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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

You are right. I first wrote mammal but change it to animal, because I've never thought of fish as animals. I've never heard anyone refer to them as animals. I have never read anything that refered to them as animals.

Edit: The Surprising Answer: Are Fish Truly Animals? Exploring the Debate Around Fish as Animals

https://jerrysfishingblog.com/the-surprising-answer-are-fish...

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For reference, here's the scientific definition of "animal" - which is broad enough to include insects and various microorganisms as well as humans and other mammals:

> Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, have myocytes and are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development. As of 2022, 2.16 million living animal species have been described — of which around 1.05 million are insects, over 85,000 are molluscs, and around 65,000 are vertebrates. It has been estimated there are around 7.77 million animal species. Animals range in length from 8.5 micrometres (0.00033 in) to 33.6 metres (110 ft).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal

(Fish are in the category of vertebrates.)

Do you a variety of animals swimming in your living room animal tank?

Did you ever have any pet animals (maybe that barked or meowed?)

That “Jerry’s Fishing Blog” just demonstrates the problem with using google to try to support a point. It way overstates the “debate” on the subject. At least since Linnæus developed his biological taxonomy in the 1700s, fish have been considered animals.

Here’s what Linnaeus wrote around 1758 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisces_in_the_10th_edition_of_... ):

> Always inhabiting the waters; are swift in their motion and voracious in their appetites. They breathe by means of gills, which are generally united by a bony arch; swim by means of radiate fins, and are mostly covered over with cartilaginous scales. Besides the parts they have in common with other animals, they are furnished with a nictitant membrane, and most of them with a swim-bladder, by the contraction or dilatation of which, they can raise or sink themselves in their element at pleasure.

And here’s a modern take, from https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/biological/f... :

> Fish are aquatic vertebrate animals that have gills but lack limbs with digits, like fingers or toes. Recall that vertebrates are animals with internal backbones.

You probably rarely hear them referred to as animals because people use the word "fish" to talk about them. But they are certainly animals.

Out of curiosity, are you a Christian who observes Lent? Many of my Christian friends do not consider fish to be “meat” as that is not allowed during Lent, but fish is allowed, therefore fish != meat.

No but my Irish ancestors were Catholic

There's no debate about fish being part of the animal Kingdom.

If you've never heard anyone refer to fish as animals, you probably never took biology in grade school. I mean no offense, but literal children with single-digit ages know that fish are animals.

You have never heard of or read about fish being referred to as animals? Not even in your biology classes at school? That you haven't is extremely strange to me, I understand what people mean when they say fish aren't animals, in terms of the colloquial usage when referring to meat, but I didn't think that most people thought that fish literally weren't animals at all.

Humans are animals too for that matter

If you can see it and it moves, it's probably an animal. Very occasionally you can see a protist with your naked eye (like a giant rotifer).

You might even say it's animated!

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