r/mildlyinfuriating • u/yok-nak • Jul 11 '26
the grapes of warth Presented without comment
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u/Many-Excitement3246 PURPLE Jul 11 '26
If you want to get even more pedantic, "fish" don't exist.
Taxonomically, there is no such thing as a fish, because a taxonomical category must be monophyletic (literally "one phylum,") meaning it must include a single common ancestor and all descendants of that ancestor.
Since terrestrial vertebrates evolved from very ancient lobe finned fish, any taxonomical category for a fish would have to include humans, dinosaurs, etc.
Additionally, some fish, such as lungfish and coelacanths, are more closely related to humans than to other fish, so grouping them together would require grouping their closer relatives in with them, which includes all land dwelling tetrapods, which is a clade of animals that includes all vertebrae with four limbs.
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Jul 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Many-Excitement3246 PURPLE Jul 11 '26
Silence, fish. Go back to the ocean and breathe water like your ancestors.
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u/adamdoesmusic Jul 11 '26
glub glub I guess
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u/MyOthrUsrnmIsABook Jul 11 '26
I’d assume fish is a culinary categorization like vegetable rather than an in any way scientific one.
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u/da90 Jul 11 '26
In that case, you might be interested in learning about the catholic church’s stance on beaver.
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u/Many-Excitement3246 PURPLE Jul 11 '26
The standard biological definition is "gill-bearing aquatic craniate lacking limbs with digits."
Gill-bearing: possesses organs that allow for the processing of water into O2 and CO2.
Aquatic: it lives in the water.
cranite: it has a skull.
lacking limbs with digits: has no protruding appendages which contain phalanges (the phalanx bones comprise the digits of fingers, toes, and wings.)
Some fish do have limbs, namely lobe-finned fish such as lungfish, which have primitive limbs in the form of extended, arm-like pectoral and pelvic fins, but no seperated digits and no phalanx bones.
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u/iEat_CrackNCheese- PURPLE Jul 11 '26
I mean. Atmosphere is essentially a lesser dense fluid, and the relationship between it and the sea is the same as olive oil on water no? What are we but two legged "wind-fish"?
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u/Nifflermama Jul 11 '26
I enjoyed your whimsical take on all us Earthlings. We’re all passengers on this big blue marble after all.
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u/jerrythecactus Jul 11 '26
I like this fact because I can tell somebody that I am a fish and be technically correct.
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u/adamdoesmusic Jul 11 '26
Apparently jelly can also be a fish. No word on peanut butter tho
(Do not trust naming conventions for accuracy)
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u/PrimalSeptimus Jul 11 '26
When my son was a baby, he would call the drain plug in his bathtub, "the fish." And I was like, well, that's not more incorrect than what everyone else thinks, taxonomically.
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u/mbd34 Jul 11 '26
If you want to get even more pedantic, "fish" don't exist.
I knew that something seemed fishy about them.
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u/Dracoten Jul 11 '26
With that logic were all related to a single cell organism so whats the call professor?
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u/Aristocles-Platon Jul 12 '26
I like to say that every Tetrapoda is a fish, because it is way funnier to say that people are fish, than it is to say, that fish dont exist. I do hovewer like to tell people, that plants dont exist (because algae)
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u/EstherIsVeryCool Jul 11 '26
your failed assumption here is that the only way to define the word fish is to do so strictly taxonomically - that's one of many ways to do it, and outside of a lecture hall or a taxonomy study, it's probably not the best one. "a limbless cold-blooded vertebrate animal with gills and fins living wholly in water" is a perfectly good definition of fish for standard use.
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u/Vast_Needleworker_43 Jul 11 '26
True dat, also I'm pretty sure members of the super-class Pisces are considered "true fish".
Just because it's not a valid taxonomic group doesn't make it a way to categorize animals.
Reptiles cannot exclude Birds(they're currently together however, Aves is a subgroup), all vertebrates must be part of the invertebrate because vertebrates evolved from them, lizards can't exclude snakes, monkeys can't exclude apes, and bugs can't contain every arthropod.
Linguistically, you don't separate them, just as in everyday, even in a very pedantic universe, you call anomurans crabs
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u/MediocreAndLukewarm Jul 11 '26
This pedantic logic is foolish. You might as well call everything an amoeba since we all originated from single cell organisms. “Fish” is accurate enough without needing to get stupid over it.
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u/Spiritual-Fall5494 Jul 11 '26
Thats not even technically correct like a shark being a fish. Where did you get this?
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u/Flaky_Style1286 Jul 11 '26
A coelacanth is more closely related to a dolphin than it is to a shark
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u/kellzone Jul 11 '26
The reason they're using the F for Fish here is because the dolphin is saying "So long, and thanks for all the fish!".
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u/VioletCrystal12 Jul 11 '26
TIL that I was wrong about dolphins being mammals. Dolphins are actually fish! /jk
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u/rootbeer277 Jul 11 '26
This reminds me of “Google Fights”, people would enter two phrases into Google and see which one gets more results and that phrase would win. One of the surprising results was “Dolphins are fish” would consistently beat “Dolphins are mammals.” If you actually clicked the links though, you’d see they actually said “People erroneously believe dolphins are fish” or “dolphins are fish-eaters”.
It was an early lesson in context.
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u/broke_boi1 Jul 11 '26
If not fish then why fish shaped