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Uh-oh! This shark has been slimed! The hagfish is also called the snot eel for a good reason. If attacked, it instantly oozes slime from its pores that teach a predator to never try that again. Watch this scene in action at National Geographic. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
A truck full of fish overturned and dumped its load into Northern Ireland farmer Gordon Flinn’s field on Thursday. The tonnes of mackerel were piled two feet deep in places. The driver of the truck was taken to the hospital, but was not seriously injured and was able to return to the scene. The truck was removed and the road opened later that night, but the Flinns may have to put up with a fishy smell for some time. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Louise Flinn)
Men,
want to go swimming in Papua New Guinea? Pray you don't encounter this
lil' fella, lovingly named the "ball cutter" fish by the locals
for the obvious reason:
This is the ferocious 'Ball Cutter' fish which has killed two men by biting off their testicles. A British angler has told how he snared a predator known to feast on the testicles of men.
Jeremy Wade, 53, spent weeks fishing in remote Papua New Guinea after locals told him how a mysterious beast was castrating young men in the area's waters. He finally caught the perpetrator: the Pacu fish, known locally as The Ball Cutter. Jeremy wrestled the 40lb monster on the floor of his boat and opened its snapping jaws with his bare hands to discover a set of human-like teeth. The Ball Cutter boasts an impressive set of gnashers, which tear off the testicles of unwitting anglers and swimmers, leaving them to bleed to death.
Ted Sabarese had a great idea for a photoshoot: people paired with fish that look like them. There are four more at the link. Now when you tell someone that he has a face like a fish, you’ll have to be more specific.
Link -via Kottke | Photographer’s Website
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Images: (L) Gentileza Diario Uno/Infobae
(R) Simpsons Wiki
A group of fishermen in Cordoba caught a mutant fish off a lake near a nuclear power plant that looked like it came straight out of The Simpsons. Folks, meet the real life equivalent of Blinky, the three-eyed fish:
"We were fishing and we got the surprise of getting this rare specimen. As it was dark at that time we did not notice, but then you looked at him with a flashlight and saw that he had a third eye," said Julian Zmutt, one of the fishermen.
Link [Google Translate] - via Geekosystem
German aquaculturist TCHelmut put a glass observation tower in his koi pond. The fish get a good view of their surroundings and people get a good view of the fish! There are more videos at his YouTube channel, including the installation of the tower and how it looks at night. -via The Daily What
One giant leap for evolution.
Alice Gibb from Northern Arizona University and colleagues discovered 6 unrelated species of fish that have evolved the strange ability to jump:
Researchers discovered that at least six different types of fish are able to launch themselves into the air from a solid surface.
The team said this was an evolutionary snapshot of the transition from living in water to inhabiting land. [...]
It suggests that, rather than a rare adaptation that evolved in a select few species, the ability to leap on land is common among bony fishes. So many more of their ancient aquatic relatives might have invaded the land than had previously been thought.
Fish tanks are usually judged solely by the variety of fish inside, but these unbelievably cool fish tanks would be amazing even without their underwater tenants. I particularly love the one on the top left that looks more like a mini-forest than a fish tank.
That's
one smart fish! An orange-dotted turkfish was captured for the first time
on video digging a clam out of the sand, then repeatedly throwing it against
a rock to crush it.
"The animal excavates sand to get the shell out, then swims for a long time to find an appropriate area where it can crack the shell," videographer Giacomo Bernardi, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. "It requires a lot of forward thinking, because there are a number of steps involved. For a fish, it's a pretty big deal." [...]
The clam-cracking tuskfish isn't the first fish to be observed using tools. The tuskfish is a kind of reef fish known as wrasse, and these species have been seen using rocks as anvils to crush shellfish. But this is the first time the behavior has been caught on video.
LiveScience has the story and video clip [self-starting, with audio and pre-roll ads]
The feather starfish may be pretty just sitting there, but when it starts swimming, that’s when it’s true beauty shines. In fact, it’s downright hypnotic.
Via I Am Bored
For most animals, we live an approximately 24-hour cycle and synchronize our circadian rhythm to day and night. Even in the deep dark depths of the ocean, fish who cannot see still have bodily reactions to light. However, the Phreatichthys andruzzi is the first creature known to have no sensitivity to light at all, with a body clock running an extreme 47 hours.
The cavefish, Phreatichthys andruzzii, has evolved for nearly two million years in the isolated darkness of caves beneath the Somalian desert.
Professor Nick Foulkes, of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, said that this particular species was chosen “because it was such an extreme example, having been isolated from a day-night cycle for so long”.
