A Series of Unfortunate Icelandic Animals, Part One: The Wolf Fish

In the first installment of this important new series, we take a closer look at the piscatorial world’s answer to Keith Richards.

Also known as the Atlantic Catfish, Sea Wolf, Wolf Eel and Anarhichas lupus (which, funnily enough, were all names for lesser known 80s hair metal groups), the Wolf Fish looks its seen a thousand badly-behaved boozy world tours and has the scars and dodgy teeth to prove it.

A larger specimen would happily would eat your hand for dinner before downing a few rocks as an digestif — its Icelandic name Steinbítur translates as ‘stone biter’ — due to some incredibly powerful jaws and a set of fangs that would put Ronaldinho’s vampire double (pictured here) to shame.

But in spite of having looks that only Shane McGowan‘s mum could love, this grey monstrosity is a much sought after sport fish. Caught in the deeper seas a few kilometres from Reykjavik, it apparently provides a worthy battle once hooked and attracts serious deep sea anglers (both of them) to holiday in Iceland on a regular basis.

A variety of lures, attractors, fishy baits (clam meat is a real winner) and bits of dead animal are used to tempt the beast from its cave — we use the same trick on our head of IT — but reports surrounding the use of inflatable life-sized ‘Miss Wolf Fish’ lures are unconfirmed at the time of writing.

More Wolf Fish: Flickr | YouTube | Wikipedia | Google Image Search | Khoi Vinh

Photo kindly provided by Daniel. Thanks Daniel, you’re a star in the face of the sky.