fish
grrlscientist | September 10, 2008tags: Billfish, sailfish, Xiphiodei, fish, National Geographic magazine
In the Whirl.
Adorned for the hunt, with fin raised and changeable colors
flashing, a sailfish in the Gulf of Mexico circles a ball of
sardines, preparing to strike.
Image: Paul Nicklen/National Geographic magazine [larger view].
My contact at National Geographic magazine sent a link to an interesting story about billfish (sailfish) to share with you and she also gave me permission to use the incredible images of billfish (sailfish) that are there to see. They also have a video that shows how these fish make a "bait…
zooillogix | August 26, 2008Some people look at this and see a terrifying undersea monster with potrusible jaws like our old pal from Alien. I see my dog Izzy playfully tugging on my sleeve... after some sort of horrible experiment that mutated her into a nightmarish killing machine. Kidding kidding.
The goblin shark is a fascinating resident of the deep sea. They are most commonly associated with the waters around Japan where most specimens are recovered as by-catch from fishing trawlers. When a goblin shark finds its prey, it protrudes its jaws and uses a tongue-like muscle to suck the victim into its sharp front…
zooillogix | August 25, 2008The Georgia Aquarium just unveiled the latest addition to it's bigger-is-better strategy: Nandi the manta ray. Apparently rescued from shark nets off the Coast of South Africa, Nandi spent the last few months living at uShaka Marine World in Durban, South Africa. When it became clear that Nandi was going to outgrow her enclosure and that the Georgia Aquarium could house her (and maybe pay handsomely for her?), the wheels were set in motion. Nandi will be the first manta ray to be exhibited in the United States.
Nandi doing her thing. Photo credit to John Bazemore, AP Photo
Currently 9ft…
sporte | August 22, 2008Two teenagers, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, carried out their own science project over the past year. They visited 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores and gathered 60 samples of fish and sent them off to the University of Guelph to get sequenced.
I like this story. One of my former students did a project like this for the FDA years ago, sampling fish from the Pike Place Market and identifying them with PCR. He was an intern, though. Here we have students identifying sushi on their own!
Quoting the New York Times article:
They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with…
edyong | August 5, 2008Thanks to Hollywood, the jaws of the great white shark may be the most famous in the animal kingdom. But despite its presence in film posters, the great white's toothy mouth has received very little experimental attention. Now, Stephen Wroe from the University of New South Wales has put the great white's skull through a digital crash-test, to work out just how powerful its bite was.
A medium-sized great white, 2.5m in length and weighing in at 240kg, could bite with a force of 0.3 tonnes. But the largest individuals can exert a massive 1.8 tonnes with their jaws, giving them one of the most…
edyong | August 2, 2008
The next time you buy salmon from your local supermarket, think about the hidden costs in each succulent fillet. Compared to wild fish, farmed salmon is far less likely to burden your wallet. But by buying it, you may be placing a much larger burden on the environment. Fish stocks around the world are declining due to over-fishing and 'aquaculture' - the farming of fish - was originally thought to help. But farming brings with it a host of ecological problems.
If the farmed fish are meat-eaters, as salmon are, they must be fed on the proteins and oils of wild fish, which does nothing to…
edyong | July 31, 2008They say that all's fair in love and war, and that certainly seems to be the case of Atlantic mollies (Poecilia mexicana). These freshwater fish are small and unassuming, but in their quest to find the best mates, they rely on and Machiavellian misdirection.
The males always prefer larger females but not if they are being watched. Under the voyeuristic gaze of a rival male, Atlantic mollies will either feign disinterest or direct their attentions toward a smaller, less attractive female.
Deception is par for the course in the animal kingdom. Plovers will try to lure predators away from…
zooillogix | July 23, 2008After some torrential rain in Pinellas County, Fla, residents were treated to some friendly neighborhood walking catfish. Once again, this was sent to us by Kevin Zelnio who runs an online Viagra store or some such. Interestingly, the link he sent us was from a recent local news broadcast, but a little bit of sleuthing showed that they were just running old CNN footage from YouTube which they tried to pass off as their own. Scoundrels! Reminds me of what we do here everyday...
zooillogix | July 21, 2008I rarely divulge details of my personal life on Zooillogix because, frankly, I am quite a catch and I didn't want female readers leaving their husbands. On July 12th however, I (Andrew - the older and wiser one who still has both hands) got married. I tell you this because something horrible happened shortly before the wedding that directly informs this story: my then fiancee forced me to get a pedicure.
