Dad's 'creepy' discovery during epic Aussie camping trip: 'Stuff of nightmares'
Cam Wild and his family often embark on Aussie adventures in their 4WD, but a recent find terrified the Perth dad.
As a full-time adventurer, Cam Wild is used to seeing all the weird and wonderful creatures the Aussie landscape has to offer. But nothing prepared him for the terrifying find he and his mates stumbled upon while enjoying a 4WD camping trip recently.
"That is the creepiest looking thing I have ever," the Perth man, who runs Wild Touring, said of the black jawfish that startled them late at night. Speaking to Yahoo News Australia he revealed they were on a remote island in the Pilbara region of Western Australia when they made the discovery.
"We were walking the mud flats around the island by torchlight at low tide looking for crayfish, fish or octopus that had been left high and dry from the large tidal movement," he said. "I’ve never seen a Black Jawfish before, at first I actually thought it was a dead cod or something.
"It was pretty late by then, but it really scared the sh*t out of us," he added.
'Creepy' fish find startles campers
A video posted on Cam's social media pages, which often documents his cross-country 4WD travels with his family, shows the moment they first caught sight of the jawfish. The creature is endemic to northern Australia, from Exmouth, Western Australia, and can be spotted as far as the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland.
"That is psycho. That is the creepiest looking thing I have ever," Wild is heard saying while another man pokes it with a speargun tip "just to see if it snaps" — and it did.
The sudden snap made the blokes jump back in fear. "Oh my God, oh my God," they're heard saying in unison. "That's going to haunt me in my sleep," a woman in the group is heard saying.
"Can we keep looking to see if we can find a pair of spare underpants? That was creepy," Wild adds in the video which has racked up over 5.2 million views on TikTok alone.
What are Black Jawfish and are they dangerous?
According to Wild, Black Jawfish "are an ambush predator that dig their burrows with their mouths"."They will sit and wait all night for prawns, crabs or small fish to get within striking distance, and then make a meal of them," he told Yahoo.
They're found in and around tropical waters and rocky and coral reefs, Professor Culum Brown from Macquarie University said.
"You can see from their body plan that they are adapted to living in burrows, hence the big head and tapering body — also forward-facing eyes," he told Yahoo News Australia.
"They use their big mouths to excavate their burrows but they also brood their eggs in their mouths [mouth-brooding fish do tend to have big mouths]."
He said they're "very territorial," hence its reaction to the prodding in the video. "I doubt they pose any real risk to people unless you were silly enough to put your fingers in their burrow."
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Unusual fish stuns: 'Stuff of nightmares'
Naturally, the look of the fish stunned others who admitted they'd never seen one before. "My soul left my body for a minute," one posted in the comments.
"I just jumped out of my chair," another said after watching the video. "This is the stuff of nightmares," said a third.
Meanwhile, others agreed it's "another reason to stay away from Australia". "Why does everything that wants to harm me live in Australia?" another questioned.
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