Fish

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• Watch Animal Alligator gar The alligator gar is one of the largest freshwater fish in North America. It has a broad snout lined with teeth, armor-like scales, and a swim bladder that works like a lung, so it can gulp air in warm, still water. It lives in the big rivers, swamps and bayous of the southern United States, Mexico and Central America.
• Watch Animal Arapaima The arapaima is one of the biggest freshwater fish in the world, longer than a grown-up is tall. It lives in the warm, slow rivers and flooded lakes of the Amazon, and it must swim up to the surface to gulp air every few minutes.
• Watch Animal Atlantic bluefin tuna The Atlantic bluefin tuna is the largest of all tunas: big ones can be about 4 meters long. Its torpedo-shaped body is built for long journeys, and it can keep its body warmer than the water around it. Bluefin tuna were badly overfished, but with fishing limits set by countries working together, the numbers caught are now controlled.
• Watch 3D Animal Atlantic cod The Atlantic cod is a large, speckled fish of the cold North Atlantic. It has a whisker-like barbel on its chin and three fins along its back. For hundreds of years people have caught cod for food, so many that some cod populations crashed and are still being rebuilt today.
• Watch 3D Animal Atlantic herring The Atlantic herring is a small, silvery fish of the cold North Atlantic. Herring swim in enormous schools, eat tiny floating plankton, and lay their sticky eggs on the sea floor. Whales, seabirds and many fish depend on them for food, and people have fished for them for hundreds of years.
• Watch 3D Animal Atlantic mackerel The Atlantic mackerel is a sleek, shiny fish of the North Atlantic Ocean, with a blue-green back covered in wavy black bars and a silvery white belly. Mackerel swim in large schools near the surface, eat tiny crustaceans and lay floating eggs. Many fish and sea mammals eat them, and so do people.
• Watch Animal Atlantic mudskipper The Atlantic mudskipper is a fish that spends much of its time out of the water. It lives on the muddy shores of mangrove swamps and river mouths along the coast of West and Central Africa, where it skips across the mud on its strong front fins and catches food on land.
• Watch Animal Atlantic salmon The Atlantic salmon hatches in a river, swims out to the North Atlantic Ocean to feed and grow, then returns to the very river where it was born to lay its eggs. Along the way it changes color and shape several times.
• Watch 3D Animal Basking shark The basking shark is the second-biggest fish in the world, after the whale shark. It swims slowly near the surface with its enormous mouth open, sieving tiny floating animals called zooplankton out of the water. It is gentle and lives mainly in cool seas.
• Watch Animal Big-belly seahorse The big-belly seahorse lives in the cool coastal waters of southeastern Australia and New Zealand. It is one of the largest seahorses, usually 18 to 28 centimeters long. It grips seaweed and jetties with its curly tail and sucks up tiny shrimp through its snout. As in all seahorses, the male carries the eggs in a pouch on his belly and gives birth to hundreds of babies.
• Watch Animal Blacktip reef shark The blacktip reef shark is a medium-sized shark of warm, shallow coral reefs in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. You can spot it by the black tips on all its fins. It hunts fish, squid and crabs, stays close to its home reef, and gives birth to just a few live pups at a time.
• Watch 3D Animal Blue tang The blue tang is a royal-blue reef fish with black markings and a bright yellow tail. It lives on coral reefs across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, starts life yellow, and carries sharp blades at the base of its tail.
• Watch 3D Animal Bull shark The bull shark is a large, stout shark of warm coasts around the world. It is one of very few sharks that can swim from the salty sea into fresh water, and it has been found thousands of kilometers up big rivers like the Amazon and the Mississippi.
• Watch Animal Chinook salmon The Chinook salmon, also called the king salmon, is the largest Pacific salmon. It hatches in a cold river, travels to the ocean to feed and grow for a few years, then swims back up its home river to lay eggs.
• Watch 3D Animal Common carp The common carp is a large, sturdy fish with big scales and little whisker-like barbels by its mouth. It comes from rivers and lakes of Europe and Central Asia, but people have carried it to every continent except Antarctica, where it can muddy the water and harm water plants. Koi are a colorful kind of carp.
• Watch Animal Electric eel The electric eel is a long, snake-shaped fish from South America that makes its own electricity. It uses weak pulses to find its way and talk, and strong ones to catch food. Despite its name, it is not a true eel at all.
• Watch Animal Emperor angelfish The emperor angelfish is a striped reef fish from the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Adults are blue with bright yellow stripes, a yellow tail and a dark mask across the eyes. Young ones are dark blue with white and blue rings, and they change color as they grow. Emperor angelfish nibble sponges on the reef.
