SHEEPSHEAD FISH

Someone slap a lawsuit on the dentist who fitted this fish with the freakishly human teeth... What's that you say? Evolution did this. By natural selection? What was it thinking! The sheepshead fish, aka the lovechild of Billy Bass and my granny's dentures, is a scaly, sparkly swimmer that can be found in the shallow waters of the western Atlantic, from Nova Scotia to Brazil. It's a euryhaline species, which means it can tolerate a wide range of salinity.

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While the fish usually lives in coastal waters and estuaries, they sometimes head to freshwater to find warmth in winter. In days gone by, the fish could be spotted in Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay, which was named after it, but then the Bay became polluted and the fish disappeared.

No one knows exactly why it's called the 'sheepshead' fish, when its teeth are clearly the main event, but some say that its blunt snout and almost horizontal mouth are indeed sheep-like. Its grey and black stripes do, however, lend themselves to its alternative moniker of the convict fish. Put one in jail next to a prisoner in a striped uniform and it shouldn't look like a fish out of water.