HOME |
RSS | 
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!
Comments Off
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)
Okay, I made up the last bit. But these fish have been altered to grow far more muscular than normal trout:
The bodybuilder stature of the trout comes from turning off myostatin, a protein that normally slows muscle growth. Researchers had known of a natural myostatin mutation that allowed for 20 to 25 percent more muscle growth in Belgian blue cattle, but did not know if the same would apply to the different mechanism of muscle growth in fish.
Terry Bradley, a fisheries and aquaculture expert at the University of Rhode Island, worked with a group of grad students for 500 hours to inject 20,000 rainbow trout eggs with different DNA snippets designed to block myostatin.
About 300 eggs ended up carrying the gene for more muscle growth, and eventually produced fish that mostly have the six-pack ab appearance — even though the fish don’t have standard abdominal muscles. A big dorsal hump adds the appearance of muscular shoulders.
Photos at the link.
Scientists have identified a new species of extinct gigantic filter feeding fish, the SUV-sized Bonnerichthys:
The fish fossils, described in the latest issue of Science, also prove that filter feeding emerged long before the first whales. For this method of eating, the diner suspends itself in the water, mouth agape. Water escapes through gill slits, leaving behind the filtered food.
It can help to have a big mouth, which many of these enormous fishes must have had.
Co-author Kenshu Shimada, a research associate in paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, told Discovery News that one of the fish he and his colleagues identified, Bonnerichthys, grew to around 20 feet in length and swam through a seaway covering what is today the state of Kansas.
I can’t get the image of the fish going "nom nom nom" outta my head. Darn the Interwebs! Link (Photo: Robert Nicholls / Paleocreations)
Photo: K. Parkinson/Australian Museum
Back in 2006, we blogged about Mr. Blobby, the ugliest fish ever. Who knew that many years later the same fish caught the attention of mass media. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass writes why we should all be fearful of Mr. Blobby:
As you can see from the accompanying photograph, the cunning blobfish (Psychrolutes marcidus) is the most terrifying fish in the world. And if you’re not afraid of it yet, you should be, because there’s always something lurking out there that can get you.
Its hideously deformed body is quite boneless, a gelatinous orb hovering in the deep, covered in slime and mucus. But there’s something even worse.
Its face.
Most fish don’t really have faces. You’ve heard people refer to "fish eyes" or "fish lips," or they say, "Oh, shut up, you old fish face." But the blobfish actually has a face. Not a fish face, but a human face, complete with lips and a big, bulbous nose. A blobfish looks like some fat, drunken judge and may be highly intelligent. And therefore quite dangerous.
It frowns. It leers. Sometimes, it even drools.
"That’s gross!" said an editor around here who didn’t believe me. But once she saw the photos, she began gnawing the knuckles on her right hand in sheer, abject terror.
Peter Rombough, a biologist at Brandon University in Canada, has conducted a study on the functions of fish gills. He concludes that although gills may allow a fish to breathe, that might not be the original reason why they evolved:
In order to keep from shriveling like your fingers in the bathtub, fish must constantly exchange ions, such as sodium and potassium, with the water. Larval fish can exchange ions through their skin, and early fish likely used rudimentary gill structures known as branchial baskets. But when the salinity of the water changes rapidly–as happened when fish invaded freshwater habitats–fish would have needed a much more efficient way of exchanging ions with their environment. That means large, complex gills.
Link via reddit | Photo: US Department of the Interior
The nature blog Treehugger has a slideshow of ten unusual fish that are so scary looking that they’ll give you nightmares. Pictured above is the fangtooth fish, a deep sea fish about 17 cm long. It has the largest teeth of any sea creature relative to body size.
Link via Digg | More Information about the Fangtooth | BBC Video about the Fangtooth | Image: Jeff Cart
An unnamed Alaskan bush pilot went on a fishing trip and neglected to wash down his plane afterward. The 1958 Piper Cub was just too much temptation for a bear to bear.
The fishy aroma attracted a passing grizzly bear who, clearly frustrated at not being able to see the lovely “noms” it could smell, took the plane apart in an effort to find it. Aircraft fabric is no match for bear claws. The bear also chomped both tyres for good measure, then departed the scene.