In the course of its evolution it has lost its eyes, colouration and scales, having no need for them in the pitch-black of an underground cave system.
Regular feeding shows, however, that the fish will adjust its circadian rhythm for food.
Researchers from Murdoch University have been watching bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia develop an ingenious way to fish. First witnessed by researchers in 2007, a dolphin will use a conch shell to trap and scoop up fish. The dolphin will then proceed to pour the fishies into its mouth as if they were the bottoms of a chip bag. The remarkable part is that this behavior seems to be becoming more widespread, marking it as a trend learned.
“Conching” is a method by which Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins are trapping small fish in conch shells, bringing the shells to the surface, and then shaking them with their rostrums to clear out the water and dump the fish into their mouths. More remarkably, the trend appears to be spreading throughout an entire population of dolphins, and fast.
The first isolated instances of conching were recorded in 2007 and 2009 among a small group of Shark Bay’s dolphins. But other dolphins seem to be observing that behavior and learning the method for themselves–in the last four months alone, researchers have documented the behavior six or seven times–marking a very rapid horizontal spread of behavior.
Link via Popular Science
We’ve all heard about snakes eating food bigger than them, but this is just ridiculous. The black swallower eats fish that are 3 times larger than it by grabbing it by the tail and swallowing as the fish coils up inside the swallower’s stomach. The Proceedings of the Ever So Strange have more about this bizarre fish that has never been seen alive.
Most people have trouble not stuffing their face and gaining a few extra pounds on chocolate. But have you ever heard of a fish with the same problem? Apparently the fish outgrew its tank, getting fed a daily diet of Kit Kat bars.
Aquarium staff were baffled when the 8.8lb giant gourami called Gary rejected normal food after being donated to them.
Then the previous owners of the exotic Asian freshwater fish admitted feeding it only with the chocolate-covered wafers.
Experts at the Sea Life London Aquarium had to put crushed Kit Kat pieces inside grapes and banana slices to tempt the 15.7in-long fish on to a normal diet.
Gary’s handler Rebecca Carter said: “I’ve never heard of a fish being fed chocolate, let alone brought up entirely on the stuff.”
For the first time a wild fish, the Blackspot Tuskfish has been photographed by a diver using a tool. Scientists predict that before long we will be cowering before those damn dirty Cod. Probably not, but check out the photo gallery of this tool using fish at the link.
Fortunately, Mr Gardner managed to photograph this happening as there has never before been any evidence to prove tool use in fish. Behavioural ecologist Culum Brown, of Macquarie University in Sydney, told Science Now: ‘The pictures provide fantastic proof of these intelligent fish at work using tools to access prey that they would otherwise miss out on.
It doesn’t look that way.
This image shows the biomass of popularly-eaten fish in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1900 and in 2000. Popularly eaten fish include: bluefin tuna, cod, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, mackerel, pollock, salmon, sea trout, striped bass, sturgeon, turbot. Many of which are now vulnerable or endangered.
The Guardian tells how this information was gathered. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
Craftster member blupony808 made this awesome plush angler fish out of fabric, garden hose, a night light, paint, and imagination. Yes, it lights up, too! This project won the monthly challenge at Craftster. See more pictures of how she built it. Link -via Rue The Day
A curious little fish encounters a baited hook in his explorations. Animation by Character Matters Animation Studios. -via the Presurfer
Fish in the Hudson River (US) have developed an immunity to polychlorinated biphenyls, a type of toxic chemicals developed in 1929. They’ve done so at an amazing speed:
“This is very, very rapid evolutionary change,” said Isaac Wirgin, an environmental toxicologist at New York University’s School of Medicine, and the study’s lead investigator. “Normally you think of evolution occurring in thousands to millions of years. You’re talking about all this occurring in 20 to 50 generations maybe.”
The fish in question is called the tomcod, and scientists have determined the specific gene which has changed:
It turns out the fish sport a handy modification to a gene encoding a protein known to regulate the toxic effects of PCBs and related chemicals, called the aryl hydrocarbon receptor2, or AHR2.
The fish are missing six base pairs of DNA of the AHR2 gene, and the two amino acids each triplet would code for. PCBs bind poorly to the mutated receptors, apparently blunting the chemicals’ effects.
The adaptation occurs almost universally in Hudson River tomcod, but crops up only infrequently in two other tomcod populations—in Connecticut’s Niantic River and the Shinnecock Bay at Long Island’s south shore.
