Lil' living fossils

Behold the first footage of a juvenile coelacanth:

Big ups to Charlette for this one.

UPDATE 11/19/09 00:42 - Here's a news release, courtesy Casey.

A victory for lungfish, turtles and Queenslanders!

 Seen here is the largest specimen of Murray (Mary River) Cod.

Tibbetts, T.A. (2003, January 6). Pictures from the snowy mountains. 

Retrieved from http://www.uisgebeatha.org/snowymountainspictures_dec2002jan2003.html

Remember when I was hating on folks for the idea of damming the Mary River, home of Australian lungfish, the Mary River Turtle and Mary River cod?  Almost certainly not, but as a result of that entry I joined the SAVE THE MARY RIVER!!!! group, whose e-mails have kept me abreast of the situation. As of yesterday, I am pleased to announce that it looks like the Mary River is safe from damming!  Australian conservationists are a-twitter (probably literally); I need to check Australian news sources for more info.  Look at these guys:

DPI researcher with a lungfish caught in Splitters Creek. (ABC: Jodie van de Wetering)

van de Wetering, J. (2009, February 10). Learn about lungfish. 

Retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2009/02/10/2487576.htm

 

Mary River Turtle, sporting awesome headgear.

Perhaps the second-largest specimen of Mary River cod?

Scott, B. (2007, July 20). A Snail's eye view. Retrieved from http://snailseyeview.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html 

Good job, everyone!

Freaky fish? That is not a freaky fish, THIS is a freaky fish!

Oceana (a PAC concerned with oceanic affairs) apparently has an annual "freakiest fish" contest on their blog, the Beacon.  I viewed this year's candidates and am by and large unimpressed; the only fish that I think legitimately belong on that list are the wolf-fish, hairy angler, hagfish and maybe the crown-of-thorns starfish.

Why are coelacanths on there?  Yeah, they're not conventionally attractive, but they're hardly freaky; if anything, their behavior is kind of dull.  And leafy seadragons?  All they do is look pretty!

Past winners of the Freaky Fish voting include:

2008 - Fanfin seadevil.  This is not surprising, as anglerfish ALWAYS excel in this kind of contest.  Seriously, look at that thing.

ANGLERFISH PROTIP: As terrifying as they look, they tend to be pretty small, less than a foot (~30 cm) long; and that's the big females, males tend to be very small and essentially are free-swimming gonads before becoming just plain gonads.  I'll elaborate on this later.

2006 - Blobfish, fangtooth, monkfish.  Blobfish are Internet famous due to an e-mail meme claiming that they're an example of deep sea creatures washed up during a tsunami.  Fangtooth?  Well, they can live in the abyssopelagic zone, which pretty much implies that they're going to be freaky looking.

ABYSSOWHAT?

Abyssopelagic!  TIME TO TALK ABOUT LAYERS (or ZONES) OF THE OCEAN 

"Abysso-" - the abyss.  I'm reasonably sure that everyone reading this knows what "abyss" means/implies.  For our purposes, let's say that it means "stupid deep".  The average person will have no interaction with the abyssopelagic zone due to the pressure/temperature/general conditions down there; for a general idea, here's a demonstration of what happens to styrofoam cups.  The current record for human free-diving is around 530 feet (161.5 m); so, as you can see, without a submersible, even the most enthusiastic human diver will never plunge below the euphotic/epipelagic zone. 

"-pelagic" - if a fish is described as "pelagic", it means it lives in open water, not near/on the bottom of a body of water (those organisms are called "demersal") or in reefs.  There are further subdivisions within these categories, but this definition of "pelagic" will suffice for the time being.

 

It kind of reminds me of the internal structure of the earth:

 

Earth's polar diameter is 7,899.80 miles (12,713.5 km); the average thickness of the continental crust is 21-43.5 miles (35-70 km), while oceanic crust is only 3-6 miles (5-10 km) thick; bear in mind that humans have never even dug to the mantle.  We interact with very little of earth's interior, similarly to how little of the ocean most of us personally access.

Brief tangents into geology aside, the ocean is typically divided into about five layers; only the two uppermost layers receive any light from the sun.  Generally speaking, we're most familiar/comfortable with forms of life that ultimately depend on sunlight to survive, either directly or by consuming organisms that directly use sunlight for life (i.e. plants).  Note I certainly do recognize that abyssopelagic scavengers depend on the sun indirectly, by eating things like dead whales that sink to the ocean floor.  Things that live in places with no sunlight (such as the aphotic zone and deep caves) tend to seem a little freaky to us.

