PhD student at Southampton, studying mesopelagic fish ecology. Occasional writer and amateur baker. Tweets about fish in superlatives. Opinions my own.
Bit of a cool note to end the evening on - I am now a published scientist! Go read all about the cool mesopelagic fishes I found in the
#DiscoveryCollections
during my MSci project. Endless thanks to
@tammy_horton
and
@NOCnews
for all their support!
Green teeth! Garfish (Belone) have weirdly high concentrations of the molecule biliverdin in their skeletons, giving their jaws this bizarre turquoise hue.
So tuna crabs are benthopelagic descendants of benthic taxa which have well developed eyes, two grasping appendages, and swim backwards through the water column, trailing their legs.
Tuna crabs are basically squid!
LOOK: Filipino zoologists have recorded the world’s first discovery of a pregnant Megamouth Shark, according to the National Museum of the Philippines (NMP).
📷 NMP
These guys are some of the coolest mesopelagic animals. That huge domed head is all just two massive compound eyes, and the transparent body is covered in nanometer-scale bumps that prevent sunlight from reflecting, making them disappear in their natural habitat.
Gorgeous bright red Gigantactis observed in the Kermadec trench - while red colouration is common in deep sea animals this is the first time I’ve seen it in an angler!
Muting this so I don't get distracted but let me be clear - this is not at all an attack on fishers. Also, I am not a fisheries scientist, but I have a personal response to seeing a large apex predator killed which I more might share if they didn't think "oh that's just a fish".
@evilvillain1231
Yep, in particular the creepy guys are usually midwater, i.e. they live in open water and not near the seafloor. I will say though, there are a few absolute freaks on the deep seafloor
@WeirdMedieval
Well in fairness, I’m sure the oldest story ever written isn’t about a guy grieving his life partner, that would be really embarrassing for them.
@gothgirl_prelaw
Ha! Everyone check out this dork! He’s been working on a creative project and succeeding financially off of it for 17 years! Loser alert!
Holy shit! A reminder that abyssal fish, despite living in the “bibby zone”, are no less aggressive predators than their more toothsome midwater counterparts
Last week, I spent 5 days at the NHM, London, IDing deep sea fish and generally gawping at ichthyological oddities. I must confess, though, that I had an ulterior motive. In this thread I'm going tell you the whole story and show you the single coolest fish I've ever found! 1/
@WingsTV_
Certainly there are more damaging fishing methods - I just don’t necessarily agree with purposefully targeting large apex predators like this, it’s a pretty unsustainable food source.
@sweetiealert
Fun fact: the particular strain of wild apples from which all modern edible apples are descended is thought to have evolved to be big and sweet specifically to attract bears for seed dispersal, as opposed to other apples that exploit birds for the same purpose!
Industrialised whaling isn’t good but this picture of Old Tom, an orca who helped whalers in Eden Bay, Australia in exchange for tongues, is potentially the single coolest photograph ever taken by man.
Also I was probably a little bit clumsy in comparing this to trophy hunting *in particular*, poaching could be a better analogy in that people are hunting wildlife to produce a high-value commodity, not for fun (though sport angling for tunas is also a common practice)
Huh! This is a fanfish (genus Pteraclis), a widespread pelagic genus of pomfret, but they look really weird without the characteristic massive fins. The bases of the fins look really hypertrophied, and that scale texture is odd, I thought they were some really janky lamprid!
@tropicalcamatte
Ok so I wasn’t particularly familiar with Puyi as a historic figure so I looked him up.
Motherfucker this is the most swagged up baby I’ve ever seen.
@SamWhyte
Look people tried to call for the most minor change to help with this and the media tried to froth up stochastic violence against them, whaddya want us to do
@sarakhiser
Mad how Shirley Jackson accidentally by mistake wrote a story about the nature of state-sponsored violence and conformity in American society when she set out to write about a kooky lottery
Does anyone have any idea why red pigmentation, which is a common camouflage strategy in midwater inverts, is so comparatively rare in fishes? Off the dome, only whalefishes have it. Plenty of shallow water & benthic red fish, so I can't see it as a phylogenetic constraint?
🌊 Last weekend, some lucky kayakers and snorkelers came across a rare deep-sea dwelling fish in La Jolla Cove. The seagoers spotted a 12-foot
#oarfish
and to give you an idea of how rare this encounter is, only 20 oarfish have washed up in California since 1901!
What a gorgeous little clip exhibiting the jet propulsion used by frogfish. Most bony fish breathe through "buccal pumping", taking water into the mouth and expelling it through the opercular openings, but you can really see how they're adapted into a squid-like siphon here!
Big Archaeology will tell you that these are meant to be whales but real heads know that this is indisputable proof that mankind coexisted with giant roughsharks until the 19th century.
You ever think about that one time some angler on Reddit caught the nicest barracudina specimen I've ever seen?
I think about it. I think about it a lot.
@TheZinsmeister
@kendallybrown
If there’s even a 0.0001% of an innocent person being executed it invalidates the whole thing (which already is entirely pointless)