A team of divers and the citizen science project Reef Life Survey have discovered a new population of what is believed to be the world’s rarest fish.
The Red Handfish (Thymichthys politus), is a small and critically endangered bonyfish, only found off south east Tasmania, and until last week only one remaining population of around 20-40 individuals had been identified.
The new site, which is secret in order to protect the new population, contains an estimated of 20-40 individuals, and is few kilometres away from the previously known population in Frederick Henry Bay.
Each site covers just 50 metres by 20 metres – about the size of two tennis courts – as the range of the handfish is limited by the fact it walks on the seafloor instead of swimming.
Male and female lined seahorse mated pair interacting
Seahorses are really interesting for a wide variety of reasons, but not least because they can be seen doing things like this. Mated pairs will rest next to each other, wrap tails around each other, sway together, and bump gently into each other. It looks almost tender, and it’s definitely not an attempt at mating. Really, it looks like affection.
friendly reminder that, if you take proper care of your eels and keep them in a big tank with lots of hiding places, they will never feel the need to hide in the sand
instead, they’ll either sit at the front of the tank and wait for you to walk in the room, or they’ll all noodle out of the woodwork they were napping in when they find out you’re there
eels will only bury in the sand if they’re scared or threatened and have nowhere else to hide. thanks for coming to my ted talk
This goes for all sneaky fish prone to hiding. All fish will hide sometimes, but every fish in the world will be much more confident if they have enough cover. The more cover they have, the safer they feel, and the more you see them.
Moray eels very frequently sit in their holes, that’s just what they do, but even they will stick more of their bodies out and come out more when they feel safe.
Hello everyone gather round, I’d like to introduce you to another favorite fish of mine. Meet Tetraodon miurus, the potato puffer!
The potato puffer, also called the congo puffer, is a freshwater puffer fish named for, well, looking like a potato with fins. Not to mention that the potato puffer is an ambush predator, unlike most other puffers, which are typically open water hunters. This means that our potato boy here is exceptionally lazy, spending much of it’s time with its awkward, clunk body buried in the substrate with only their eyes and mouth poking out.
They also have extraordinarily smooshy faces that conceal some gnarly fused teeth, resembling a beak! If you wanna see one of these fellas in action, I highly recommend checking out one of my favorite instagram accounts, @jackthepotatopuffer! It has some excellent content and lots of videos of Jack in action, including inhaling eating, and burrowing! Thanks for coming to my TED talk I hope you appreciate the potato boy as much as I do
The marine eels and other members of the superorder Elopomorpha have a leptocephalus larval stage, which are flat and transparent. This group is quite diverse, containing 801 species in 24 orders, 24 families and 156 genera (super diverse).
Leptocephali have compressed bodies that contain jelly-like substances on the inside, with a thin layer of muscle with visible myomeres on the outside, a simple tube as a gut, dorsal and anal fins, but they lack pelvic fins. They also don’t have any red blood cells (most likely is respiration by passive diffusion), which they only begin produce when the change into the juvenile glass eel stage. Appears to feed on marine snow, tiny free-floating particles in the ocean.
This large size leptocephalus must be a species of Muraenidae (moray eels), and probably the larva of a long thin ribbon eel, which is metamorphosing, and is entering shallow water to finish metamorphosis into a young eel, in Bali, Indonesia.
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