Ye Yaodong grabbed a remora from the bucket. It was about thirty or forty centimeters long, and all three were roughly the same size. He placed it directly on his father's arm, then let go.
"Look, this fish loves hitching rides. It has a suction disc on its head, with tiny spines on those plates to keep it from sliding off bigger fish."
Father Ye looked puzzled. "I know. That's how it was stuck to that big fellow just now."
"It can stick to anything."
Remoras were lazy ocean fish with slender bodies and a large oval suction disc on the top of their heads and necks. They were known for traveling attached to sharks or other large marine creatures. They could stick to anything.
They had taken laziness to the limit: if they could hitch a ride, they would never swim.
The tops of their heads looked like shoe soles, as though their creator had stepped on them. Those were their passes to hitchhike around the world for free.
The suction from that shoe sole was astonishingly strong. Large remoras weighed over twenty jin, and once one latched on, getting free was no easy matter.
Remoras latched onto whoever they encountered-large fish of all kinds, boats, and even people.
This one was still firmly attached as it hung from Father Ye's arm. Afraid he might kill them by playing around, Ye Yaodong pulled it off after a moment and tossed it back into the bucket. He still had a use for it.
Father Ye frowned at him. "Explain yourself properly. If you're not going to, just take the boat over to say hello to your friends, and let's head back early."
"I wanted to use it to catch fish. It specializes in attaching itself to big fish. We can