Alaskans are a hardy bunch, however – as tough as the aircraft they fly. The pilot radioed for two new tyres, three cases of duct tape and a couple of rolls of cellophane to be flown in so he could repair his craft and get home.
Duct tape: is there anything it can’t do? The story includes a picture of the plane after repair. Link -via Fark
Invasive Asian carp are populating the Great Lakes and forcing native species out of their traditional habitats. Scientists are taking steps to contain the invaders without affecting other species. They’ve developed an underwater “wall of sound” that takes advantage of the physical differences between Asian carp and native fish.
In a tributary near Havana, about 200 miles from Chicago, ecologist Greg Sass is testing a barrier that injects beeping sounds into an effervescent wall, which captures and magnifies the noise. The chirping bothers only the carp because it hears higher frequencies than native species do; a series of tiny bones connecting the carp’s swim bladder to its auditory system amplifies sound. In hatchery trials, the acoustic “fence” stopped 95 percent of the invasive fish.
You know all about student pranks – greased pigs in the cafeteria, cows being led upstairs, all of that juvenile stuff. Maybe you’ve even heard about the more complicated college stunts – when M.I.T. students erected a police car on the top of the school’s Great Dome, for example. Its license plate number was pi. Anyway, here are a few lesser-known student stunts. If you’re, um, “inspired” by some of these, I claim no fault… but be sure to take pictures.
Caltech is M.I.T.’s biggest rival in pranks, despite being located at opposite ends of the country. They often take potshots at one another and are especially prone to pranks at football games. Although the Great Rose Bowl prank is pretty well known, another football stunt occurred when Caltech wasn’t even playing. During the 1964 Washington vs. Illinois Rose Bowl game, the audience of 100,000 was rather bored by a somewhat lackluster game. That is, until they looked up and realized that someone had changed the electronic scoreboard to make it appear as if Caltech was putting the hurt on M.I.T. It happened again in 1984 – although the teams were UCLA and Illinois (again), it appeared as if Caltech was stomping M.I.T., 31-9.
The Blue Groper fish have a unique way to control their population: they can change their sex!
Bob Harcourt, Associate Professor Macquarie University: "The blue groper is a large fish, but the really sexy thing about Blue Groper is they start off as females. We’ve got lots of blue groper that are small green groper and as an old male dies then the largest most dominant females turns blue and becomes male.
And so one of the really cool things about these fish, is the sex ratio doesn’t really vary, but it is a function of how well protected they are. If you take a lot of males out, then the females have to spend a lot of their time turning into males, which means they can’t breed and they can’t lay eggs."
Now, the blue groper may be in danger. Their population has crashed and scientists are trying to figure out why. National Geographic has the video clip: Link – Thanks Marilyn!
Netherlands residents now have a place to watch their fish when they go on vacation. It’s the world’s only fish-resort. My question is how can they stop the fish from fighting each other?
Curt Carish of Kaua‘i, Hawaii was at Port Allen beach when he spotted a fish swimming awkwardly. He grabbed a bamboo pole and beat the fish until it went limp. Carish put the fish in his cooler. When a friend opened the cooler and looked at the fish, it had a gold watch hanging out of its mouth!
“And the funniest thing is that the watch was on time and still ticking,” Carish said.
Carish, who often hangs out at the private Port Allen Club with many other members, said in all of his 30 years on Kaua‘i he has never encountered anything this bizarre.
The coast of California, in particular, is home to one of the most spectacular kelp forests. Within the confines of this massive forest there lies an abundance of fishes, invertebrates and algae, marine birds and marine mammals.
(image credit: Timothy G. Laman)
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.
Businessman Andrew Cheatle lost his cell phone during a visit to the local beach. Believing it was gone forever after his cell phone apparently swept out to sea, he received a big surprise a week later.
Andrew, 45, said: “I was messing about with my dog and my phone must have fallen out and been swept out in the swell.
“I kept calling it but I gave up hope after a couple of days.”
He was shopping for a new phone with girlfriend Rita Smith, 33, when her mobile went off.
She told him: “Your old mobile number is calling my phone.”
