The Slowest Fish In The World

On the spectrum of animals that are and are not easy to eat get into our mouths, fish have swum towards the top of the rankings. Famously, they've spent the last several thousand years never catching on to the fact that worms on hooks make them disappear forever. But maybe that's not enough for you. Maybe holding a stick over a body of water until food comes out is still too much effort. Maybe what you're really looking for is an animal slow enough that you could pluck out of the depths with chopsticks like a speed-ramped Mister Miyagi. 

If that's your jam, you'll want to start off on easy mode with the least speedy Culver's value meal in the ocean. 

Have you ever seen a seahorse swim? It's unsettling. It takes everything you think you know about the aerodynamic nature of undersea creatures and reaffirms that with one stroke of the "look how bad that seahorse is at moving" brush. 

Especially untalented in the field of going anywhere fast is the dwarf seahorse, which the Diving Almanac lists as the slowest little fishy in the deep blue sea –clocked at a blink-and-you'll-miss-it gait of 152 centimeters per hour. As a point of reference, if the dwarf seahorse tried to get into the regular horse game and run the two kilometer track at the Kentucky Derby, it would take about twelve weeks to reach the finish line. Considering that they only have about a two year lifespan, that would make up around eleven percent of the life of the seahorse in question. Still, what a rush.

By comparison, the black marlin is the record holder for the world's fastest fish, tearing up the briny depths at 129 kilometers per hour. But speed isn't everything. If James Dean's car had been a dwarf seahorse, we wouldn't have to recreate him digitally every time Hollywood ran out of actors who hadn't been cancelled.