No, They Weren't One-Eyed, One-Horned Flyin' Purple People-Eaters...

That was just the name of a highly popular tune by Sheb Wooley, way back in 1958 (before a lot of you probably were born). Instead, the following are incidents about fish with two mouths, starting with one that a fella named Phillip caught from a private pond in Cobb County, Georgia, on Sept. 30, 2010.

As noted by fisheries biologist Greg Grimes at the time, the fish actually had a second jaw that led to the shared throat. The second, smaller jaw was located directly below the primary jaw. This bottom jaw couldn't create the sucking action that would have allowed the bass to engulf prey and feed. However, the anomaly probably didn't interfere with the feeding habits of the fish. The 10-inch bass was in good body condition, which indicated the fish was feeding just fine.

Grimes couldn't say exactly what caused the bass to have two mouths, but suggested it could be a genetic mutation or perhaps was the result of an injury to the fish's lower mouth at a younger age. The only other two-mouthed fish he had heard of was a trout in Nebraska.

My Internet research, however, turned up another trout with two mouths that a lady named Debbie caught from Lake Champlain in upstate New York in August 2019. While reeling it in, she thought she had "a good catch," but when she and her husband saw the fish, they were shocked. As they pointed out, the fish's bottom mouth had been hooked, and it appeared to have a normal mouth on top.

Debbie said the fish appeared to be in good health. She and her husband released the fish but not before they had taken a few photos of the rare find, which they shared with Ellen Marsden, a professor of fisheries at the University of Vermont's Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. She speculated that a random, embryonic mutation likely prompted the unusual growth.

"Such departures from the normal happen fairly frequently in nature," said Marsden, "but most are lethal."

And finally, there's the two-headed, four-eyed carp that was caught back in 2017 from a lake near where the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident occurred. Dubbed "Chernobyl fish," the freaky specimen prompted theories that the deformation came about due to contamination in the lake. However, scientists aren't sure, saying that they would have needed to run tests on the specimen to determine whether contamination was a factor or not.

For all intents and purposes, the carp looked to be healthy and fully-grown, leading one expert to theorize that contamination wasn't a factor, because that would have killed most fish in their infancy.

University of South Carolina biologist Dr. Timothy Mousseau said, "Most radiation-induced mutations lead to lower growth, survival and fertility. Most such 'mutants' do not live long enough to get so large. Most are slower, less capable, and thus more likely to be eaten or die than 'normal' individuals."

The scientist, who studied Chernobyl and Fukashima extensively, added that "controlled experiments" would have been needed to determine what was wrong with the fish, most likely an Asian carp. He went on to note that the two eyes at the top of its head were nostrils. A defining feature of these fish are that the nostrils grow high on the head, above the eyes.

None of this info, however, stopped social-media users from saying the fish looked like it was caught in Chernobyl, or that it looked like Blinky, the three-eyed wonder caught in the water outside the nuclear power plant in The Simpsons.