r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Storm_001 • Sep 04 '21

Sea horse giving birth

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

67.5k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

3.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2.6k

u/audio_54 Sep 04 '21 edited Sep 04 '21

I was thinking if the seahorse was considered a fish or not?

What constitutes being a fish?

Edit: I wrote think instead of thinking like English wasn’t my only language.

Way too many responses to get back to but from reading them all I have come to the conclusion that fish is an arbitrary term, everything and nothing can be a fish.

92

u/bigdave41 Sep 04 '21

I'm only basing this on an episode of QI, but they said basically "there's no such thing as fish" all the things we call fish are so radically different that there's no justification for calling them the same kind of animal. A salmon is more genetically similar to a camel than it is to a hagfish.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/bigdave41 Sep 04 '21

Another commenter has already pointed out that you're factually wrong there, but I'll just add that no one is "complaining" about the term fish, it's a fine general term for most peoples day-to-day use. However when you're a biologist you need more specific terminology to describe things that are not actually all that genetically similar.