Alphabeasts: B is for Babel Fish

This week's entry in "Alphabeasts" is a phenomenally useful creature, to the point that it's a veritable icon for the improbable, implausible, and effective removal of certain sorts of barriers. Nothing solves the problem of interspecies linguistic communication quite like the babel fish.

That said, I don't think there's any canonical visual representation of the little critter. The recent Hitchhiker's movie has a lot going for it (Messrs. Rockwell, Fry, and Def, at the very least), but if you watch this clip, I think you'll agree with me that the babel fish in the movie would never fit in a human ear canal. The old TV show Hitchhiker's has a diagram that says the creature is leechlike but just looks like a kissing gourami.

So I had a little license to come up with one of my own.



In the process, I learned that one may not want to do an image search for leeches, and I located a couple of interesting noncanonical images of the fish. In my version, I have included little flipper-limbs in tribute to the recent movie, and a few hooks that the babel fish (which gets its nourishment from its host's thoughtwaves) could use to keep itself in place once installed.



Why would a creature that lives inside its host have great big eyes? In my version, they're just eyespot markings on the babel fish's ventral surface. I figure that it's to the babel fish's advantage to look cuter than a leech, since it needs its hosts to be willing to put a little yellow slimy thing into their ears.

Next week: since I've already done ear insertion, we'll skip the Ceti eel in favor of a visit to my favorite comics fantasy universe.