10382144-657032357679438-2664142029638762592-n-1401560851.jpg

The Elephant Nose Fish (Gnathonemus petersii) is a wonderfully unique-looking fish that looks much like an aquatic pachyderm. Native to the rivers of West and Central Africa, it has a vast distribution and has been recorded in places as diverse as Mali, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Central African Republic, Cameroon, The Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia.

 
A quiet and placid species, it prefers the dark and muddy beds and heavily-vegetated areas of slowly-moving rivers and pools with plenty of cover such as submerged branches.
 
Its most striking feature, as its name suggests, is its trunk-like protrusion on the head. This isn’t actually a nose, but a sensitive extension of the lower lip that it uses for everything from locating food to communicating and finding its way through the murky waters of its home.
 
Like an Electric Eel, it produces a weak electric field using specially-adapted muscles near its tail. Its “trunk” is covered in electroreceptors, as is much of the rest of its body, allowing the fish to receive electrical signals and thereby sense even the tiniest of movements as the field around it is disturbed. This means it can not only find an elusive meal on the bottom of a river, but it can also navigate in total darkness - useful skills for a near-sighted fish when hunting prey or avoiding predators in the gloom. If kept in an aquarium, the electrical impulses generated by this fish can be actually be made audible by placing two electrodes in the tank that are then hooked up to an audio amplifier.
 
Despite looking like an elephant, however, this fish is certainly no Dumbo. It has a relatively large brain, possessing the equivalent of a human brain in terms of its size, and is able to recognise its owner over time. 
 
Finally, like other scaleless fish, it is very sensitive to deteriorating water conditions. In parts of Germany and the USA, it is actually used as an indicator of the quality of municipal water supplies, as the frequency of its electrical discharges increases as the water becomes more polluted.