A fish furnished with a sucker or adhesive organ. a. The REMORA, Echeneis remora.
1697. Dampier, Voy., I. iii. 64. The Sucking-fish is about the bigness of a large Whiting.
1756. P. Browne, Jamaica, 493. The Sucking Fish. This fish is remarkable on account of its scuta,… by whose setulæ … it fastens itself to the sides of ships, planks, fishes, or other bodies.
1880. Günther, Introd. Study Fishes, 461. A somewhat ingenuous way of catching sleeping turtles by means of a Sucking-fish held by a ring fastened round its tail.
1884. John Gibson, in Longman’s Mag., March, 524. Few sharks are caught in tropical seas that have not one or more sucking fish attached to them.
b. Applied to various other fishes, e.g., the Cornish sucker, the lump-sucker.
1776. Pennant, Brit. Zool., III. 120. Lesser Sucking Fish…. Lepadogaster.
1867. Chambers’ Encycl., IX. 181/1. Sucking Fish, a name sometimes given … to fishes of the family Discoboli.
