Air cats

Yesterday I was in a bar with Fred and his girlfriend. As per usual the conversation meandered in all kinds of directions, until we hit one of my all time favourites: animals. Fred’s girlfriend mentioned that she found it strange that in Dutch we have a product called ‘WC-eend’ (Toilet Duck – I’ve complained about it before), which should really be called ‘WC-swan’ (Toilet Swan) if you think about it. Indeed, the bottle looks much more like a swan than a duck.

Which brought me to the following thought. There are actually loads of animals that have funny names in the sense that they don’t look like the aninal they’re named after. Especially sea animals, it seems.

Oh sure, there’s a sea spider or a sea horse which do look like spiders or horses, but there are others that just don’t make any sense to me.

Like the different kinds of seal-like creatures – you know, those slippery bastards with big snouts and whiskers that shout ‘uh uh uh’ all day and used to stink up your local Aquaworld. They have the most funny names like sea lion, sea cow and even sea bear or sea elephant!

But I don’t get it. What kind of biologist was observing this animal:

and thought to himself: “That kind of looks like a bear! That’s it, I’m gonna call it a sea bear!"? Didn’t it cross his mind that it would be pretty confusing to have a sea bear if we already have a polar bear, which is basically a bear that (partly) lives in the sea?

I mean, it’s almost as if we were out of inspiration when it came to giving names to the sea animals. Instead of inventing something new we just said. Okay that’s a sea eal, that’s a sea spider, that’s a sea turtle, that’s a sea snail. There’s no end to it!

Imagine we’d done that to birds? Look, son, there’s an air cat:

   

Lazy biologists.