Continuing on though, we have monkfish.  I first encountered monkfish in this context, familiar to readers from the Pacific Northwest:

That is at Seattle's famous Pike Place Fish Market, where fish are tossed daily for your pleasure!  Every time I've visited, they've also had at least one monkfish amid the salmon, with his happy monkfish sign.  If you look closely at them, you'll figure out why they're ugly - monkfish are anglerfish!  

Though I've never had them myself, they've been called "the poor man's lobster" and are evidently tasty enough to have led to an overfishing problem.  They're also known as "headfish" or "goosefish"; monkfish liver used in sushi is called "ankimo".  Research also reveals that their flesh is known to be marketed as a substitute for scallop, so if you're trying to make ethical seafood choices, please read your labels carefully to avoid consuming monkfish.

Okay, I'll admit - the illustration of the John Dory doesn't do this fish justice.  In its blurb, they also neglected to mention that it has protusible jaws, which ups the freak factor considerably.  

Additionally, my research on John Dories allows me to provide you a source for frozen John Dory halves and monkfish!, straight from the marine processors of China!  If that's not enough, how about these tasteful John Dory plates, yours for the princely sum of £29.95 (~$49 US)?

OTHER NOMINEES I OBJECT TO:

The upside-down jellyfish.  Jellyfish have a pretty high base level of "weird"; this one is by and large pretty normal looking, aside from the upside down business, but does that actually surprise anyone?  I personally nominate the granrojo jellyfish (Tiburonia granrojo), Nature's very own Metroid:

 

They're about 2-3 feet wide (60-90 cm), have gross fleshy arms and live 650 to 1500 meters (2000 to 4800 feet) down.  They're not much to say about them, because we don't know much about them.  However, one interesting feature is that their number of arms of variable between individuals.  George Matsumoto, an MBARI (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute) biologist who was lead author on the paper in which granrojo was first described, has this to say about it:

The feature that researchers find most intriguing is a collection of short stumps protruding from Big Red's surface—so- called "oral arms" that might be used for feeding. What mystifies Matsumoto is why some of these jellies have four arms, whereas others have six or seven.

"It is like finding one human with four arms, another with three, and another with two," says Matsumoto. 

 (2003, May 5). Mbari news - big red jelly surprises scientists. Retrieved from http://www.mbari.org/news/news_releases/2003/nr03-matsumoto.html

They're huge, freaky and AWESOME.  The MBARI press release also has links to more images of granrojo, which I strongly recommend you look at.

My final objection is the crown-of-thorns starfish.  Yes, I changed my mind from earlier.  While yes, their appearance is can be kind of concerning, starfish (more appropriately called "sea stars" because they are echinoderms, not fish, but I call cuttlefish "cuttlefish" so I clearly don't care all that much) are by and large a pretty freaky group.

Starfish are popular with children because of their familiar shape.  However, their familiar shape is kind of inherently freaky because they exhibit radial symmetry.  Humans and most animals exhibit bilateral symmetry; that is, we have a left and right side that would more or less match up if we were folded in half along a vertical axis.  Organisms with radial symmetry only have a top or bottom, no right or left.  Think about that for a second and recognize how utterly alien that would be to the human experience, to have no right or left.  The evolutionary biology of starfish

Other organisms that exhibit radial symmetry include jellyfish, some types of sea anemones, sea urchins (bearers of custardy gonads, considered a delicacy in many cultures), sea lilies and many plants. 

Then there's the way that starfish eat.  To put it bluntly, they have two stomach, one which they evert (basically, push out of their bodies) to engulf/digest food, one to further digest food.  Some are able to force their everted stomachs inside the protective shells of soft-bodied mollusks (e.g. clams) to devour them within their own homes.

But as far as plain freaky visual appearance goes, the crown-of-thorns starfish is a non-entity compared to say, the basket star:

Tanenbaum, J. (2006, June 15). Jacob tanenbaum: teacher at sea: 06/01/2006-07/01/2006. Retrieved from http://jacobtanenbaum.com/~tasblog/2006_06_01_archive.html 

I know I am not the only one getting a Lovecraftian vibe from this thing.  Look at the arms!  The mouth!  The everything!  Also, they're pretty large, with the central disk growing up to 5.5 inches (15 cm) across.  JUST THE DISK.  Did I mention they don't have blood?  And look like dendritic structures inside the brain, except they're mobile, huge and have regenerative limbs?

