Flying Fish at War

Have some amazing photos to start your week

Is this mostly an excuse to share some lovely photos of extraordinary animals? Yes, it is.

Is it also an excuse to share a couple of historical war-related tangents that I’ve had up my sleeve for ages on the off-chance I decided to do a podcast episode about flying fish? Yes, it is.

There’s not going to be a flying fish episode anytime soon. Too many other animals on my to-do list. So instead …

I’ve said before, in a past episode, that I - like probably lots of people - have seen flying fish fly and not really been appropriately awed by what I’m witnessing. This is a case where good photos can restore some of the wonder. They freeze the beauty of the moment for us to admire. They give us a chance to think ‘That really is a strange and surprising thing I’m looking at’.

A flying fish frozen in flight reminds me of some glassy Lalique or Swarovski sculpture/ornament.

Beautiful. And the beauty really is the main point of this post for me. But also biologically extraordinary, obviously, because this is a fish that glides through the air. For tens of metres/yards or even a few hundred if they can catch an updraft. It’s a fish with wings, people! Crazy. An exquisite marriage of form and function orchestrated by evolution.

And there are many more different species of flying fish than you might imagine - dozens. That one above is the Margined Flying Fish.

Here’s Bennett’s Flying Fish:

The Clearwing Flying Fish:

Photo: Scott Harris via iNaturalist, CC BY 4.0

Atlantic Flying Fish:

Spotfin Flying Fish:

Photo: Charlotte Kirchner via iNaturalist, CC BY 4.0

Nature + Photographer = Art.

Historical Tangent #1: Perhaps not surprising, given how striking and kind of counter-intuitive these animals are, that the name ‘Flying Fish’ has been appropriated by us humans.

Powered aircraft that could take off from and land on water became a thing from 1910 onwards. The Curtiss aircraft company in the US was one of the main early developers, and one of their earliest versions was … Flying Boat No.2, the ‘Flying Fish’, seen here making its first successful flight in 1912:

A less obvious connection to aircraft, though, comes up around the same time. This is probably taken in 1918, towards the end of the First World War: "Captain Harry Gwynne and his decorated Nieuport Plane, "The Flying Fish", France":

It’s a Nieuport biplane - I believe (I could be wrong) the first type of combat aircraft to have permanent, fixed machine guns mounted. Why Harry Gwynne was taken with the idea of turning his into a flying fish … I do not know. Cool, though.

Back to Nature. Flying Fish arguably should be called Gliding Fish, since that’s what they’re doing. Not powered flight, but gliding - though they do have a ‘powered launch’. Their tails propel them up and out of the water and can even give them a bit of extra oomph over the surface of the ocean:

Photo: Adam J. Searcy via iNaturalist, CC BY 4.0

However, flying is the name that’s stuck. For example, here’s an early illustration of a widespread Flying Fish species - commonly known as the blue or cosmopolitan flying fish (or sometimes other names):

The scientific name for this species is Exocoetus volitans. The second half of that - volitans - literally just means flying in Latin. The first half - Exocoetus - is ultimately from ancient Greek, via Latin. It meant something like ‘fish that sleeps on the shore’.

Exocoetus is just one of several different genera of flying fish - but they’re all grouped in the family Exocoetoidea. And at this point those with an interest in military history or military technology might guess where we’re going with …

Historical Tangent #2: Unless I’m forgetting something, the last time the UK had a one-on-one war with another country was the 1982 Falklands War against Argentina. During which three (I think it’s three, anyway) British naval vessels were hit by anti-ship missiles, with considerable loss of life, and the total loss of two of the ships.

The missiles the Argentinians were using were French-built, and they were called … Exocets.

Because the French name for a Flying Fish, from the Latin, as also reflected in the scientific names, is exocet. And one of the multiple ways these anti-ship missiles could be launched was as an extremely low-altitude sea-skimmer.

So these particular flying fish are ship-sinkers.

I prefer the natural version, though: