Go fish

Fishkeepers all over have been abuzz over a latebreaking development in their world. The fish you see above is called a rose-veiled fairy wrasse, a fish native to the Maldives. Now, the Maldives is a nation of islands in the Indian Ocean. There are 1192 islands that make up the country there, southwest of Sri Lanka and India, and aren't you glad you don't have to remember the names of all those islands? But back to the fish above. He was first noticed in the 1990s, same as Weezer and the Spice Girls, but at first, fishlovers thought they were another example of a different species, the red velvet fairy wrasse. 

But the confusion was cleared up when everyone recognized that "red velvet" is a type of cupcake. It was a Maldivian scientist named Ahmed Najeeb who said no, this is an entirely new species and he lives in the Maldives' "twilight zone" reefs, which was down deep in the sea. And because these twilight zones are so deep down, they are largely unexplored. That means, grab your goggles and head for the Maldives, and you might find an entire new fish and get to name it yourself.

You may NOT call your discovery the "Filet-O-Fish," however. That is a copyrighted name for what McDonald's calls "Heaven on a bun."

As reef fishes go the fairy wrasses are fairly small - adults coming in between three and six inches. They are sexually dimorphic, but don't get all worked up and call the governor of Florida to make sure the poor students down there aren't being taught about sexual dimorphism. That only means that the males and females of a species have different body forms. 

By the way, you'll be either amused or shocked to find that Florida is now rejecting the purchase of a large percentage of mathematics textbooks in use elsewhere. I suppose they have word problems in Algebra dealing with two trains leaving terminals hundreds of miles apart, traveling toward each other at specified rates of speed, and how many of the people on the train heading for Florida are known to be cross-dressers?