This Week’s Creature Feature – Two Years into a Life Sentence
Two years ago, the Calvert Marine Museum put a new inmate in the tank, a snakehead fish, as the showpiece of the museum’s invasive species exhibit.
“It was a good example because there was a lot of press on it a few years back,” says Ken Kaumeyer, the museum’s curator of estuarine biology. Though the fish hasn’t attempted a jailbreak, Kaumeyer isn’t ready to declare it a model prisoner.
Originally, the snakehead was to be part of a larger exhibit, featuring three of the fish. Kaumeyer learned that snakeheads don’t like to share space.
“We discovered rather quickly that the largest fish becomes dominant and beats up on the others,” Kaumeyer says. “So that’s why there’s one in the tank.”
Maybe the snakehead knows there’s no possibility of parole.