A fish without a head leisurely swimming in the lake.
in WTF
A headless fish nonchalantly gliding through the lake.

S
Per [another redditer](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/wbo0sV0CW4) That is some sort of pleco, probably just a common plecostamus. Very invasive. Those two black dots you see right behind the wound are its eyes. The brain is in between and slightly behind the eyes.Hes still all there mentally. However either through predation or some sort of infection his entire mouth is gone. He’ll swim around like this until he starves to death or gets eaten.
K
More likely someone caught him and chopped off his head thinking it would kill it and threw it back in as food for other fish. This is a common practice with invasive fish.
R
most probable
T
damn that’s fucked up that they missed then
C
Plecos are good eating in stews you eat them with your hands like crayfish. Is eaten in the amazonian regions of southamerica
R
>you eat them with your hands I prefer to eat with my mouth, thank you.
D
But, when it’s chopped off, it’s good to have a back up.
E
I would prefer my own hands but a backup sounds good
G
I prefer to not eat my hands.
J
Bro thinks hes Deidara
P
Their skin is very armor like. How do you eat them using hands
C
The same way one eat crayfish picking them apart. I have eaten a smaller specie we call them busco we gut them and cook them whole with aji, herbs, tomato and spices. When cooked you can pick them apart using your fingers and suck the juices from the head.
C
Or a snapping turtle or other predator just chomped his head off.
K
It looks far too clean cut.
T
The fish world’s version of Mike the chicken.
C
I guess its reasons like this when we would fish in Victoria Australia, if you caught the invasive carp you were not allowed to put it back into the water. Because what if your attempt didn’t kill it, and it could keep breeding
N
I thought this was just brain stem lizard brain bare basic motor skills at work. But the thought the guy is all there mentally, can still see, move around perfectly fine and just going to starve to death because there’s nothing there to eat with is horrifying. Here’s hoping these guys don’t have anything relative to “oh shit!” consciousness & pain with there predicament. 😱
D
If it makes you feel better, bare basic motor skills and a lizard brain are all that plecos ever have. They’ll lay on an aquarium heater until they get burned.
I
This did make me feel better, thank you.
G
Plecos almost certainly feel pain in the biological sense and likely have some degree of sentience—enough that their welfare should be taken seriously. They are not mere “unfeeling machines,” even if their subjective experience is simpler than ours.
1
They don’t have lizard brain. Lizards brains evolved later than fish brains
P
Maybe they are very deep in thought…
T
Their*
N
Because of your user name, take my upvote ⬆️
L
“I have no mouth and I must scream”
V
Man I know invasive species can cause a shit load of damage to environments but I still feel bad seeing harm done to them
J
it’s natural to feel bad seeing harm done to anything with even a remote amount of life. i still remember being five years old sitting next to a screen door playing when I killed a fly and realized I was responsible for it not flying anymore. Life is definitely sacred and we do right to protect it.
H
“If I am killed simply for living, let death be kinder than man” I have had the same experience as you, but with a snail
L
I shot a bird with a BB gun when I was 7, that was a core memory of why I don’t hurt animals. Much later in life I hooked a bass badly in the back of the throat, poor lil guy was bleeding badly… haven’t fished since, hurting animals for my enjoyment isn’t fun.
P
>I shot a bird with a BB gun when I was 7, that was a core memory of why I don’t hurt animals I did exactly the same thing when I was 7 and it’s my core memory as well for the same reasons. Still feel bad for the sparrow.
P
For me and my pellet gun it was a chipmunk. There was NO WAY I would be able to hit it, and I did! I cried that night and many other nights afterwards. It felt like such a waste, and that’s why I eat what I hurt / kill (except for some vermin). I fish for food (and love fishing) and I don’t really respect catch and release, and I hunt for meat. I am not blood thirsty and feel sadness for even every squirrel that I kill, but I eat them. Sport hunters are sick fuckers in my mind. I absolutely respect your decision to stop the activities that hurt the animals.
B
My mom said I would cry when the snow melted in the spring. I felt bad for the snow.
I
“I killed him, Gilbert.”
S
Lmao exactly where my mind went
D
I agree. But I do not care one bit about flies. Id be the first to go on a fly genocide 😂those pests annoy me to no end.
L
theirs defi it’ll a difference between quick and lingering like this ;(
Q
Ahh I see the eyes now. Poor animal basically got his face chopped off. Kind of fucked did you think about it
A
But the gills are also gone? And even if the gills are still there, it can’t force any water past them without a mouth, so it would suffocate quite soon
A
Pleco gills face downwards and are very close to the pectoral fins. They wouldn’t be visible from this angle.
T
dang why does this make me kinda sad?
B
Because you’re human.
E
I dunno if its all there mentally, probably gonna have ptsd from having its face bitten off.
J
I don’t know what I’d do if someone ate my mouth.
B
Plecos are the cockroaches of the water. They are so hard to kill. In the aquarium hobby, I’ve heard multiple times about someone forgetting one in a drained tank for weeks or months and then upon refilling the tank, it just swims around like nothing happened. I found out they do this in the wild, but its still such a foreign concept.
D
When I moved houses, I had a 130-gallon tank that I was trying to keep alive with the fish inside of it. Moving it was a bitch because I had to drain it almost completely, which game little room for the fish. Not to mention all the sloshing. My plecos didn’t give a shit. Those things are invincible. You can barely even starve them because they just eat all the growth inside the tank. And have fun picking them up with all those damn spines.
P
That’s wild, but how do you drain a fish tank and forget that there was a fish in there?
G
Plecos are really good at hiding, so you drain the tank and think you got every fish out, but that pleco is hiding under or inside a log/decoration. It’s not uncommon for fish to “go missing” in an aquarium, as that’s the circle of life, so not finding the pleco wouldn’t immediately be cause for concern
P
Ohhhh. Okay that makes a lot more sense than what I was imagining.
G
I really used to love plecos, by far the most personality in my tank. Breeding bristle nose was also really fun, seeing 200 babies arrive over night. Would love to get back into it, but don’t want more responsibility/things that need to be cared for on a holiday.
N
Mine passed away after 13 years. Was as close as my wife and I had to having a kid. 🙁 We didn’t know how big he was going to get at first but just kept upgrading tanks and filters as he grew bigger than anyone else in the tank. RIP buddy.
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