There have been some mighty fishy pictures on the Net lately, but given the sources I think it’s safe to say charges will not be laid against Photoshop.

These lumpfish were photographed at a Japanese aquarium. Eumicrotremus pacificus evidently have suckers on their fins so they can cling to rocks underwater, and the aquarium reckoned they could hold on to colourful balloons just as easily.

The National Geographic, no less, came up with this and other shots of the six-inch-long Pacific barreleye — Macropinna microstoma – which it insists has a transparent head!

What you see is its barrel-like eyes topped by green, orb-like, sunlight-filtering lenses. It lives 600 metres deep in submarine darkness off central California.

The eyes are looking upward in this picture by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The pair of dark orifices out front that look like eyes are actually organs to smell with.

And then there was Briton Ian Welch, who was in Thailand last month helping with a stingray-tagging programme. He went fishing in the Maeklong River, presumably in Samut Songkhram, and landed the biggest freshwater fish ever caught with a rod.

In the river. With a rod. I’m still looking for further details on this story, which appeared in the British press but, as far as I know, in neither of Thailand’s English-language dailies.

Once you move away from fishes and into snakes, though, Photoshop rears its head and reality becomes ambiguous.

This image enjoyed a brief but wide-ranging life online because it’s supposed to show a gigantic snake shimmying down Borneo’s Baleh River. A second “photo” didn’t even come close to being realistic, but there were plenty of sceptics about this one too.

This shot was supposedly taken from a helicopter by a member of a flood-relief team.

The picture’s shelf-life was certainly goosed along by the accompanying allusions to the legend of the Nabau, a 100-foot-long snake with “a dragon’s head”. The story was not aided by comparisons to the prehistoric, 45-foot-long, crocodile-swallowing Titanoboa, whose fossilised skeleton was recently discovered in Colombia.