You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘anglerfish’ tag.
A photo of the new Ceratioid Anglerfish discovered by researchers fom Nova Southeastern University)
Ferrebeekeeper is doing a poor job highlighting strange and magnificent fish for you (which was our blogging New Year’s resolution for 2015). Fortunately I was forcibly reminded to do so this week by marine scientists who discovered a brand new species of anglerfish in the midnight depths of the Gulf of Mexico. This new fish is a ceratioid anglerfish, which are notable for their fishing rod appendages and for their sexual parasitism. The male is much smaller than the female and, when the fish mate, the male attache himself permanently to the female’s body. His nervous system melts away into hers and he becomes a sort of gamete-producing lump. Particularly successful (or promiscuous?) female anglerfish have multiple males attached to them.
The photo of the new anglerfish makes it seem huge and disturbing, but the creatures are only about 10 centimeters (four inches) long—and that’s the large females: the males are much tinier. The tiny size of these intense predators is a disturbing reminder of what freakish giants humans really are (seriously…like 99.999 percent of animals are smaller than us). Additionally the romantic lives of these ceratioid fish serve as a reminder that relations between the sexes can be conducted much much differently than we do it!
Antennarius commerson – Giant frogfish (Commerson’s frogfish)
This is Commerson’s frogfish aka the giant frogfish (Antennarius commerson). It is a voracious carnivore which attacks anything small enough to be prey (which is pretty much anything smaller than itself–since the fish has an extremely extensible body). Commerson’s frogfish is a chameleon—it can change color to resemble the tropical sponges of its native habitat –yellow, red, orange, gray, or black, with all sorts of stripes and splotches (though the creature seems to betray a predilection for yellow).
Giant frogfish, (Antennarius commerson) photo by Rokus Groeneveld
Giant frogfish, Antennarius commerson
(photo by “Hole in the wall”)
The frogfish is an anglerfish and its front dorsal spine is tipped with a pinkish shrimplike lure (a feature known to biology as an esca). The fish lives in tropical and semi-tropical water of the Indo-Pacific (an eco-region which comes up repeatedly in this blog). Despite being known in English as the giant frogfish, Antennarius commerson only grown to 38 cm (15 inches) in maximum length which demonstrates that horror is relative (and that frogfish are not large from a human perspective). Although it is not classically beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, there is something oddly charming about its grumpy expression. I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I do!
Antennarius commerson – Giant frogfish (Commerson’s frogfish)
Copyright Teresa Zubi
ferrebeekeeper 