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Rare black seal pups among births at Donna Nook in Lincolnshire

The grey seal pups at Donna Nook are normally born white and shed fur at about two to three weeks.

HOLY SHIT

it's Talk Like A Creature day btw.

fascinating linguistics breakdown

Have you seen this post?

You probably have. It currently has over 120,000 notes, largely because of this addition.

Of course it's going to get reblogged, this kind of unsourced factoid does numbers on here. But something about it wasn't quite right.

A bit of searching turned up the origin of the "fact".

Alright, so it's someone who posted this on reddit 4 years ago and somehow ended up in the search hits. And the post confuses the electric eel (from South America) with the electric catfish (from the Nile, which the Egyptians would have known about).

Reminder: this is an electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). It is from South America. (image from Wikipedia)

And this is an electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus). It is from the Nile and would have been familiar to the ancient Egyptians. (image from Wikipedia)

And then of course people were speculating in the notes to that post about trade routes between South America and Egypt. Excellent scholarship everyone.

At this point I was ready to call it another made-up internet fact that gets reified by people repeating it. But something was still bothering me.

An ancient Egyptian slab from 3100 BC. What could that be...

Oh.

The Narmer palette. It's the goddamn Narmer palette. (image, once again, from Wikipedia)

So where is this "angry catfish"?

It's not the Egyptian name for the electric catfish.

It's... Narmer. It's Narmer himself.

Narmer's name is written as above (detail of top middle of the palette), using the catfish (n`r) and the chisel (mr), giving N'r-mr. The chisel is associated with pain, so this reads as "painful catfish", "striking catfish", or, yes, "angry catfish" or other similar variants, although some authors have suggested that it means "Beloved of [the catfish god] Nar".

So.

Where does this leave us?

It would appear that this redditor not only confused electric eels with electric catfish, but also confused a Pharaoh's name with the name of a fish. And then it got pushed to the top search hits by a crappy search engine and shared uncritically on tumblr.

In short, "the electric eel is called angry catfish" factoid actually literacy error. Angry Catfish, who ruled upper Egypt and smote his enemies, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Also the Arabic name for the electric catfish is raad (thunder) or raada (thunderer).

References

Afsaruddin, A., & Zahniser, A. H. M. (1997). Humanism, culture, and language in the Near East: studies in honor of Georg Krotkoff. Eisenbrauns.

Clayton, P. A. (2001). Chronicle of the Pharaohs. Thames & Hudson.

Godron, G. (1949). A propos du nom royal. Annales du Service des antiquités de l'Egypte, 49, 217-221.

Sperveslage, G., & Heagy, T. C. (2023). A tail's tale: Narmer, the catfish, and bovine symbolism. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 109(1), 3-319.

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Hello, I am etaf, a Palestinian living now in Egypt with my family after we managed to escape from Gaza when all our property was destroyed, and we returned from scratch in this life. When we escaped to Egypt, we did not think of anything other than feeling safe from the fear we were facing in Gaza, but unfortunately I did not expect that life would become this difficult, after we left with nothing, no home, no money, no clothes, no family, we are facing something beyond human imagination. When I ask for help, I cry a lot because we are not used to that. We used to live in beautiful palaces, have a job, and a beautiful life, and now we have become nothing!💔

Our source of income was destroyed and the new merchandise was burned. 💔

We are now facing daily challenges to survive—things that most people take for granted, 💔 Lost Stability: The war has left us without work or a stable source of income. 🍞 Basic Needs: Food and Children's needs, rent, education, and other basic living requirements. are becoming harder to afford with rising prices .

📚 Dreams on Hold: Loss of family and loved ones Like so many here, my family’s dreams have been replaced by the need to simply survive. 😢

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tbh i never really considered seals. until i finally saw one irl and was like omg. the creature

this is my artistic representation of what they looked like on the beach from where i was standing in the distance

it was the most magical day of my life

the skrunkly🩷💜💙

coloured sketch thing of Nomi-nomi!!! i love them SO SO SO SO SO SO MUCH

i’m ,,,,,, kwear….🥺🩷💜💙

that one mhuyo meme popping off on twitter rn called to me

so pure….

Today's Seal Is: Scandalously Ruffled