Andrew continued: “She said some guy was going on about my phone and a cod so she handed it over to me and he told me where he had found it.
“I thought he was winding me up but he assured me he had caught a cod that morning and was gutting it for his fish stall and that my Nokia was inside it — a bit worse for wear.
“I didn’t believe him but went to meet him and found it was my phone — a bit smelly and battered — but incredibly it still worked after I let it dry out.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.
Ian Welch of Aldershot, Hampshire (U.K.), caught the biggest freshwater fish by rod in Thailand, a record 55 stone (770 pound) freshwater ray!
It took 90 minutes to land, 13 men to heave it out of the water… and weighed 55 stone when they finally got it to the scales.
So it’s little wonder that when Ian Welch first hooked the record stingray, it almost pulled him into the river.
Mr Welch, who weighs 111/2 stone, said: ‘It dragged me across the boat and would have pulled me in, had my colleague not grabbed my trousers.’
The angler, from Aldershot, Hampshire, was fishing in Thailand when he landed the ray, which is the biggest freshwater fish to be caught with a rod.
The biologist was helping with a stingray tagging programme on the Maeklong River, when he hooked the fish.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.
Remember the post about Micropinna microstoma, the fish with a transparent head? In that post, Neatorama reader sniggitysnags told us about the existence of the video clip by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute researchers:
MBARI researchers Bruce Robison and Kim Reisenbichler used video taken by unmanned, undersea robots called remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to study barreleye fish in the deep waters just offshore of Central California. At depths of 600 to 800 meters (2,000 to 2,600 feet) below the surface, the ROV cameras typically showed these fish hanging motionless in the water, their eyes glowing a vivid green in the ROV’s bright lights. The ROV video also revealed a previously undescribed feature of these fish–its eyes are surrounded by a transparent, fluid-filled shield that covers the top of the fish’s head.
This animal is so awesome that we just have to put it on Neatorama’s front page again: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – Thanks sniggitysnags!
More info at the MBARI website.
Two net-caught individuals contained fragments of jellyfish, which must have been their last meal. Such a potentially painful dinner requires incredible stealth, so it’s now thought that barreleyes carefully maneuvers its body near such stinging organisms, keeping its “eyes on the prize,” as the researchers said, throughout the entire hunt. Its tiny mouth then picks at the victim while a transparent shield protects the fish’s eyes.
(image credit: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute)
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.
One small step for birds, one scary pre-Planet-of-the-Apes warning sign for human beings. Watch the bird snag some bread being tossed to its less-intelligent cousins and then use it to attract some fish to snack on.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
So how did we get here anyway? Call it evolution, call it luck, but really the best and brightest creatures above and below the waves found powerful allies. In some cases these are completely unexpected – predator and prey, friend and foe – but the ones that stuck it out and stayed friends through the toughest of times managed to make it to today’s oceans and seas.
Evolution alone is an amazing thing – but species that evolve together can be all the more spectacular, protecting, feeding and cleaning one another in incredible ways. Sharks pair with fish, fish with shrimp and shrimp with sea cucumbers and much much more. From boxing crabs that wield poisonous anemones as weapons to shrimp that scour the mouths of electric eels, here are seven of the most radical symbiotic relationships from the shallowest to the deepest waters of our world.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
Comments Off 
Whether you love PETA or hate them, you still may find the humor in their new campaign to change the word for “fish” to “sea kittens.” Maybe they took the word “catfish” a bit to far, but you have to wonder is a fish still a fish by any other name?
Personally, I find this to be further discrimination against ugly animals. If they con you into thinking fish are like adorable little kitties, will it really get you to stop eating more fish? As for me, go ahead and dish me up some delightful meowing sushi, I’m hungry.
Apparently it’s called a frogfish, and while it looks sort of cute from afar, this thing is ugly… and fascinating. DarkRoastedBlend has a whole gallery of different types of frogfish, from the fluffy to the warty.
Link via DarkRoastedBlend
| FEATURED ITEMS FROM THE NEATOSHOP | |
 |
Mustache Bottle Opener |
 |
My Cryptozoological Family - Family Car Stickers |
 |
Zombie Hand Bottle Opener |
View more: New Items &
Best Sellers |
|
