Species of Fish Coloring Pages
Fish were swimming around for hundreds of millions of years before the first dinosaur ever hatched. Today they live just about everywhere there's water, from tiny mountain streams to the darkest trenches at the bottom of the ocean, and they come in some truly wonderful shapes.
Jump to: Color by Numbers | Fish Species | Adult Pages | More Fish
Fish Color by Numbers and Connect the Dots
Fish Species
Angelfish
Freshwater angelfish come from the rivers of the Amazon, where their tall, flat bodies let them slip neatly between reeds and tangled roots. That shape makes it hard for bigger fish to spot them when they turn sideways...
Anglerfish
A female anglerfish carries her own fishing rod, a long spine on her head with a glowing tip at the end. Down in the pitch-dark deep sea, curious little fish swim over to see the light, right up to her waiting mouth.
Arctic Cod
Arctic cod live in water so cold it would freeze most fish solid. Their blood carries a natural antifreeze that keeps ice crystals from forming, so they can swim happily right under the sea ice, where seals and whales come looking for them.
Blobfish
The blobfish only looks like a sad, droopy blob when it's pulled up to the surface. Deep down where it lives, the weight of all that water holds its soft body in a perfectly ordinary fish shape...
Carp
Carp don't have any teeth in their mouths. Instead they have a set of grinding teeth tucked away in their throats, which they use to crush snails, seeds and anything else they slurp up from the bottom of the pond...
Clownfish
Every clownfish starts out as a boy. Each anemone is home to one big female and a few smaller males, and if the female ever disappears, the biggest male changes into a female and takes her place.
Eels
Eels look a lot like snakes, but they're fish. Every European eel starts life in the Sargasso Sea, out in the middle of the Atlantic, and the tiny babies drift for thousands of kilometres to reach the rivers of Europe...
Goldfish
Goldfish can see more colours than people can. Their eyes pick up ultraviolet light too, so the world inside their bowl probably looks a lot brighter and more colourful to them than it does to us...
Grouper
Some groupers grow bigger than a grown-up. The giant grouper can reach more than two metres long, and it swallows its dinner whole by opening its huge mouth so fast that the food gets sucked right in...
Koi
Koi can live an amazingly long time. A famous koi in Japan named Hanako was said to be over 200 years old, which means she was already swimming in her pond before anyone had invented the bicycle...
Lionfish
A lionfish's long, frilly fins look like a lion's mane, but they hide spines that can give a very painful sting. Lionfish come from the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and since they turned up in the Caribbean they've been gobbling up the local fish, so divers there now catch them on purpose.
Piranhas
Piranhas are much less scary than the movies make them out to be. Many kinds munch on seeds, fruit and plants that fall into the river, and red-bellied piranhas swim in groups mostly so they're safer from the birds, dolphins and caimans that like to eat them.
Pufferfish
A pufferfish is a slow swimmer, so it has a different plan for staying safe. When something tries to eat it, it gulps water until it swells up into a round, prickly ball that's much too big and spiky to swallow.
Salmon
Salmon hatch in rivers, swim all the way out to sea to grow up, and then come back to the very same stream where they were born. They find their way home by smell, and on the trip upstream they leap right up waterfalls to get there.
Sardines
Sardines are safest in a crowd. Every winter, millions of them travel up the coast of South Africa in schools that can stretch for kilometres, and so many dolphins, sharks and seabirds follow along for a feast that people call it the Sardine Run.
Sharks
A shark never runs out of teeth. It loses them all the time, and a new one simply moves forward from the row behind to take its place, so some sharks go through thousands of teeth in a lifetime...
Swordfish
A swordfish doesn't use its long bill to stab its dinner. It swings it from side to side through a school of fish instead. It can also warm up its own eyes, which helps it see clearly when it dives down into cold, dark water...
Tuna
A tuna never stops swimming, not even to rest. It breathes by pushing water through its gills as it moves forward, and its sleek shape lets some kinds cross whole oceans and back again in a single year.
X-ray Fish
The X-ray fish lives in the rivers of South America, and its body is almost see-through. If you look closely, you can spot its backbone right through its skin, just like an X-ray.
Fish Coloring Pages for Adults
More Fish
Famous Fish in Stories
Fish turn up in stories all over the world. In a Russian tale, a poor fisherman catches a golden fish that can grant wishes. His wife keeps asking for bigger and grander things until the fish finally takes it all back, and the couple ends up right where they started, with their old cracked washtub.
In Ireland they tell of the Salmon of Knowledge, which ate nuts that fell from magic hazel trees into its river. A boy named Fionn was cooking it for his teacher when he burned his thumb on the skin and popped it in his mouth, and from that moment on he knew everything there was to know.
The Māori of New Zealand say the demigod Māui hauled up an enormous fish with a magic hook, and that fish became the North Island. It's still called Te Ika-a-Māui, the fish of Māui.