flounderling

plural flounderlings

1. A small or young flounder

   On such an one I came All inadvertently, Splashing the shallows Where Atlantic ebb Was making bare The flats, As when one Wading Sets unguarded step Upon a lurking Flounderling.

   1918, Richard Darwin Ware, Rediscoveries, page 102

   1 more example

   At first flounderlings are thin-bodied but typically fishlike in other respects. Then suddenly striking anatomical changes take place, and the creature's behavior becomes fixed for an essentially two-dimensional way of life.

   1979, John L. Culliney, The forests of the sea: life and death on the Continental Shelf, page 90