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b"Sign up for our mailing list!\\n\\nThis week let's learn about an amazing little fish and an awesome tortoise! All the pictures here were taken by ME at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga!\\n\\nFurther Reading:\\n\\nStar tortoise makes meteoric comeback\\n\\nThe astonishing elephantnose fish:\\n\\n \\n\\nBurmese star tortoises:\\n\\n \\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw. I\\u2019m fully vaccinated now so I\\u2019m able to go out and about cautiously, still wearing a mask of course, and this weekend I went to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. I had a fantastic time and saw lots and lots of amazing fish and other animals! If you ever get a chance to visit, it\\u2019s definitely worth it.\\n\\nWhen I got home, I kept thinking about one particular fish. I wanted to learn more about it. So I decided to make an episode about that fish and another animal I saw at the aquarium.\\n\\nThe fish that captivated me so much is called the elephantnose fish. I\\u2019d never seen anything like it. The one I saw was about the length of my hand, dark gray or black in color, and looked like a pretty ordinary fish except for the proboscis that gives it its name. The fish has a flexible projection from its nose that it was using to probe around in the gravel at the bottom of its river habitat.\\n\\nI should mention that the Tennessee Aquarium has enormous displays, beautifully designed to mimic the animals\\u2019 natural habitat and give them plenty of room to move around. There\\u2019s one tidal animals display in the ocean side of the aquarium where the water sloshes through and around rocks to mimic the tide. It\\u2019s fascinating to watch the fish in that exhibit stay pretty much motionless despite the water\\u2019s movement, because that\\u2019s what they\\u2019re adapted for. So there\\u2019s plenty of opportunities to see an animal\\u2019s behavior.\\n\\nAnyway, I took lots of pictures of the elephantnose fish and when I got home, I started researching it. It turns out that it\\u2019s way more interesting even than I thought!\\n\\nIt lives in rivers and other freshwater in central Africa and grows up to 9 inches long, or 23 cm. That\\u2019s according to the info display next to the exhibit. The display also said the fish was a species called Peter\\u2019s elephantnose fish, although it\\u2019s possible they have more than one species on display. There are a lot of elephantnose fish, more properly called mormyrids or freshwater elephantfish, and many of them have this interesting proboscis.\\n\\nThe proboscis isn\\u2019t actually a nose like an elephant\\u2019s trunk. It\\u2019s technically a modified chin and mouth, called the Schnauzenorgan. The elephantnose fish mostly eats small worms and insect larvae, and it especially loves mosquito larvae.\\n\\nThe elephantnose fish uses electroreception to navigate the muddy waters where it lives and find food. Its whole body, and especially its Schnauzenorgan, is covered with electrocyte cells that can detect tiny electrical pulses. If you remember way back in episode ten, about electric animals, many animals can sense the weak bioelectrical fields that other animals generate in their nerves and muscles. It\\u2019s especially common in fish since water conducts electricity much better than air does. But the elephantnose fish also generates a stronger electric field of its own, which it uses as a sort of sonar. It generates the field in special electric organs in its tail, and as it moves around in the water, the electric field comes in contact with other things\\u2014plants, rocks, other fish, and so on. It\\u2019s not strong enough to give an animal a shock, but it\\u2019s strong enough for the elephantnose fish to easily sense changes in its environment. The fish can tell what it\\u2019s near because its electrical field interacts differently with different things. A rock, for instance, doesn\\u2019t conduct electricity so the fish probably senses it as a blank spot in its electrical field, while a plant may conduct electricity even better than water and therefore changes the shape of the fish\\u2019s electrical field..."