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b"I hope you're all well and not too bored if you're one of the millions who are having to stay inside right now! This week let's learn about a fishy mystery, fish with fur!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nMirapinna esau - a Furry Fish from the Azores\\n\\nThe so-called fur-bearing trout:\\n\\n\\n\\nA hairy frogfish:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe hairyfish\\xa0(I couldn't find any actual photos of one):\\n\\n\\n\\nThis man is serious about moldy fish. He wants the mold to think about what it's done while it's in time out:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nThis week let\\u2019s learn about a fishy mystery, if not an actual mystery fish. Are there any fish with hair?\\n\\nSometimes you\\u2019ll see a mounted fish that has fur, usually decorating a restaurant. It may be the same type of restaurant that also has a stuffed jackalope, which we talked about in episode 113. Fur-bearing trout are jokes by taxidermists, who usually attach rabbit fur to a stuffed fish.\\n\\nBut some cultures have stories about fish with hair. This includes the Japanese story of big river fish with hair on their heads like people, although since these fish are supposed to come out of the water at night to fight and play, they\\u2019re probably not actual fish. There\\u2019s also an Icelandic legend about an inedible trout with fur that shows up in rivers where people are not being nice enough.\\n\\nCould these stories be based on a real animal? Are there any fish that grow fur or hair?\\n\\nMammals are the only living animals that grow actual hair from specialized cells, but lots of animals have hair-like coverings. Baby birds have downy fuzzy feathers that look like hair and many insects have hairlike structures called setae [see-tee], made of chitin, that make them look furry.\\n\\nSome fish grow hairlike filaments that help camouflage them among water plants and coral. We\\u2019ve talked about the frogfish and its relatives, the anglerfish, many times before, because they\\u2019re such weird-looking fish, many of them deep-sea species that are seldom seen. The hairy frogfish isn\\u2019t a deep-sea species, though. It lives in warm, shallow waters, especially around coral reefs, and grows to about 8 inches long, or 20 cm. The hairlike filaments that cover its body help it blend in among seaweed and anemones. It\\u2019s usually brownish-orange or yellowish, but it can actually change its color and pattern to help it blend in with its surroundings. This color change doesn\\u2019t happen fast, though. It takes a few weeks.\\n\\nLike other frogfish, it has a modified dorsal spine called an illicium with what\\u2019s called an esca at the end. In deep-sea species of anglerfish, the esca contains bioluminescent bacteria, but in the hairy frogfish it just looks like a worm. The fish sits immobile except for the illicium, which it twitches around. When a fish or other animal comes to catch what looks like a worm swimming around in the water, the frogfish goes YOMP and gulps the animal down. Like other frogfish species, the hairy frogfish has large, strong pectoral and pelvic fins that it uses to walk across the sea floor instead of swimming.\\n\\nAnother fish that looks like it has hair is called the hairyfish. The hairyfish barely grows more than two inches long, or 5.5 cm. It eats copepods and other tiny crustaceans that live near the ocean\\u2019s surface and it\\u2019s covered with small hairlike filaments. Its close relations are equally small fish called tapetails because its tail fin has a narrow extension at least as long as the rest of its body called a streamer. The tapetail was described in 1956 but scientists were confused because no one had ever found an adult tapetail, just young ones. It wasn\\u2019t until 2003 that a team of Japanese scientists discovered that the DNA of tapetails matched the DNA of a deep-sea fish called the flabby whalefish. There are lots of whalefish species, but the largest only grows to about 16 inches long, or 40 cm. It looks very different from its larval form,"