Freaky Fish Collections in the 1930s

Headline from The New Zealand Herald, August 11, 1931.

Years ago I was given a two-headed minnow by Darrell Hunsley, of Col. Hunsley’s Freaks and Oddities. It sits proudly in my cabinet of curiosities and is one of the highlights of my collection. Hunsley had come across several of the freaky fish at a hatchery. When thousands are being born, the odds are there will be an anomaly somewhere in the bunch.

But long before Col. Hunsley started spotting two-headed fish at hatcheries, a conservator of fish and game in Rotorua, New Zealand, Mr. A. Kean, curated an entire museum of weird trout treasures.

As reported in 1931, Kean’s collection included two-headed trout, double-tailed trout, four-eyed trout, cyclopic trout, and conjoined-twin trout—all preserved in glass bottles, with none living beyond the fingerling stage.

Two-Headed Minnow. Hartzman collection.

Among the two-headed fish, one suffered from a curvature of the spine that left its body in a spiral. According to a newspaper description, the specimen was “a most weird-looking creature, resembling more some ancient heraldic figure than any natural species.”

Another star of the museum had a large head with four eyes lined up in a row. It lived nearly six weeks.

In 1935, another freaky fish finder, Mr. F. D. Robson, boasted a collection of nearly 50 live trout curiosities. Each was only a few weeks old, surviving as long as possible in a tub. Like Kean’s collection, many had two heads.

“These freaks swim round their tub quite unconcerned and seem not a whit perturbed by the fact that they are not like normal trout,” reported The Evening Post.

Robson took special care of his oddities and believed they would grow and become full-sized trout. No further reports indicate if he was right.