The Adventures of Flat Stanley

My niece Kawena sent over Flat Stanley in February. Clad in an Aloha shirt and carrying a suitcase, I took him all around the island of Oahu. One of the first places we went was the west side, to a beach called Makaha. It's one of my favorite places to surf, and this day was really fun! The waves were about head high and it was pretty packed since just about everyone goes to Makaha when there is a west swell. Of course Stanley couldn't surf with me, but he had some fun on the sand.

On another day, I took Stanley into the lab with me. I work in a marine biology lab. One part of my work is to catch fish in the wild and look in their stomachs to see what they've been eating.

The fish in the picture below is an opah, a moonfish. It lives in really deep water out in the open ocean and is a really popular fish to eat here in Hawaii. My friend had been looking at their stomachs and saw only... mushy stuff. Now that might not seem weird until you look at their mouths. They have essentially no teeth! Their mouths are like vacuums, just sucking up their prey (usually fish). So you would expect their stomachs to house whole fish! But nope, just mushy stuff. We started wondering if they were actually eating jellyfish.

We decided to look a little deeper. We could feel this rough patch of something deep in the throat of this fish. When we looked, we found rows and rows of small sharp teeth, pointed inward towards the stomach. Imagine having teeth in the bottom of your throat! We are guessing these opah suction fish into their stomachs and these sharp teeth prevent the fish from swimming back out. Anyway, Stanley was there watching this whole discovery.

More Stanley adventures to come!