Here's a video to help drive home how...special...they are:

In case you didn't find that unsettling, let's also meet their cousins, the brittle stars!

And a final video, in honor of Halloween.  One of the defense/stress mechanisms of sea cucumbers (another echinoderm; while many cultures eat them, they are NOT sea vegetables, they are mobile organisms) is to violently expel parts of its respiratory organ out of its anus.  It is things like this that make me happy to be a human, for while I may cope with stress poorly, my reactions do not include violently crapping out my lungs. 

When they do this (called "evisceration" for obvious reasons), they may expel a nasty chemical soup that will hopefully take care of the predator...however, if you're keeping sea cucumbers in a tank, it may also kill all the other inhabitants in a charming process called "cuke nuke".  GAME OVER, PLEASE INSERT COIN AND TRY AGAIN.  They do grow these organs back, but depending on the violence of the evisceration, the cucumber may be injured in the process.

So, for your pleasure, here are some divers molesting a sea cucumber to get it to demonstrate this marvelous ability.  While I personally think molesting sea cucumbers is rather rude, evisceration evidently pretty normal for them.

Hope you enjoyed, have a Happy Halloween! 

I Love Ancient Fish EPISODE I: Bowfin

Image by Solomon David, curator of the fabulous PrimitiveFishes.com. Also, possessor of the most Torah-iffic name I've ever heard.

This week I visited my hometown of Sulphur, Louisiana, and couldn't help but notice the word "choupique". Choupique Bayou, some kind of Cajun sausage hut involving the word "choupique"...the word seemed familiar but wouldn't quite come to me, so I looked it up when I got home. "Choupique" is the name used for the bowfin, Amia calva, in South Louisiana.
Like so many other fish, the choupique goes by a wide variety of confusing names, such as "mudfish", "speckled cat" (probably because they have barbels; they are NOT catfish), "grindle", "cypress trout" (they are not trout), "lawyer" and "dogfish". Personally, I think "dogfish" is the worst of these because "dogfish" conjures images of small sharks, not these guys. I suppose it could be worse, there's the good ol' mahi-mahi/dolphin name issue that alarmed me as a very young fish dork.

In addition to the fish, "Choupique" is also the name of a Louisiana band depicted here in what appears to be gay Klan attire, bless their hearts (no seriously, that's just a joke guys, no allegations of racism here)
.
The bowfin, like its excellent brethren the gar, bichir, coelacanth and others, is considered a living fossil. Bowfin flourished during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of the Mesozoic, making them contemporaries of superstar dinosaurs Allosaurus and Brachiosaurus. This is not a recent fish. Like several other types of "living fossil" (e.g. Nautilidae, the nautiluses, who are spiffy and deserve their own entry), the bowfin is the only remaining member of its family (Amiidae).

PRO-TIP: Here's a handy tour of events through geologic time, courtesy the San Diego Natural History Museum. The good folks at the Geological Society of America have even made up a colorful PDF chart of geologic time that you can print up and tape to your wall/give to your loved ones so you never have to look too far to see when the PLIENSBACHIAN AGE was.

*~BOWFIN Q&A HOUR~*

So why are they called bowfin?
Bowfin are distinguished by their very long dorsal fin.

QUICK EXTERNAL FISH ANATOMY PRIMER WITH OUR FRIEND THE LARGEMOUTH BASS! THIS WILL BE USEFUL IN THE FUTURE, TRUST ME.

Courtesy KentuckyLake.com

The dorsal fin is the fin(s) running along the length of the fish's back. Most fish have fairly short dorsal fin(s); the bowfin is not most fish.
What kind of sweet prehistoric features do they have?
Bowfin have a couple: in particular, the gular plate and their kind-of lung. The gular plate is a large bony plate located in their mouths. Gular plates are not unique to bowfins, they're also found in Elopidae (ladyfishes, skip-jacks), Megalopidae (tarpon) and Albulidae (bonefishes); other types of gular plate are found in living fossil-mates the coelacanth and the bichir. For photographic details, here's a drawing from The Dictionary of Ichthyology. Other owners of gular plates include the bowfin's evil twin, the snakehead. Notice that snakeheads have long anal and dorsal fins.
I hate to give any species bad press, so I need to say that snakeheads are not evil in their appropriate context. However, as an invasive species they can wreak havoc on ecosystems.
Regarding their lung, while bowfin do not have lungs in the same manner as lungfish, their swim bladder can function as a primitive lung and they may take oxygen by breathing air. This behavior is also exhibited by those perennial aquarium darlings, the betta and the gourami, though they possess a different type of lung-like organ (called the labyrinth organ; will be visited later). Being able to obtain oxygen through a method other than gills is very helpful when you live in low-oxygen environments, which are incidentally the habitats in which both bowfins and bettas are found.
Also, here is a picture of a bowfin skull:

