The feastable fish

This Thanksgiving...

Eat a turkeyfish

Lemmings of the sea.

Fun with tempera cakes!

Thanks to Rad Murphy for the inspiration.

Nudi got branch

I like big branch and I cannot lie

 You other brothers can't deny

When a nudi walks in with a itty bitt waist

And a branchial plume in your face

 You get sprung

Hot tubbin' herps - what's it got to do with biodiversity?

There's a well known allegory that states that if a frog is dropped in boiling water, jumps out immediately and avoids a brothy grave; yet a frog placed in cold water that is heated slowly enough you'll have some tender (tasty?) froggy sous vide.

Recent research suggests that if the temperature of that pot (or the world as a whole, you guys following me?) increases slowly enough the increasing temperature could actually lead to increased biodiversity. Little froggy might evolve a physiology better adapted to warmer temperatures.

Maybe frogs would evolve something similar to sweat glands or dragon wings (because that would be sweet... and there would be increased surface area for heat radiation, of course).

Somewhat related: did you all hear about the frog with the transparent belly?

Some lesser known plankter species.

Everyone's heard of coccolithophores, pteropods and euphausids. Old news. Here are some lesser known species floating around in our oceans.

Nurdles for turtles

Japanese dock washes ashore in Oregon

29K rubber duckies' oceanographic odyssey

Funny story behind the pelagic spaghetti worm:

During my semester in Bermuda, my class went on a blue-water dive armed with BCD pockets full of Ziplocks to collect plankton as they drifted by. One of the divers in my class collected this very strange worm.  Upon closer inspection, the worm turned out to be a planktonic piece of spaghetti.  The rolling swells of the deep water had apparently caused one of the students on the boat to lose his lunch.

Those Cuckolding Cetaceans

So yeah, I'm pretty sure that's where whale sharks come from.  That's why no one can find the pupping grounds.

Fishy Physiology - Boozing with Bubbles

Ever wonder why goldfish can live for such a long time in a a tiny bowl with no aeration?

Ready for an fishy physiology lesson?

You'd better be. Shit's about to get sciency.

Goldfish, like all animals, prefer to extract energy from whatever delicious things they're able to find and eat through aerobic respiration.  First, with some metabolic magic known as glycolosis, glucose is converted to pyruvate, releasing a small amount of energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). This pyruvate then makes it's way to the mitochondria where through some craziness known at the Krebs cycle it is oxidized to form even more ATPs (Like 8 of them!).

But this oxidation requires... oxygen, believe it or not.

Many carps (goldfish are closely related to the common carp) naturally live in shallow ponds and lakes that freeze over during the winter, shutting off oxygen to the waters below. So goldfish have evolved an alternative metabolic pathway that anaerobically converts pyruvate into acetaldehyde which is then reduced to ethanol, releasing some energy (though not as much as the Krebs cycle). Similarly to those yeasty beasties that make all of your favorite beverages so delicious.

As far as I know no one's tried brewing a beer with goldfish.

There'd be a lot of fish poop, which would probably have a negative effect on mouth feel.

But, if you think about it, that goldfish you've left in the disgusting bowl on your desk for the past month without a water change is probably working on a buzz.

He is also probably going to die soon.

Change your fish's water.

- Couple days later -

- Couple days later -

- Couple days later -

Want to learn more about goldfish metabolic pathways? Johnson & Bernard 1983

Stay in school, kids.

Using what were essentially video games for fish, researchers were recently able to provide new evidence that schooling behavior in fish likely evolved as a survival strategy, a widely accepted, but until now, not directly supported hypothesis.

Sometimes following the herd can be a good thing.

Noisy Neighbors - IN COLOR!

Last month we learned that whales are able to "block their ears" to cope with loud noises. While whales probably aren't stuffing kelp in their ears whenever a cruise ship plows by (science fact: toothed whales actually do a lot of their hearing through the pan bone, a fat filled window in their jaw), researchers are still in the dark as to the exact mechanisms of this acoustic alleviation.

On a side note, I had the privilege of meeting Kina the false killer whale (the subject of this research) while spending a semester at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. You might have heard of his famous wholphin roommate Kekaimalu.

Kina the false killer whale. (Photo A. Paradise)

My professor using an acoustic device to test Kina's hearing. (Photo A. Paradise)

Yes, I know the pinnae make it a sea lion

Eh... not good eats.

Probably not their first choice

Could it be lAUVe?

To avoid any confusion, that's an AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) not a torpedo.  This particular one is a Tethys design.

Going for the Gold(fish)

Image quality's not great today; the scanner is down so I took these with my camera.

Less trolling, more shoaling, happier fish.

Elephant seals are the Cyranos of the Southern Seas

Fish Facts # 2: Fish Balls

In a recently published study, scientists found that removing the gonads from at least one species of fish caused decreased growth rates, suggesting that fish balls play a role similar to the pituitary gland.

Even when surgically transplanted to nonsense locations, fish nuts allowed for normal growth rates.

 Further research is required to evaluate the growth promoting properties of multiple sets of fish testicles.

 As well as other possible side affects of increased naddage.

 read more about the actual research here