Link via reddit | Photo: Mark Mattson, Normandeau Associates
Laurent Ballesta’s job is not easy, but it’s one to die for. The photographer recently spent four weeks diving a total of 95 hours to get pictures of an ancient fish. Ultimately, Ballesta and his team spent a total of 81 minutes swimming beside a “school” (four, that is) of coelacanths. The fish was thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered in 1938, and it still resembles its prehistoric ancestors. See a gallery of the photos at National Geographic. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
(Image credit: Laurent Ballesta)
Knifefish have a long doral fin that flutters back and forth to move the fish. Here‘s a video showing one in motion. Scientists at Northwestern University thought that it could serve as a useful basis for an underwater robot, and so studied its movement:
Planning for the robot — called GhostBot — began when graduate student Oscar Curet, a co-author of the paper, observed a knifefish suddenly moving vertically in a tank in MacIver’s lab.
“We had only tracked it horizontally before,” said MacIver, a recent recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. “We thought, ‘How could it be doing this?’”
Further observations revealed that while the fish only uses one traveling wave along the fin during horizontal motion (forward or backward depending on the direction on the wave), while moving vertically it uses two waves. One of these moves from head to tail, and the other moves tail to head. The two waves collide and stop at the center of the fin.
The researchers then created a computer simulation of the fish and designed a robot to duplicate its movements:
The group took the robot to Harvard University to test it in a flow tunnel in the lab of George V. Lauder, professor of ichthyology and co-author of the paper. The team measured the flow around the robotic fish by placing reflective particles in the water, then shining a laser sheet into the water. That allowed them to track the flow of the water by watching the particles, and the test showed the water flowing around the biomimetic robot just as computer simulations predicted it would.
“It worked perfectly the first time,” MacIver said. “We high-fived. We had the robot in the real world being pushed by real forces.”
Link via Fast Company
New York City may have had the glitziest ball drop to ring in the New Year, but Beebe, Arkansas, took the cake in the weird department: shortly before midnight, thousands of blackbirds began dropping dead out of the sky!
Around 11 that night, thousands of red-winged blackbirds began falling out of the sky over this small city about 35 miles northeast of Little Rock. They landed on roofs, roads, front lawns and backyards, turning the ground nearly black and terrifying anyone who happened to be outside. [...]
The cause is still being determined, but preliminary lab results from the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission revealed “acute physical trauma” in samples of the dead birds. There were no indications of disease, though tests were still being done for the presence of toxic chemicals.
Link (Photo:Stephen B. Thornton/The Arkansas Democrat Gazette)
Adding to the mystery, over 100,000 fish washed up dead on the banks of the Arkansas River, near Ozark – about 125 miles from Beebe:
Travis Harmon of the Department of Environmental Quality said: ‘Barges reported passing up river and churning up dead fish from the bottom of the river.
‘A single species is killed, and we don’t know the cause. If it was toxic, other species would be affected.’
So, is this a premonition of sort for 2011? What do you think killed all those birds and fish? What’s going on, Arkansas?
A Tweet from Rob Corddry (formerly of The Daily Show, now with Adult Swim) is turned into a comic by David Barneda at Twaggies. Experiences with my youngest child lead me to believe this is true wisdom. Link
We fear piranhas and make jokes about them, but they have their place in the ecosystem. National Geographic sets us straight with some facts about the fish.
They’re good parents—at least initially. A mom may lay 600 eggs at once, dad promptly fertilizes them, and both parents guard the brood once it hatches. (Later, they might eat some of their young. But let’s not focus on the negative.)
Despite their scary looks, they’re actually cowards. Okay, that’s a bit unfair, but studies have shown that rather than congregating to hunt cooperatively, as was always believed, they join forces because they’re afraid of being eaten. They’re especially likely to band together—in schools as large as 1,000 fish— at times of year when predators such as caimans and dolphins are regularly present. Apparently, they’ve gotten the message (evolutionarily speaking) that there’s safety in numbers even if you yourself have really sharp teeth.
That’s just a sample of the things you might not know about piranhas. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
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Image: Peter Shearer/National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research
I don’t know about you, but I’m utterly fascinated with weird and scary creatures that troll the deep ocean. Dark Roasted Blend has a fantastic post (as usual) filled with images of such creatures.
This one above is the Dragon Fish:
Light is so rare down there that its uniqueness is an allure, for mating, as well as a lure, for eating. Grammatostomias flagellibarba, ‘dragon fish’ to you and I, uses bioluminescence – biological light – mainly for the latter: EATING. Any deep, deep, deep swimmer that notices and becomes interested in a certain tiny flickering light will end up becoming caught by the dragon fish’s monstrously huge and needle-sharp toothed mouth. The light being a glowing lure at the end of a long, thin filament connected to the underside of the fish’s jaw.
