As you contemplate the wonders of evolution, and how a creature can be born with something weird and new, and that thing can either help it get ahead or not hurt its chances, and it can then reproduce and make another one like it, spare a thought for the red-lipped batfish.
A real animal, it has the kind of mouth that, as a kid, you may have made from Babybel cheese wax, to go with your red wax fake nails. It has a beard of white whiskers. It has fins that bend backwards, like a person’s arms at yoga when they are about to do upward dog. Before your eyes, it sprouts a new limb from its nostril. Its nose – technically a snout – is long, at the top of its head, and hook-shaped. It cannot swim, only crawl. Its crawl is more like a waddle.
You might think, why not the red-lipped batfish? Why shouldn’t it exist? The red-lipped batfish disagrees. Its permanent scowl serves a single function: to let you know that it regrets evolving at all. Better to be primordial slime than this.
It could easily have been made from the various and insurmountable small piles of random objects that accumulate perpetually around your house.
Naturally, it lives in the waters off the Galápagos Islands. It eats other, smaller, fish and is bigger than it looks: RLBFs can grow to 40cm. It has a stripe, it has spots. “After the red-lipped batfish fully matures, its dorsal fin becomes a single spine-like projection that comes out of the top of the head”. This thing is called an “illicium” and, at the top of the illicium is an “esca”, which emits a light. The RLBF can live at 300m below the surface of the ocean.
As the great Hannah Horvath once said, “Is there anything in this world creepier than a fish?”
It looks as though it is just daring you to ask whether it is wearing lipstick. It looks like it applied the lipstick using its fins, ie not very well, uneven, wider than the outline of its lips.
We’ve all been there. We’ve all felt like a badly made-up, odd-limbed, irritable floor-dwelling mess.
Werner Herzog has been there. He might as well have been responding to the sight of this fish with human-like lips when he said: “We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and [… ] overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe.”
• Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia
• Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
