It’s Freaky Fish Friday (not a Lenten custom) as this week’s news bring us a herring that glows in the dark, a fish with legs and another fish that scared the chips out of a New Zealand jogger. Is Neptune trying to tell us something?

A woman in the eastern Kazakhstan city of Semey brought home a fresh herring for dinner and freaked out when she filleted it and found that its insides glowed in the dark. (Why she was filleting fish in the dark is a question for WTF Wednesday.) Gulbarshin Kaydarova says she found “strange growths” giving off a blue-green light when she cut open the herring. Fearing radiation (it’s Kazakhstan), she threw the fish away, but not before making a video for local news and social media.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBTmDdoOtgY

Local health official claimed the fish was safe to eat, but they didn’t say how they made this determination just from looking at a video. Most people agreed with Gulbarshin Kaydarova:

This herring was glowing with a scary green light. That’s it, this fish is no good to eat.

In Thailand, yet another fish with legs was pulled in by freaked-out river fishermen who had no idea what it might be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHrT-0XRAcs

Rather than teasing their friends with a fisherman’s tale of a man-sized walking fish that got away, they took a video and uploaded it to social media, where most agreed the foot-long two-legged creature was probably a batfish. While the Thai climate is suitable for batfish, it’s strange that this deep-sea fish was found in a river.

Proving that joggers should watch where they step, Philip Duncan, head of WeatherWatch New Zealand, was on his lunchtime run when he found what he described as a “flattish tube” creature at the north end of a Te Atatu beach in western Auckland, New Zealand.

It looked foreign, it didn’t look like something which was either out of New Zealand or from the very deep sea. It was long and skinny and sort of looked like an eel but it seemed to be the wrong color and have the wrong mouth and jaw.

Strange fish on New Zealand beach

A photo of the fish on Twitter prompted speculation it was a decaying barracuda or an oarfish.

Freaky-looking fish are generally just lost, malformed or misidentified. On the other hand, freaky glowing fish should be looked into – although not looked at directly.