The world we live in is indeed full of interesting things around, and the more we explore, the more we realize that our knowledge is still limited.
Fishermen caught a strange animal causing a stir
At the end of 2020, on a quite popular forum called Naira Land, there was a topic that attracted a lot of attention from netizens around the story of a mysterious animal caught by fishermen in the Philippines. .
According to information from the topic, after catching this animal, because they didn’t know what it was, they took a picture of it and posted it online, to see if someone could give them an exact answer.
From the shared image, it can be seen that the animal has a very strange appearance, even a bit scary with lines as if it is a hybrid of several different animals.
Strange animal caught by fishermen in the Philippines
The lower body of the animal has a somewhat similar appearance to a sea elephant or a seal or a sea lion. It is grayish in color and weighs a few pounds. However, it has a small yellow tusk sticking out of its nose like that of a small elephant. In addition to the tail, it also has 2 more paddles on both sides of the body to support swimming.
The animal has an ivory-like part sticking out of its nose
It is because of this bizarre appearance that the animal has attracted the attention of a large number of locals. Both adults and children flocked to see the animal with their own eyes. Many people admit that they have never seen anything like it since they were children.
After all, what is this strange child?
On the forum there are also many conjectures about the identity of the animal.
“It’s so scary, it’s like an alien,” commented one imaginative netizen.
“It looks like a combination of seals, elephants and pigs,” one person commented.
“I see it again as a cross between a buffalo and a seal,” another commented.
This is a picture of a manatee, and the tail doesn’t look like the animal the fishermen caught
“I think it’s a manatee. There’s nothing strange about it,” another person answered.
“Brother. This is not a manatee, because the bottom part looks similar, but the head of this animal is different”, another commented.
“This is a platypus,” replied another.
This is a platypus, bro
“The manatee must have had an affair with something in the sea and gave birth to this one, because its head looks a bit weird,” a funny netizen predicted.
“No, this is a dugong, also known as a sea cow, of the dugong family. It is also related to manatees so it looks a bit like this one, but the most distinctive feature is probably the tail.” Another person gave the most convincing sounding answer so far.
This is the front view of the sea cow (bowling fish), it also looks very similar
Finally, a Thai website said they also caught a bowfish in Phuket. And from the shared image, it can be seen that it is exactly the same animal that fishermen in the Philippines caught.
Dumplings caught in Phuket
Then the exact animal that the fishermen in the Philippines caught was a bowfish.
According to information from Wikipedia, the dugong, also known as sea cow or fairy fish (scientific name is Dugong) is a mammal that lives in the subtropical coastal zone. The dugongs are the only sea cows in their range, which spans the waters of some 40 countries and territories across the Indo-West Pacific.
Dumpling fish has a diamond-shaped body, thick skin, color changes according to the color of algae clinging to the skin, horizontal fins instead of vertical fins like other fishes. Their eyesight is very poor but their sense of smell is very sharp.
The reason dugongs are also called sea cows because they use their upper lip to graze on the grasses in the ocean. What we think of as tusks are actually their front teeth.
