginning with the letter “a”. He said everywhere he called, he received one of two answers: “Don’t know what it is, but sure we’ll take it” (at which point he hastily called the next store); or “Are you nuts?! There’s NO WAY I’D TAKE ONE OF THOSE THINGS!” (at which point the store owner would hastily hang up on him). He made to “V” before reaching my family, who knew I’d wanted one since I was a small child. Long, mildly embarassing story there.
Buddy was truly awesome. I fed him on tongs most of the time, but once we were comfortable with each other, I would occasionally feed him with my bare hand. The books say they’re slow moving, which is true most of the time, but they’re capable of intense bursts of speed. Having the gaping maw of a giant rock that can kill you bolt toward you to take food from your unprotected hand is an experience one never forgets. Wise? Maybe not, but the only person at risk was me, and I understood the consequences of a miscalculation. I knew the local ER would be no help if something did go wrong; I’ll never forget having to take my mother to one after she was stung by an anemone, and having to explain to the doctors what an anemone was, and that it was not a fish…
Buddy also came complete with weird behaviors like shedding his skin and having monthly panic attacks that appeared to be connected to the lunar cycle. Given that they oftentimes live in and near tide pools with plenty of moonlight, that may not be as ridiculous as it sounds. Because they live in rocky environments and tide pools, they’re quite adept at walking and can - you guessed it - live out of water for hours at a time. Even after death, their venom is still extremely potent, and the most venomous spines are on their dorsal fins where they can easily be stepped on. Every time I entered the house, the ritual was to check the floor and walk over to Buddy’s tank to verify his location.
I miss him. 
I love that you gave the killer such a trustworthy and all around-good-guy name! I would have happily grown up in your house.