Glowing Termite Mounds of Brazil

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Strange by Nature, your guide to the strange, weird, unbelievable, and improbable wonders of the natural world.

**Kirk Mona** (0:23)
Hello, everyone, and thanks for being here today. I'm Kirk Mona, and joining me are Rachel Gimza and Victoria Thompson. We're all naturalists who together have scoured the world for weird and wonderful wonders, just to please your mammalian brain's desire for novelty. Isn't that nice?
Let's do this.

**Rachel** (0:43)
Well, welcome back to the show.
This week is me and Victoria again. Kirk is still out this week. We wish him well. He's doing what he needs to do, which is totally fine, because, boy, howdy, Victoria. Do I have something fun for you?

**Victoria** (0:59)
Oh, I'm excited. Tell me.

**Rachel** (1:01)
Good. So, Victoria, do you recall when I talked about the tasseled woe-be-gone shark in episode 80?

**Victoria** (1:10)
Wait, what was it called? No, I don't remember.

**Rachel** (1:13)
That's fair. To be fair, we've talked about this. We've been pretty frank about this on the show is, we'll go through and record a little behind the scenes. We'll go through and record. And we're all really interested in what we've talked about. And somewhere in the recesses of our brains, that information sticks because every once in a while, I will tell Kirk a little fun fact that I apparently told him on the show, or he told me, or you told me. It's just, so it stays there.
But I don't recall exactly who I've told it, or where I learned every piece of bit. And often right after we record, my brain just shuts off for a little bit, and all information goes away.

**Victoria** (2:02)
So same, Rachel, same.

**Rachel** (2:03)
Yeah. So we've talked about it on the show. I'm going to be frank about it. That's what happens. So I'm not surprised you don't remember anything about the Tasseled Wobegon track. Another little off-site.
Before we pressed record, I actually had Victoria. I was double-checking our spreadsheet because I thought I saw another name. And apparently, in a different episode, I talked about the Black Sea Devil. We'll talk about it in a second. So I don't remember much about the Tasseled Wobegon.
To be really honest, but while researching that, and because it's no surprise to anyone, while I was researching and trying to figure out what I was going to talk about this week, some of the folks I follow on social media love sharks as well. So the fact that I learned about the Tasseled Wobegon shark is unsurprising. But one of the people I follow, actually just posted about the Wobegon shark, and they actually corrected a misidentified picture of the shark to the actual species. And that in itself sent me on a different rabbit hole, because this person hated the fish that I'm going to be talking about today. And I was like, excuse me, this is fascinating. And don't get me wrong, Tasseled Wobegon's absolutely fascinating. Go listen. This fish is also fascinating. So, and part of the reason why is because you all are my captive audience. And I'm going to tell you about what I found because it's upsetting. And I love it so much.

**Victoria** (3:46)
Oh, okay. Bracing myself now.

**Rachel** (3:49)
You should. So the animal I'm talking about today is called the goose fish, which is tragic as it does not have anything to do with geese at all. And it does not look like a goose. And it is a fish, but that's about it. These guys, I just googled it. Yeah, you should. It's awful, isn't it?
So this is a group of 25 species in the family Lophididae. Sometimes they are called anglers or monkfish. Goose fish in general have a pretty wide, like there's 25 different species. So I might have talked about a similar one with the black sea devil.
In a previous episode, but it's not exactly the same. It's in the same kind of family. It's still an angler fish technically, but it is not the same animal. And I am so grateful because it did send me down a wonderful rabbit hole, and I'm excited to share it with all of you. So the goose fish are, like I said, there are 25 different species. They're also known as monkfish. And okay, we'll give a brief description about what they are. They look like a flounder. They look like a fish that you pancaked to the floor.

**Victoria** (5:14)
They're kind of flat, but they don't have that weird thing going where the flounder's head is on its side with the two eyes pointing up in a weird way.

**Rachel** (5:23)
More upsettingly, the face is on top of the fish with the eyes facing up, and the mouth just is super wide and ready to chomp.