Creature Feature: Oarfish.

Happy Chinese New Year! Starting today, February 3rd, we are officially in the Year of the White Rabbit.

Oh, the horror.

No, today's animal is not the Killer White Rabbit; that does not exist, unfortunately. We suspect Playboy bunnies of being legendary creatures as well. That white rabbit in the moon that keeps popping up in anime? Not sure about that one, or the one in Alice in Wonderland. What does exist is the Chinese dragon.

Really.



If you take this fish anywhere in Asia, the local people are guaranteed to tie it to a dragon somehow. Various posts from Thailand have called it "son of the dragon," "Queen of Nagas (naga being another type of dragon, mind)", or something along those lines. The Japanese see it as a messenger from the Sea Dragon God's palace (竜宮の使い); small wonder, seeing as oarfish are extremely deep-water fish.

They are also HUGE.

Oarfish (genus Regalecus) are long, slender fish with a bright red coxcomb that runs from their heads to their tails. This, combined with a massive length of over 50 feet in some species (R. russeli and R. glesne in particular) have given this rare fish the title of 'king.' R. glesne, the longest bony fish in existence at 56 ft (17.2 meters), has the rather dull nickname of "king of herrings."

Although they have a worldwide range, encounters with oarfish are rare. These majestic fish are smart enough to live only in the deeper parts of the ocean, thus preventing humans from keeping them as pets. The oarfish caught on film are either dead, dying, or briefly coming up to the surface world to feed (maybe?) in a strange vertical position. They are toothless and thus harmless to humans. *Insert How to Train Your Dragon joke here.* If you encounter one, be sure to take a picture.

Of course, Asia has gone wild with oarfish. No, they are not good sushi; oarfish are coated with a layer of guanine slime and have unpalatable flesh. In part because they are related to dragons, they have gotten a Pokemon in Milotic, a Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card, and a Touhou character.

Oh, speaking of Touhou, they also made a lunar white rabbit. It is not physically possible to handle this many bunnies. Happy Chinese New Year!

Creature Feature: Clownfish.

There are few fish cuter than the clownfish. For those of you not fish savvy, clownfish are the little orange and white fish that you may have seen in a saltwater aquarium at some point. If you have not seen them there, you probably know them from Disney-Pixar's film Finding Nemo.


Finding Nemo is, for the most part, a OK portrayal of how clownfish live (if a little bit too anthropomorphized). Clownfish (which come in two genera; the kind most know are from Amphiprion) are native to the warm waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, including Australia's Great Barrier Reef. They also live in...



...anemones. Clownfish are also called 'anemonefish' for a reason: Those cute little fish live in fleshy pillars tipped with tentacles. Stinging tentacles, in case your mind got the wrong idea.



Anemone stings hurt. A lot. They look like alien flowers, but are closer to (real) hydras than any pansy. Like all cnidarians, the anemones' tentacles are tipped with nasty little hooks called cnidocytes. Given that one hit is usually fatal in a natural environment, it's amazing that something evolved to not only become immune to the anemone's venom, but live in it.

Clownfish and certain damselfish are the only fish immune to the anemone's stinging venom. The fish is protected by a (possibly sugar-based) mucous coating developed from frequent, brief contact with its anemone. Clownfish coevolved with the anemones, and the anemones, being picked clean of all sorts of debris by the clownfish, are cool with that. The clownfish basically eat anything the anemone does not, sort of like the cat and/or dog cleaning your dishes. They even eat the anemone's dead tentacles.



The benefits of cnidarians keeping colorful fish go beyond trash disposal. A clownfish's bright colors may lure other fish to the anemone's stinging tentacles. If something chases the clownfish, BAM, face full of poison as soon as it gets back to home base. The anemone gets food and the clownfish gets a house; a win-win situation like this is called symbiosis.

AND STAY OUT!

