the.com/moonfish
a dinner-plate that swims, glows faintly, and decided cold-blooded was for cowards.
means A name for various deep-bodied, silvery, disc-shaped fish — most notably the opah (Lampris), and sometimes the moonyfishes and others — whose flat, rounded bodies recall the full moon.
from A plain English compound of 'moon' + 'fish,' coined by sailors and fishermen who looked at the broad, round, silver-bright body of these fish and saw the moon staring back. 'Moon' descends from Old English 'mōna,' a word with deep Germanic roots and cousins across the Indo-European family (Latin 'mensis,' Greek 'mēn,' all tangled up with the moon's monthly cycle). The opah in particular earns the name twice over: it's not only round and moon-pale but genuinely warm-bodied — the first fish found to be fully warm-blooded — which the essence cheekily nods to.
- first warm-blood
- only known fully warm-blooded fish
- size
- can hit 600 pounds and disc-shaped
- aka
- called opah by people who fish it
- warm heart
- heats blood via tireless flapping fins
- deep diver
- hunts hundreds of meters in cold gloom
opah — large colorful moonfish found in atlantic, pacific, and indian oceans, grows up to 6 feet long
mola mola — ocean sunfish, heaviest bony fish species, weighs up to 5,000 pounds in tropical oceans
selene vomer — atlantic moonfish, silver disc-shaped fish found from nova scotia to argentina