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Not Exactly Rocket Science
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Trout with salmon parents could help to revive endangered fish species
Posted by Ed Yong on August 28, 2009 This article is reposted from the old WordPress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Getting excited when fish produce sperm would usually get you strange looks. But for Tomoyuki Okutsu and colleagues at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, it’s all part of a day’s work. They are trying to use one species…
The tentacled snake turns a fish’s defence into a death march
Posted by Ed Yong on June 16, 2009 Underwater, fish make very difficult prey. When they sense sudden disturbances in the water around them, they respond within five thousandths of a second with a defensive reflex called the C-start. Their body contorts into a C-shape and with a flick of the tail, they rapidly zoom away from the potential threat. But one predator…
What makes 250,000,000 fish gather in the same place?
Posted by Ed Yong on March 26, 2009 On the 3rd of October, 2006, Nicolas Makris watched a quarter of a billion fish gather in the same place. They were Atlantic herring, one of the most abundant fishes in the ocean and one prone to gathering in massive schools. This was the first time that anyone had watched the full scope of the…
Newly discovered fish crosses Peter Pan with Dracula
Posted by Ed Yong on March 10, 2009 You’re looking at the face of a new species of fish and judging by the two fearsome fangs, you’ll probably understand how it got its scientific name – Danionella dracula. The teeth do look terrifying but fortunately, their owner is a tiny animal just 15 millimetres long. Ralf Britz from London’s Natural History Museum discovered…
Human-induced evolution reverses for shrunken fish once fishing stops
Posted by Ed Yong on March 4, 2009 Earlier this year, I wrote about how the human obsession with size is reshaping the bodies of other species at an incredible pace. Unlike natural predators that cull the sick, weak and unfit, human fishermen prize the biggest catches and throw the smallest ones back in. As a result, fish and other species harvested by…
Three groups of fish are actually the males, females and larvae of one family
Posted by Ed Yong on January 20, 2009 Whalefishes, bignoses and tapetails – these three groups of deep-sea fishes couldn’t look more different. The whalefishes (Cetomimidae) have whale-shaped bodies with disproportionately large mouths, tiny eyes, no scales and furrowed lateral lines – narrow organs on a fish’s flanks that allow it to sense water pressure. The tapetails (Mirapinnidae) are very different – they…
How sharks, penguins and bacteria find food in the big, wide ocean
Posted by Ed Yong on March 11, 2008 Some of us have enough trouble finding the food we want among the ordered aisles of a supermarket. Now imagine that the supermarket itself is in the middle of a vast, featureless wasteland and is constantly on the move, and you begin to appreciate the challenges faced by animals in the open ocean. Thriving habitats…