For flatfishes, you’d think things would always be looking up.

Flatfish, found all over the world, range from the angelfin whiff, which is about three inches (eight centimeters) to the Pacific halibut, which can get up to around nine feet (three meters) long. This fish group includes species familiar to seafood lovers—not only halibut, but flounder, sole, and turbot.

All flatfish have eyes on the end of stalks, so they pop out of the head “kind of like the eyes we saw in cartoons—ba-boing!” says George Burgess of the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Thanks to those pop-up peepers, “they can’t see the bottom directly underneath them, but they can see the bottom around them,” notes Jackie Cooper of