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Portal:Fish

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The Fish Portal

Ocellaris clownfish (Amphiprion ocellaris) in Papua New Guinea

A fish (pl.: fish or fishes) is an aquatic, anamniotic, gill-bearing vertebrate animal with swimming fins and a hard skull, but lacking limbs with digits. Fish can be grouped into the more basal jawless fish and the more common jawed fish, the latter including all living cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as the extinct placoderms and acanthodians. In a break to the long tradition of grouping all fish into a single class (Pisces), modern phylogenetics views fish as a paraphyletic group.

Bony fish, distinguished by the presence of swim bladders and later ossified endoskeletons, emerged as the dominant group of fish after the end-Devonian extinction wiped out the apex predators, the placoderms. Bony fish are further divided into the lobe-finned and ray-finned fish. About 96% of all living fish species today are teleosts, a crown group of ray-finned fish that can protrude their jaws. The tetrapods, a mostly terrestrial clade of vertebrates that have dominated the top trophic levels in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems since the Late Paleozoic, evolved from lobe-finned fish during the Carboniferous, developing air-breathing lungs homologous to swim bladders. Despite the cladistic lineage, tetrapods are usually not considered to be fish.

Fish have been an important natural resource for humans since prehistoric times, especially as food. Commercial and subsistence fishers harvest fish in wild fisheries or farm them in ponds or in breeding cages in the ocean. Fish are caught for recreation, or raised by fishkeepers as ornaments for private and public exhibition in aquaria and garden ponds. Fish have had a role in human culture through the ages, serving as deities, religious symbols, and as the subjects of art, books and movies. (Full article...)

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Cretoxyrhina mantelli tooth from New Jersey, USA; Naturhistorisches Museum (Vienna)

Cretoxyrhina (/krɪˌtɒksiˈrhnə/; meaning 'Cretaceous sharp-nose') is an extinct genus of large mackerel shark that lived about 107 to 73 million years ago during the late Albian to late Campanian of the Late Cretaceous. The type species, C. mantelli, is more commonly referred to as the Ginsu shark, first popularized in reference to the Ginsu knife, as its theoretical feeding mechanism is often compared with the "slicing and dicing" when one uses the knife. Cretoxyrhina is traditionally classified as the likely sole member of the family Cretoxyrhinidae but other taxonomic placements have been proposed, such as within the Alopiidae and Lamnidae.


Measuring up to 8 m (26 ft) in length and weighing over 4,944 kg (10,900 lb), Cretoxyrhina was one of the largest sharks of its time. Having a similar appearance and build to the modern great white shark, it was an apex predator in its ecosystem and preyed on a large variety of marine animals including mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, sharks and other large fish, pterosaurs, and occasionally dinosaurs. Its teeth, up to 8 cm (3.1 in) long, were razor-like and had thick enamel built for stabbing and slicing prey. Cretoxyrhina was also among the fastest-swimming sharks, with hydrodynamic calculations suggesting burst speeds of up to 70 km/h (43 mph). It has been speculated that Cretoxyrhina hunted by lunging at its prey at high speeds to inflict powerful blows, similar to the great white shark today, and relied on strong eyesight to do so. (Full article...)

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The following are images from various fish-related articles on Wikipedia.

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"I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium, that's what I should have done."

---Jeffrey Dahmer, American serial killer and sex offender (1960–1994)

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Things you can do


Here are some tasks you can do, as organized by the WikiProject Fishes, if you are interested, please sign up on the project page.

  • Copyedit:
  • Expand: Barb (fish species), fishing industry, Greater Argentine, Gold Spot Pleco, Fish anatomy, Black goby, Poecilia caucana, Arrowtooth flounder, Paiute cutthroat trout, Serrasalmus, Pygocentrus, Greater pipefish, Lesser pipefish
  • Develop featured article: Ocean sunfish is in danger of losing its featured article status - improvement urgently needed.
  • Peer review: Spring cavefish, Convict cichlid, Hoplosternum littorale, Shortnose sturgeon
  • Article requests: Missing topics about Fish, Devonian Fish Project article requests, Jörg Freyhof
  • Picture request: Phreatobius cisternarum, Scoloplax, Nematogenys inermis, Chiapas catfish (Upload any non-copyrighted fish images to the appropriate section of Wikimedia Commons)
  • Identify images: Identify and move fish-related images to the appropriate sections of Wikimedia Commons, especially images of unidentified fish
  • Collaboration: Pacific jack mackerel (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
  • Assessment: Assess the quality and importance of fish articles
  • Other: Expand Fish anatomy and Fish locomotion, Create articles for the two missing families in the Perciformes (Bembropidae and Zanclorhynchidae). Merge GLAM/ARKive donated texts into articles about endangered species.
  • If you have any question, comment or suggestion, please discussion here.

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    The Fish Portal: Mini Edition

    The Mini Edition of the Fish Portal is available for you to use on your wikipedia user page or talk page. It uses minimum space but retains many crucial features of the portal. To use it, place {{Portal:Fish/Mini portal}} on the designated page. See here for an example of the mini portal on a user page.

    The Fish Quiz

    The Fish Quiz is a friendly quiz competition designed to test your general knowledge of fish. The current game is Fish Quiz Tournament X. You can read more and join the game here.

    Associated Wikimedia

    The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

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