Amusing little tale of journalism for you:

On 30 December, I wrote a piece about the spookfish and its amazing eyes. The last line of the piece was:

That must give the fish a great advantage in the deep sea, where the ability to spot even the dimmest and briefest of lights can mean the difference between eating and being eaten.

That’s not a quote, it’s my prose. So it was a bit surprising to see a BBC piece on the same topic, dated 7 January, where the same line turns up, word-for-word, and is attributed to Julian Partridge, one of the authors on the study. Spooky and fishy.

A bit of investigation led to a press release by the