 The clownfish are weird in their own right. Besides evolving to resist anemone venom, they live with two fish per anemone in a much larger group. This group is headed by a single mating male-female pair (with the female being larger and more aggressive than the male). These two are the only clownfish that really have sex and the only two to mate. If the highest female of the much big group dies, the highest male replaces her...by changing his sex. Clownfish are born hermaphrodites, which is uncommon in fish, but definitely not child-friendly enough for Finding Nemo.

"Hey, dad? Why have those guys been comin' to the anemone every night? Is there something you're not telling me?" 

The movie was also right about clownfish being very popular in the exotic pet trade. Clownfish are easily bred in captivity, and are one of the few decorative fish to have a well-recorded life cycle in captivity. Good thing, too- it means less need for taking Nemo away from his habitat and damaging an already-fragile ecosystem.

Creature Feature: Barreleye.

As stated in the manta ray entry, there's a whole zone of the world's oceans that laughs at our surface world's definition of "normal." When you get to the depths at which the sun doesn't shine, things begin to glow in the dark, lose all bodily coverings except slime, and have eyes on the top of their heads.



The barreleye lives slightly above that zone. This does not make it any less terrifying than the things that actually live in the deepsea abyss. They live in the mesopelagic ('midwater') zone, but that's almost like saying "hey, I live right next door to Hell." Regardless of where you want to place this fish, there are a lot more of them than you think (6 genera with 13-14 species total).


(The one that you see most often is Macropinna microstoma.)

See those green blobs in the barreleye's submarine window of a head? Those are its eyes. Barreleyes have their eyes set in 'barrels' on top of the skull; the structure covering it is all soft tissue, making dried out specimens look freakier than the healthy, live fish.

Even the Japanese wouldn't eat this...

Barreleyes use their strange, upturned vision to see the shadows of potential prey. Some sources say that the eyes can also be turned forward, but these fishes are using what little light they can get from above most of the time. They are among the few fish to possess binocular vision, and the only vertebrates around to use mirrors and lenses in their eyes.


No. No, this fish does not look any better as a sketch.

The eyes are just the start of this fish's weirdness. Depending on what species you are looking at, they might have scales or not. Their fins are mostly spineless (seriously, check out the crystalline fins on the dried out specimen above). They have gizzards like birds, and some of their organs even glow in the dark thanks to bioluminescent bacteria. They even have some 'mirror lighting,' which is like countershading on crack. There is much more to these fishes than meets the eye, but the eyes are what everybody focuses on.

Creature Feature: Pygmy Seahorse.

Does anyone else remember the children's book series Where's Waldo? If not, the goal was to find a guy named Waldo (or Wally, depending on your region) in a crowd. He usually blended in pretty well either the crowd or other red-and-white things in the picture. The challenge was to find Waldo and/or his friends in the extremely-crowded image.

Now for a twist on that - find the seahorse:

OK, now for an easier one:



Still don't see it?


That adorable little sprite, dressed in red and white (or very light blue-gray) for the holidays, is a pygmy seahorse (Hippocampus bargibanti). They are native to the coral reefs around Japan, Australia, Indonesia and New Caledonia. There are two subspecies, each specifically evolved to blend in closely with a particular type of gorgonian coral (AKA sea fans). Their camouflage is both super-effective and adorable.

If you missed the seahorse more than once in the images above, you are not alone. This tiny seahorse was unknown to science for a looong time. They were first discovered by pure accident when their coral host was brought into an aquarium.




Pygmy seahorses are one of the smallest vertebrates alive. From head to twisty tail, they only stretch 2.4 cm - approximately one inch in America. (For those curious, the smallest vertebrate is a small relative of carps and minnows, also from Indonesia.) They are so small that there are probably many more subspecies and species waiting to be discovered.  Many species of pygmy seahorse have only been discovered within the last ten years. The Waldo of all seahorses will have us looking for a very long time.

(Happy Christmas Eve! Hope you all get lots of good presents tomorrow!)