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Trinidad and sent samples to the British Museum in London. His name: Robert John Lechmere Guppy. Later that year, the fish was given the scientific name Girardinus guppii in his honor, and by the 1920s it was commonly known as the “guppy.” Only problem: The fish had been previously identified in America (in 1859) and had already been given the name Poecilia reticulata . It’s still known by that name to biologists...but it’s “guppy” to the rest of us.
    LAMPREY: The name for this family of jawless fish (often referred to as “lamprey eels,” even though they’re not eels) comes from the Old French lampreie , which etymologists believe was a combination of the Latin lambere (“to lick”) and petra (“rock”), making it the “lick-rock” fish—a reference to lampreys’ round, sucker-like mouths, with which they attach themselves to rocks (when they’re not using them to suck the blood from other fish).
    TUNA. The ancient Greeks ate a lot of this mackerel variety. One of the most common fish in the Mediterranean, tuna was a standard protein in Greek cooking. It was typically cooked with vegetables and olive oil and served as an appetizer at banquets. The Greeks called the large but speedy creature thynnos , from thynein , which means “darter.” By the 16th century, tynnos had been anglicized into tunny , and by the 19th century, English-speakers called it “tuna.”
    MARLIN: You probably know the marlin as a large ocean fish with a very long and pointy snout. It got its name because that snout appeared to resemble a marlinspike , a large needle used by sailors to separate strands of rope. (The earliest recorded use of the word marlin in reference to the fish was in 1917.)
The sketch that Jack drew of Rose in Titanic was actually drawn by director James Cameron.
    SALMON: Salmon are famous for their migrations from the ocean to rivers and streams, during which they leap their way up steep grades and waterfalls to make it to their spawning grounds. The name found its way into English back in the early 1200s via the Latin word salmo , which is believed to come from the Latin verb silire —meaning “to leap.”
    ORANGE ROUGHY: They’re called “orange roughies” because they’re orange...and they have very rough scales. But they used to be known as “slimeheads” because their heads are permeated with mucous glands. They became a very popular restaurant fish in the late 1970s (thanks to improved deep-sea trawling technology), and the name was changed to “orange roughy” because “slime-head” sounded about as appetizing as “poo eel” or “booger trout.” Slimeheads, which can live for more than 140 years, have been so heavily fished since then that they are now severely threatened.
    SHARK: Sharks were called “dog-fish” in several European languages since the days of the ancient Greeks. In the 1500s the Spanish started calling them tiburons , after their name in the Caribbean Arawak Indian language, and tiburon actually became the fish’s English name for a while. Then, in 1569, a huge shark caught by the English slave trader John Hawkins was advertised for viewing in London. The ad read:
“Ther is no proper name for it that I knowe but that sertayne men of Captayne Haukinses, doth call it a Sharke.”
    Nobody knows where the “men of Captayne Haukinses” got the name “sharke.” But the big fish have been called that ever since.
    MUSKIE: This long, narrow-bodied fish is found in North American freshwater systems from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay. The Ojibwe people, who have inhabited the region since long before the arrival of Europeans, thought they looked like another local fish—the pike—and called them maashkinoozhe , which experts believe meant “ugly pike.” In the early 1700s French trappers in the area took that name and twisted it into the French masque allongé , meaning “long mask,” for the fish’s long head, which the English adapted into muskellenge in the