Talk:USS Capitaine

This is another situation where the closest match to "capitaine" in FishBase seems to be the "labre capitaine" aka hogfish, which has the right range but is not brightly colored. We need a fish book from the 1940s I guess, to figure out where some of these names come from. Stan 16:53, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I've sometimes thought, "You just made that up, didn't you?" Turns out I may have been right. From the USS Chivo (SS-341) website:

"We all know that WWII Submarines were named for sea creatures, but did you know that some sea creatures were named for submarines? During WWII the shipyards were turning out submarines quickly, and most of the really cool names were taken. So they would think up a name that sounded "fishy" and go to an ictheology science journal and find a sea creature that had a scientific name (usually in Latin) but no common name. They would then bestow the name that they had already picked out for the submarine as the common name for the sea creature. I used to know an example but I've forgotten"--Ben Hale

From an article by Captain William F. Calkins, USNR, that appeared in the USSVI San Diego Base newsletter: "Submarines are named for fish or "Denizens of the Deep." At the peak of the shipbuilding program, the navy had around 500 submarines afloat, a-building, or a-planning, and that's a lot of fish. I can testify. There are nowhere nearly as many fish as you may think there are. There are even fewer fish names than the average citizen-sailor can (a) pronounce, (b) spell, or (c) even recognize as belonging to a fish. The reasonable names like TROUT, BASS, SALMON, and SHARK were used up long before I appeared.

It takes some stretching to hook other than most common fish names to submarines and have anyone know you are naming them after fish.

We fudged a little and came around twice. There is a USS SHARK; there is also USS TIBURON, which is shark in Spanish. There was the gallant WAHOO and the USS ONO - the same fish. There was the JACK, the AMBERJACK, and the ULUA - same fish....the CHUB and the HARDHEAD (both minnows - but we couldn't name a fighting fish the USS MINNOW!!)[1]

—wwoods 01:08, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

How interesting! So I wonder if the DANFS writers simply took the fabricated descriptions at face value - there are indeed fishes of the Indian Ocean called "capitaines", but then it seems odd that they wouldn't just say "of the Indian Ocean" then. It couldn't be possible that ol' Captain Calvin was telling us a Fish Story, now could it??? :-) Stan 03:09, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think the hogfish may be our fish here; it comes in colorful varieties (see images at [2]). All of the other capitaines seem to be African (east Atlantic) fishes. —Tkinias 22:05, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)