For years she has begged me to clickity-clack the raptor claws I call toes down to "Nail Bar" but I staunchly refused, as any self-respecting pretend-zoologist must. She was quite persistent…
zooillogix | July 21, 2008Two doozies in a row brought to you today by our good friend Kevin Zelnio of Deep Sea News and The Other 95%. The first is this awesomeness:
Amazing video of a giant freshwater stingray caught in Thailand and covered as part of National Geographic's Megafishes Project. This specimen measured 14ft long but fisherman in Thailand and Cambodia claim they can grow many times larger. Little is known about these freshwater giants but if the fishermen are to be believed (and why would a fishermen ever exaggerate a fish's size?!), these stingrays, also known as whip rays, could be the world's largest…
edyong | July 17, 2008New Scientist's Feedback section has a running series of items on "nominative determinism", that strange phenomenon where a person's bears eerie witness to their occupation, such as a neurologist called Lord Brain, or an article on urology authored by Splatt and Weedon. Well here's another example for them - a new paper about a singing fish from a scientist called Bass.
Beyond the wall-mounted horrors of Big Mouth Billy, fish are not exactly known for their vocal stylings, but one group - the toadfishes and midshipmans - are very noisy indeed. They make a range of dull grunts and hums by…
grrlscientist | July 9, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, flatfish, Amphistium, Heteronectes, transitional fossils, missing link, Matt Friedman
During the development of extant flatfishes, such as this plaice, Pleuronectes platessa, one eye has migrated round the head to lie on the same side as the other. So these fishes have an 'eyed' (up) side and a 'blind' (down) side suitable for their bottom-dwelling lifestyle.
Image: KÃ¥re Telnes.
Flounder, turbot, sole, halibut and plaice (pictured above) are more than just a tasty slab of flesh on your plate. They are flatfishes that spend their adult life lying…
edyong | July 9, 2008Imagine watching a movie where every now and then, key frames have been cut out. The film seems stilted and disjointed and you have to rely on logic to fill in the gaps in the plots. Evolutionary biologists face a similar obstacle when trying to piece together how living species arose from their common ancestors. It's like watching a film with a minimum of footage; the species alive today are just a few frames at the very end, and the fossil record represents a smattering of moments throughout the film's length.
But the gaps, while plentiful, are being slowly filled in. With amazing…
bleimanb | July 9, 2008
Every year tens of thousands of golden rays, also known as cow nosed rays, make a biannual migration between Western Florida and the Yucatan Peninsula. They are known to school in groups of 10,000 or more during their exodus. These shots were snapped off the coast of Mexico by Sandra Critelli, an amateur photographer and printed in Britain's Daily Telegraph (more pics can be found by reading the full article).
We're going to need a bigger boat...
zooillogix | June 27, 2008A not at all exhaustive collection of cool bizarro aquariums.
Modular fish tank
Toilet tank. Kind of like fish purgatory.
The Fish-Bird Tank-Cage
many more below the fold...
Sink tank
The sophisticated ichthyologist's sitting room
A concept piece by a Japanese architectural firm
More of the above
This robotic fish tank senses which direction the fish is swimming and drives off in that direction. Could prove extremely useful in absolutely no circumstances.
In this Korean tank, the pump and aerator are powered via USB. Additionally, temperature is controlled via software on your…
edyong | June 23, 2008In 2004, the Australian Government turned a third of the Great Barrier Reef into the largest network of no-fishing zones in the world. All fishing was banned in an area of sea just smaller than England. It was a bold and controversial political move - jobs and livelihoods, it was said, were on the line. But the plan went ahead and in just a few years, there are signs that it's working. One of the reef's most heavily fished species - the coral trout- is enjoying a dramatic comeback, thanks to this most ambitious of marine conservation projects.
The vast expanse of the Great Barrier Reef is…
esiegel | May 12, 2008What the heck has this world come to? All over the internet, this picture of an Orangutan trying to fish with a stick has been shown:
But what's the story behind this? Is this evidence that humans are not unique among the Great Apes as tool-users?
Not quite. According to the Daily Mail, this is an orangutan that had extensive exposure to humans; this jungle setting is actually where they reintroduce orangutans into the wild from zoos, private homes and (yikes) butcher shops. This particular orangutan actually doesn't successfully know how to fish; this was something he copied from nearby…
zooillogix | April 21, 2008Two species of teleost fish, grunion are famous for their unique mating behavior. During high tides, female grunion crawl out along the water's edge and dig their tails into the wet sand. The males then wrap themselves around the female to mate and the eggs are deposited in the sand. During the next set of very high-tides, the eggs hatch and the baby grunion wash out to sea. They are native only to California and Baja Mexico.
California Grunion, Leuresthes tenuis
More info is available at Grunion.org. Another, better video is available with ads on CNN.