We are in the midst of the Discovery Channel’s annual celebration known as Shark Week. In honor of the occasion, here’s a look at the strangest species of sharks, both living and extinct.
(Image credit: Flickr user Gore Fiendus/Jerry Frausto)
There are seven known species of sawsharks (Pristiophoriformes) that have long snouts with teeth, but they are not related to sawfish (although sawsharks are fish). They swim along the floor of the ocean and use their snouts exactly as you would imagine: they smack their prey sideways to disable them. Sawsharks eat squid, crustaceans, and small fish. They look much more dangerous than they are.
The basking shark (Cetorhinus maximus) is the second-largest of all living shark species, with only the whale shark growing larger. They normally grow to 20-26 feet long, with the biggest confirmed specimen measuring over 40 feet long! They have mouths up to three feet wide, which they hold open while swimming. That’s because they are filter feeders that scoop up plankton, crustaceans, and small fish as they swim.
(Image credit: Flickr user David Biesack)
There are eight or nine different species of hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna), named for their unusual shape. The reason behind the peculiar shape of the shark’s head was debated for many years. Scientists speculated that the distance between the shark’s eye gave it some kind of advantage. Recent research confirms this. Hammerhead sharks can see a range of 360 degrees vertically. They can easy see behind them with a slight turn of the head, and most importantly, their two eyes have a huge overlap of field compared to other sharks, indicating they have excellent binocular vision. Hammerhead sharks are able to judge distances well by sight alone. They also differ from other sharks in that they tend to swim in schools and they can develop a tan when exposed to sunlight.
Fourteen-year-old Kora Wira was fishing in Florida with her parents when a barracuda jumped out of the water and bit her arm! The 42-inch fish landed in the boat and was killed by Wira’s father. Between docking the boat and driving to the hospital, there was one more chore to be done.
Wira and her dad stopped for a quick picture before jumping in the car and heading to the hospital. Wira said she wasn’t in pain at the moment, but she was still creeped out by the fish. Her arm needed 51 stitches, and doctors told her they had never treated a barracuda bite. Her stitches are out now, and she said her arm is healing.
The complete story is a slide show of photographs that include Wira’s wounds, which may be disturbing. Link -via Buzzfeed
When 16-year-old Nick Richards went fishing for carp, little did he know that he’d come home with what just could be the largest goldfish ever caught in Britain:
Richards, from Camberley, Surrey, was fishing for carp close to his parents’ holiday home when he noticed a flash of orange under the water.
He positioned his rod and bread bait close to the spot and seconds later began reeling in the mystery fish. He said: "I’d heard rumours there might be some big carp there and thought I’d see for myself. I was there for two days running and caught some big common carp.
"Then suddenly I saw this big orange fish cruising along the top of the lake. At first I thought it must be a really fat koi carp, but when I saw it properly I realised it was a common goldfish – just like one you might keep as a pet.
"It looked like it was healthy and in good condition. The lake is sheltered with plenty of food, so it’s doing pretty well. Earlier in the day I’d joked that if I caught a big fish I’d call it Billy, so of course the goldfish got the name."
Billy the goldfish clocked in at 5 lb (2 kg) and 16-inch (40 cm) long. Oh, and Nick did the right thing by tossing it back to live (and not to mention grow) another day: Link – Thanks Katlynn!
Maurizio Porfiri, a professor at NYU Polytechnic University, is designing robotic fish that he hopes will be able to infiltrate schools of fish and lead them away from dangers, such as water turbines. He thinks that certain movements by fish establish them as school leaders and that he can mechanically duplicate these behaviors:
Since fish of different sizes and species school together, Porfiri correctly hypothesized that they would not only accept a robotic peer that was larger than themselves but also welcome it as a group leader.
To engage live shoal mates, Porfiri wanted to give the robot other fish qualities. Foremost, it would have to swim silently, and its locomotion would have to closely match that of live fish. To achieve these goals, he employed ionic polymers that swell and shrink in response to electrical stimulation from a battery, propelling the robot.
Link via Popular Science | Photo: NYU-Polytechnic | Previously on Neatorama: RoboSalmon Spies on Fish
A fish with hands? You betcha! There are 14 species of handfish, nine of which have just been named and described for the first time. Handfish were named such because they use their fins to walk around on the floor of the ocean, instead of swimming. Handfish are rare and difficult to study, and scientists believe they may even be toxic to predators. The pink handfish shown here bears a startling resemblance to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. National Geographic has rare photographs of four different kinds of handfish. Link -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Karen Gowlett-Holmes)
