Printable maze · Animals
Fish maze
A maze carved into the shape of a fish, at three sizes. Exactly one route runs from start to finish, so there is always an answer and never a shortcut.
Print the page above, or take the easy grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
Print the page above, or take the medium grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
Print the page above, or take the hard grid as a PDF. Both carry the answer key, and large print is a setting rather than a separate file.
Show the answer key
About Fish
Fish were the first animals with backbones, and they still outnumber every other vertebrate group: scientists have described well over 30,000 species, more than all birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians combined. A fish pulls oxygen from water by passing it over gills, where thin filaments packed with blood vessels strip out dissolved oxygen. Many bony fish also carry a swim bladder, a gas-filled sac that adjusts buoyancy so the animal can hold its depth without swimming. A row of pressure-sensing pores called the lateral line detects movement in the water nearby.
Why a fish
The silhouette shows a fish in side view, the angle that reveals a body plan built for water: a tapered head, a deep midsection, and a forked tail fin at the narrow end. Because the outline itself is solid wall, this fish maze funnels your route through the body and out toward the tail, following the same line a swimmer's thrust travels.
Teachers building an ocean or pond unit hand this out when the class is learning how gills and fins work.
What is in this maze
A 10 by 10 maze cut into the shape of a fish, with a single route of 40 steps and 28 turns from start to finish.
| Size | Grid | Shortest route | Turns |
|---|---|---|---|
| easy | 10 x 10 | 40 steps | 28 |
| medium | 16 x 16 | 77 steps | 50 |
| hard | 24 x 24 | 165 steps | 103 |
How to solve a Fish maze
Every maze here is perfect, which is a precise thing rather than a compliment: there are no loops and no islands, so exactly one route joins any two points. That has a useful consequence. Keep one hand on the wall and never take it off, and you will walk the whole maze and arrive at the exit. It always works on a perfect maze. It is also slow, because it walks you into every dead end on the way.
Filling dead ends is faster. Find any square with walls on three sides, shade it in, and treat it as solid. That usually creates a new dead end next to it, so keep going. When you run out, what is left unshaded is the route. On the easy grid that is a few minutes of work; on the hard one it is the whole puzzle, and it is how most people who solve mazes quickly actually do it.
Working backwards is the third trick, and it exploits how a maze is built. Passages branch far more often near the start than near the finish, so tracing from the exit means fewer wrong turns to reject. On a shaped maze the outline helps too: the fish silhouette is solid wall, so a corridor running along the edge of the shape has nowhere to branch and can be followed at speed.