• Watch 3D Animal Epaulette shark The epaulette shark is a small, slender shark of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. It has a big black spot ringed with white above each front fin, and it can 'walk' along the reef, and even out of the water, by wriggling and pushing with its paddle-shaped fins. It can survive for a while in water with very little oxygen.
• Watch Animal Giant oarfish The giant oarfish is the longest bony fish in the world: it is usually about 3 meters long, and some have been reliably measured at 8 meters. Its silver, ribbon-shaped body has a red fin running all the way along its back. It lives in the open ocean, often hundreds of meters down, and drifts upright, head up, while it feeds on tiny krill.
• Watch Animal Giant oceanic manta ray The giant oceanic manta ray is the largest ray in the world, with wing-like fins that can stretch more than 6 meters from tip to tip. This gentle filter feeder funnels plankton into its wide mouth, and it has a single pup only every two to three years.
• Watch 3D Animal Goldfish The goldfish is a small member of the carp family that people in China tamed centuries ago, by the time of the Song dynasty (960–1279). Wild goldfish are greenish-brown, but careful breeding has made gold, white, black and spotted pets with fancy fins.
• Watch Animal Great hammerhead The great hammerhead is the biggest of the hammerhead sharks. Its wide, flat head, called a cephalofoil, holds its eyes far apart and is packed with senses that help it find stingrays hiding in the sand of warm, shallow seas.
• Watch 3D Animal Great white shark The great white shark is the largest of the mackerel sharks: a strong, torpedo-shaped fish with a gray back and a white belly. It hunts fish, seals and sea lions, and it is partly warm-blooded, which helps it stay active in cool water.
• Watch Animal Greenland shark The Greenland shark is a huge, slow-moving shark of the cold North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean. It grows very slowly in the cold, and in 2016 scientists used the lenses of its eyes to estimate that it can live for at least 272 years, longer than any other animal with a backbone that we know of.
• Watch 3D Animal Guppy The guppy is a small freshwater fish from northeastern South America and nearby Caribbean islands such as Trinidad. Males are smaller and brightly colored; females are larger and plainer. Guppies give birth to live young, and they are one of the most popular aquarium fish in the world.
• Watch Animal Humpback anglerfish The humpback anglerfish is a small, round, black fish of the deep, dark ocean. A long spine on the female's head ends in a glowing lure, lit by tiny bacteria, which draws prey close enough to catch in her big, toothy mouth. The males are tiny, only about 3 centimeters long, and their job is to find a female.
• Watch Animal Humphead wrasse The humphead wrasse is the biggest fish in the wrasse family, up to about 2.3 meters long. Adults have thick lips, a forehead hump and wavy lines on the face. They eat shellfish, sea urchins and even toxic crown-of-thorns starfish, and many change from female to male. Too many have been caught, so it is endangered.
• Watch 3D Animal Indo-Pacific sailfish The sailfish is a long, sleek ocean fish with a tall, sail-like fin on its back and a long, spear-shaped upper jaw called a bill. It hunts schools of small fish in warm seas, folding its sail away to speed up and raising it to make sharp turns.
• Watch 3D Animal Leafy seadragon The leafy seadragon is a relative of the seahorse covered in leaf-shaped flaps of skin. It drifts among seaweed so well that it almost disappears. It sucks up tiny shrimp through its long snout, and the father carries the eggs on his tail.
• Watch 3D Animal Lined seahorse The lined seahorse is a small fish of the western Atlantic Ocean, from Canada and the United States down to Brazil. It has a horse-shaped head, a long snout with no teeth and a tail that grips seagrass. The male carries the eggs in a pouch until tiny seahorses are born.
• Watch Animal Mandarinfish The mandarinfish is a small, shy fish from the coral reefs of the western Pacific Ocean. It has no scales; instead its skin is covered with slimy mucus and painted with swirling blue, orange and green lines. It hops along the reef bottom on fan-shaped fins, picking up tiny animals, and at dusk males and females rise together to release their eggs.
• Watch 3D Animal Megamouth shark The megamouth shark is a huge, slow shark with a big, rounded head and an enormous mouth. It swims with its mouth open to gulp tiny shrimp called krill and other small animals. It lives far out in the open ocean and is so rarely seen that scientists did not know it existed until 1976.
• Watch Animal Mekong giant catfish The Mekong giant catfish is one of the largest freshwater fish in the world. It lives only in the Mekong River and its lakes in Southeast Asia, grows up to about 3 meters long, and eats algae and plant matter. It is now critically endangered.
