Could they have been Snakehead Fish ?
Some have escaped in New York, I believe.
Mmm… Monkfish… Raw monkfish liver is a delicacy, some say it’s better than foie gras. And IMHO the only soup better than monkfish soup (cooked with sake and miso) is spiny lobster soup. It’s a very difficult fish to prepare though, you can’t fillet it like regular fish. In Japan it’s usually sold already prepared and ready to cook.
It was in the supermarket kind of one, on the corner directly opposite from the main entrance to the botanic gardens, on Main Street and (I think) Elder. Basically, it’s the southernmost of the food stores north of Kissena Corridor Park.
Definitely not a mudpuppy nor a snakehead fish, both of which are far too slim to qualify as “lumpy.”
Re Monkfish
I thought they were much bigger. OTTOMH, a Malcolm In The Middle episode shows Reese stuffing a turkey and then stuffing a monkish with the turkey.
Re Mudskippers
I can certainly see gourmets importing them. There are plenty of precedents.
Hmm, perhaps they are not food. These animals, or some part of them or a substance they produce, may be the ingredient needed for a chi spell. Try standing near the container and repeating “Oo mo gwai gwai fi nee sao” and see if anything happens.
That would be the major objection that I would see to monkfish - they would, I think, usually be larger than a large frog. On the other hand, they would certainly be the mostly commonly sold fish of that general appearance. But perhaps it could be some other kind of anglerfish.
I’ve been around the SDMB for a long time, and I’ve never experienced a frisson like when I realized we were using Malcolm in the Middle to argue a point of zoology: monkfish are big fish
RM Mentock I wasn’t using it as a cite. I just had a lot of windows open at the time, my cpu was running slower than usual and I didn’t want to open a window to search and more windows for results.
I’ll confirm the presence of wild mudskippers living in South Florida. At least they used to, in decent sized groups no less. The entire geographical area is honeycombed with a canal system system that I believe was built by the Army Corps of Engineers decades ago. I grew up on one of the larger canals, and used to catch skippers all the time with my little pole.
They dig bologna. I never saw one climb out of the water, they seemed to stay beneath the surface fulltime. This was…20 years ago?
But only people that don’t know any better would eat out of a canal though, no matter what it was you caught. Ick.
There are a number of temperate coatal fish that have a froglike appearance; not sure which of these might be native to your area, but they typically look like the Blenny/Shanny.
I’m certain these would not have been mudskippers. Mudskippers spend most of their time on the mudflats. If they were always below the surface, they were not mudskippers. (I also doubt they would go for bologna.)
I’m fairly familiar with the literature on introduced species, and if something as bizarre and exotic as mudskippers had become established in south Florida 20 years ago to the extent you found them common, I’m certain I would have heard of it.
As Mangetout says, there are a number of native fish that have a somewhat froglike appearance.
no, no, DocCathode, it wasn’t a bad thing