what is a fish?

Answer 1

you dont know what a fish is????wow and thaught my friend waz the dumb one.

Answer 2

- any of various mostly cold-blooded aquatic vertebrates usually having scales and breathing through gills; "the shark is a large fish"; "in the living room there was a tank of colorful fish"
- the flesh of fish used as food; "in Japan most fish is eaten raw"; "after the scare about foot-and-mouth disease a lot of people started eating fish instead of meat"; "they have a chef who specializes in fish"
- Pisces: (astrology) a person who is born while the sun is in Pisces
- seek indirectly; "fish for compliments"
- Pisces: the twelfth sign of the zodiac; the sun is in this sign from about February 19 to March 20
- catch or try to catch fish or shellfish; "I like to go fishing on weekends"

wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Answer 3

A fish is an aquatic animal with fins, gills, and flippers. It is also cold-blooded.

Answer 4

Tobe classified as a fish: Mind you not all fish have scales or 2 sets of fins. Some have skin like catfish, sharks and rays as well as eels.
What makes a fish a fish? How can creatures as different as the great white shark and the tiny minnow both belong to the same class of animals?

Fish are classified by a few items:

The term "fish" is most precisely used to describe any non-tetrapod chordate, i.e., an animal with a backbone but lacking four limbs (or having ancestors that had four limbs). Unlike groupings such as birds or mammals, fish are not a single clade but a paraphyletic collection of taxa including hagfishes, lampreys, sharks, rays, lungfishes and coelacanths, sturgeons, gars, and advanced ray-finned fishes.

A typical fish is cold-blooded; has a streamlined body that allows it to swim rapidly; extracts oxygen from the water using gills; has two sets of paired fins, one or two dorsal fins, an anal fin, and a tail fin; has jaws; has skin that is usually covered with scales; and lays eggs that are fertilised externally.


Fish come in many shapes and sizes. This is a sea dragon, a close relative of the seahorse. Their leaf-like appendages enable them to blend in with floating seaweedHowever, to each of these there are exceptions. Tuna and some species of sharks are warm-blooded, and able to raise their body temperature significantly above that of the ambient water surrounding them. Streamlining and swimming performance varies from highly streamlined and rapid swimmers which are able to reach 10-20 body-lengths per second (such as tuna, salmon, and jacks) through to slow but more manoeuvrable species such as eels and rays that reach no more than 0.5 body-lengths per second. Many groups of freshwater fish extract oxygen from the air as well as from the water using a variety of different structures. Lungfish have paired lungs similar to those of tetrapods, gouramis have a structure called the labyrinth organ that performs a similar function, while many catfish, such as Corydoras extract oxygen via the intestine or stomach. Body shape and the arrangement of the fins is highly variable, covering such seemingly un-fishlike forms as seahorses, pufferfish, anglerfish, and gulpers. Similarly, the surface of the skin may be naked (as in moray eels), or covered with scales of a variety of different types usually defined as placoid (typical of sharks and rays), cosmoid (fossil lungfishes and coelacanths), ganoid (various fossil fishes but also living gars and bichirs, cycloid, and ctenoid (these last two are found on most bony fish.
There are even fishes that spend most of their time out of water. Mudskippers feed and interact with one another on mudflats and are only underwater when hiding in their burrows. The catfish Phreatobius cisternarum lives in waterlogged leaf litter

The various fish groups taken together account for more than half of the known vertebrates. There are at least 24,600 known species of fish, of which over 23,000 are bony fish, with the remainder being about 850 sharks, rays, and chimeras and about 85 hagfishes and lampreys. They range in size from the 16 m (51 ft) whale shark to a 8 mm (just over ¼ of an inch) long stout infantfish.

Many types of aquatic animals commonly referred to as "fish" are not fish in the sense given above. These include cuttlefish, jellyfish, inkfish, and starfish. Marine invertebrates that are consumed as food are commonly called shellfish. Whales and dolphins have been called fish as well, although they are mammals taking oxygen directly from the air.

Snails also, some have gills some have lungs some have both yet even the ones with just gills are not classified as "fish". They are all in the Gastropods.

You cannot classify an animal, fish or mammel by the fact it comes from an egg since most forms of life (not bacteria etc) come from eggs, just like humans. We don't lay eggs but we come from eggs. Plattapus are the prime example. Mammels that lay eggs and yet are not fish but Mammals. some fish are live bearers yet are still fish.

Hope this helps

Answer 5

A marine creature with fins, a tail, gills, and slimy stuff all over.

Dictionary.com says:

Any of various cold-blooded, aquatic vertebrates, having gills, commonly fins, and typically an enlongated body covered with scales.

Answer 6

a fish is a coldblooded animal that breathes its oxygen througth water. it has fins, scales and can only survive under water, people often keep them as pets in aquariums

Answer 7

underwater animal. The opposite of humans(land/water differences)