A Mysterious Marine Inhabitant That Scares The Locals Quite a Lot. Alligator Pike. In North America, huge and full-flowing rivers flow, such as the father of them all, the Mississippi. They were chosen as a home by a huge freshwater fish with an alligator head and an impressive mouth full of sharp teeth.
The official name of the creature is the Mississippi Carapace, and this is a real dinosaur fish, the ancestors of modern fish lived here about a hundred million years ago, judging by the found remains. Another name for the monster is the alligator pike.
Now such pikes reach 3 meters in length and weigh 150 kilograms, but in the old days, there were also larger specimens. Unfortunately, civilization and progress did not spare the inhabitants of wild nature, their habitat decreased, the ecology got worse. But the carapace, we would say, was lucky, he turned out to be useless for humans - his meat is tough, tasteless and, in general, inedible.
And some parts are completely poisonous: the insides and especially the caviar. Only the local people by the Mississippi River, the Indians, can eat alligator pike meat.
Is a three-meter toothy monster dangerous for humans - theoretically, yes, there are even facts of alligator pikes attacking people, but this happens extremely rarely. It is easier to get hurt by a fallen tree or be attacked by any other predators. You should never dip a damaged finger into river water, otherwise, there may be those who want to munch it. And these will not necessarily be alligators, it might be much smaller creatures.
Moreover, this fish can scare people by sticking its head out of the water and sitting like that for quite a long time, that is why it is often mistaken with an alligator. It can simply breathe oxygen from the air above the water since it is not enough in the slow waters of the Mississippi for such a large living creature. The fish turned out to be useless for people, but it still suffered from them – it was killed for eating commercial fish. That is, it competed with fishermen.
Some hunters were able to catch this fish only to make a stuffed animal out of it and hang it on the wall.
Only in the 1980s, the fishermen finally changed their minds, after all, the unique alligator pike was on the verge of complete extinction, and this can bring any environmental problems.
#Marine #AlligatorPike #fish #amazing
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