DOD Bestiary: Fiship

Common Name: Fiship (Ship fish, Mountain fish)
Pronounced: (rhymes with “bishop”)
Classification: Cetichthys osteocephalus (Bone-headed Whale-fish)
SGOC Rank: Megafauna

Length: 56 feet
Height: 15 feet (ground level, discounting dorsal fin)
Weight: 25 tons
Diet: Omnivore
Social Structure: Solitary
Home Planet: Earth
Distribution: Atlantic Ocean
IUCN Status: Near Threatened

Description:

The fiship is a giant bony fish that behaves much like a baleen whale. Members of the teleost group, fiships are more specifically pachycormids, a family of bony fishes that thrived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Despite suffering huge setbacks during the K-T Event this family has clung on in the subterranean Niobrara Sea, where the pachycormid line has survived to repopulate the post-Cycle Atlantic.

As large as some whales, fiships are cigar-shaped giants with huge mouths and gill rakers for collecting fish and plankton in bulk. The long pectoral fins are unique in that their leading edges are hardened into blades for self-defense; the many notches in adults’ blades are a telltale sign of just how often these weapons save the fish from predators. Most of their food is taken from the upper ocean layers via filter-feeding and the occasional burst of ram-feeding, but fiships have been known to flush water from their mouths to reveal small animals buried in the seafloor. The fiship greatly dislikes cold temperatures and, instead of seasonally migrating to the poles like whales do, they huddle around deep-sea hydrothermal vents and enter a state of torpor for several months. Their mating habits are currently unknown.

Lacking the ethical constraints that come with hunting whales and dolphins, fiships have taken their place in the whaling – nowadays, “megafishing” – industry, which targets them for their meat, bones, and edible roe. Thankfully the fish seem to be fast-breeding and their numbers are barely dented by the industry’s annual haul. They are hunted by predatory SGOs, giant sharks, mosasaurs, several species of cetus, hydrarchos, and tribes of coast-living Skrag.