Image by Udo M. Savalli

As you can see, they feature the armored head that I love so dearly in old-school fish.
Do I want to a catch a bowfin?
Maybe. Bowfin are renowned for their enthusiastic fighting and penchant for biting, much like my cat. With these fish, the fight continues after they've been removed from the water, so come prepared with leather gloves. To quote The Bowfin Anglers' Group, possibly the people on the Internet who are most excited by bowfin, "Bowfin fight like cat[fish]s or carp on speed" and "The bowfin has sharp teeth that will make hamburger of a careless thumb".
Do I want to eat a bowfin?
Depends who you ask. The good folks down at the Bowfin Anglers' Group seem to think so and provide recipes for your perusal. Folks at other message boards give opinions ranging from "tastes like fish jello", "the cats wouldn't eat it" to "if you cook it quickly after it's killed it's okay". In my neck of the woods people definitely eat bowfin, but my people are also from the swamp and eat pretty much anything, so take that with a pinch of file.
Can I keep one in an aquarium?
Not with other fish if you're not using them as feeders. Bowfin pretty much eat anything, including each other. If you're feeling saucy, I hear they're fans of crawfish.
Anything else I should know?
Male bowfin are very protective of their young, to the point that they will display aggressive behavior (i.e. take a chunk out of you) if you happen to be wandering around their habitat and they feel you have come too close their fry.
References/Recommended Reading:
Brent Courchene on bowfin
FishBase's entry on bowfin
The Bowfin Anglers' Group
Alan Richmond of the University of Massachusetts on bowfin

L-l-l-lungfish

Some of y'all know that I am an enormous fan of primitive fish. They allow us a view of what the Age of Fishes was like to some extent, and everyone knows that the Devonian Period was by far the coolest part of the Paleozoic Era, which was filled with cool stuff. Anyway, I was playing around at Endangered Ugly Things yesterday and eventually came upon Ceratodus.com, an Australia-based breeder of Australian lungfish for the aquarist market. I don't want to post images from there without their permission, so just go look at their gallery - their lungfish are absolutely adorable, though all lungfish are terribly cute.
I first learned about lungfish as a child from a general "facts about animals" book my parents got me for Christmas one year. It had an illustration of a lungfish curled up in its muddy pocket and I was sold. Incidentally, this is the same book that taught me about jackdaws and Surinam toads.
Continuing with our story, it was through these links that I learned about Granddad, the oldest fish aquarium fish known, who also happens to be an Australian lungfish. Granddad has lived in Chicago since 1933, making him at least 80 years old. Next time I head over Chicago-way, I plan on paying my respects to this venerable fish.

I later ended up at Primitivefishes.com, which is pretty much a goldmine of these guys: bichirs, lungfish, coelacanths, gars (the first fish I ever caught), bowfins, bonytongues (arapaimas), knifefish, etc; awesome fish who I plan to talk about more in-depth later. This site in turn links to their forum, Aquatic Predators.com, which I intend to join and drool over - c'mon, they have a mormyrid forum! Everybody loves mormyrids!

Who can say no to a face like that?

I'm not the only lungfish lover out there, though: there's Lungfish.info and Anne Kemps Lungfish for all your lungfish info needs.
Nature also has an unfortunate editorial circa 2006 about the damming of the river that the Australian lungfish inhabits. Checking up on Wikipedia (always the scholarly source), it doesn't appear that the dam has been constructed yet (the projected timeframe was 2011) and there is substantial local opposition. Lungfish aren't the only species that would be affected by the dam: other non-human residents who'd be affected include the Mary River Cod and the Mary River Turtle, both endangered species.
More information can be found at Savethemaryriver.com, "...the official website of the SaveTheMaryRiver Coordinating Group - an organization dedicated to preventing the construction of a proposed dam on the Mary River at Traveston Crossing (Qld)."
NEWS FLASH: There was a substantial lungfish kill reported on June 25th below the North Pine Dam. More links to news articles may be found here.