Old Fish Dead

A 39-pound shortraker rockfish caught off the coast of Alaska last month could be 200 years old, according to experts. This is remarkably depressing.

The fish, which was swimming around when Alaska was still the colony of Russian America, was hooked by an insurance adjuster from Seattle perhaps 150 years its junior. It did not even receive the solitude of a watery grave. It did, however, receive the Yahoo front page firehose.

The exact age of the fish is not yet known, though they continuously get larger as they get older, and this one is nine inches longer than the previous oldest shortraker, who was 175 when he too was plucked from the peaceful depths. A corpse desecration has resulted in samples of the fish being sent to a lab to determine the precise number of years it paddled around this finite mortal coil before one last meal turned out to be pointy, gasping death.

Memento mori, its ancient, staring eyes seem to say.