• Watch Animal Moorish idol The Moorish idol is a tall, flat reef fish with bold black, white and yellow bars, an orange patch on its snout and a long white fin that trails behind it like a ribbon. It lives on reefs across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, from East Africa to the coasts of the Americas, and uses its tube-like snout to pick sponges and small animals from cracks.
• Watch Animal Neon tetra The neon tetra is a tiny fish, about as long as a quarter is wide, with a glowing blue stripe and a bright red patch. In the wild it lives in clear and dark-water forest streams of the western Amazon. It is also one of the most popular aquarium fish in the world.
• Watch 3D Animal Northern pike The northern pike is a long, torpedo-shaped freshwater fish with a duck-bill snout full of sharp teeth. It lives in cool lakes and rivers across the northern parts of North America, Europe and Asia, where it hides among water plants and ambushes passing fish.
• Watch 3D Animal Ocean sunfish The ocean sunfish, or mola, is one of the heaviest bony fish in the world. Its body is tall, round and flat, with a long fin on top, another underneath, and a strange frilly edge instead of a tail. It dives deep to eat jellyfish and is often seen resting at the surface, perhaps to warm up.
• Watch Animal Ocellaris clownfish The ocellaris clownfish is a small orange-and-white reef fish from the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It shelters among the stinging tentacles of a sea anemone, protected by a slimy coat, and every clownfish starts life as a male.
• Watch Animal Orange clownfish The orange clownfish is a small, bright orange reef fish with three white bands edged in black. It lives in the warm western Pacific, from northern Australia to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, always beside a sea anemone. A coat of slimy mucus keeps the anemone's stings from hurting it, and the fish and anemone help each other.
• Watch Animal Rainbow trout The rainbow trout gets its name from the pink-red band along each side. It comes from the cool rivers and lakes of western North America and far eastern Russia. Some rainbows stay in fresh water all their lives, while others, called steelhead, swim out to the ocean and come back to spawn.
• Watch Animal Red lionfish The red lionfish is a striped reef fish with long, spiny fins that spread out like a lion's mane. It comes from the Pacific and eastern Indian Oceans, where it hunts small fish and shrimp at night. People released lionfish into the Atlantic Ocean, and there they have spread fast, eating many native reef fish.
• Watch Animal Red-bellied piranha The red-bellied piranha is a silver fish with a red belly that lives in rivers, creeks and floodplain ponds of South America. It has a famous reputation, but experts say the danger to people is greatly exaggerated: piranhas mostly eat fish, insects, snails and plants.
• Watch 3D Animal Reef stonefish The reef stonefish is a master of disguise. Its lumpy, warty skin and rocky colors make it look like a stone or a piece of coral on the sea floor. It waits without moving until a small fish or shrimp comes near, then gulps it in a flash. Sharp spines on its back protect it from enemies.
• Watch 3D Animal Scalloped hammerhead The scalloped hammerhead is a large shark with a wide, flat head shaped like a hammer, with wavy notches along the front edge. It lives in warm coastal seas around the world, gathers in big schools, and hunts fish and squid. It is now critically endangered because so many are caught.
• Watch 3D Animal Shortfin mako shark The shortfin mako is a sleek, metallic-blue shark that roams warm and mild oceans all over the world. Scientists call it the fastest shark: it can sprint at up to about 70 kilometers an hour and even leap out of the water. It hunts fast fish such as tuna and swordfish, and it is now endangered.
• Watch 3D Animal Siamese fighting fish The Siamese fighting fish, often called the betta, is a small freshwater fish from shallow, warm waters in Thailand. It can breathe air with a special organ, and males build nests of bubbles for their eggs. People have bred bettas for many centuries, giving pet bettas their bright colors and long fins.
• Watch Animal Smalltooth sawfish The smalltooth sawfish is a giant ray with a shark-like body and a long, flat snout edged with teeth, called a rostrum or saw. It swings the saw to stun fish and uses it to sense their tiny electric signals. Young sawfish grow up among mangroves. Once found on both sides of the Atlantic, it is now Critically Endangered.
• Watch Animal Smooth-head blobfish The smooth-head blobfish lives on the deep sea floor off southern Australia, 600 to 1,200 meters down, where the water pushes in hard from every side. Its body is soft, with loose skin and no scales. In the deep, the water pressure helps hold it in shape, so it looks like a fish. Pulled up to the surface, that pressure is gone and its body sags, which is why photos look so 'blobby'.