Tag: marine biology

todropscience:

BONNETHEAD IS AN OMNIVORE SHARK, RESEARCHERS FOUND

What an animal consumes and what an animal digests and assimilates for energetic demands are not always synonymous. Sharks, accepted as carnivores, have guts that are presumed to be well suited for a high-protein diet. However, the bonnethead shark (Sphyrna tiburo), an abundant shark commonly found in seagrass habitats, has been previously shown to consume copious amounts of seagrass, flowering marine plant that forms subsea meadows in some coastal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, as in other parts of the world. And now, is considered the first known plant-eating shark. The finding were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.

The bonnethead shark is an abundant shark species in shallow waters of the Eastern Pacific, the Western Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico, where they feed on seagrass and small crustaceans, snails and other fishes, and according to researchers, in natural conditions, up to 62.1% of gut content mass is seagrass. Because a large percentage of the diet is seagrass, conserving seagrass beds is vital to the hammerhead shark family and other marine life.

bogleech:

holy shiiiiit every time I think I’ve seen it all in terms of biology there’s still always something new! Look at DENDROGASTER.

These are parasites found only inside of starfish and they are CRUSTACEANS.

There are many parasitic crustaceans who lose all arthropod anatomy as they mature and come out like just a glob of flesh but I’ve never seen one this ornate!

bogleech:

I’m suddenly seeing this posted all over the place but it’s completely false, sorry guys.

The largest species ever discovered is only three feet in length, and it’s the least scary, most normal looking one there is:

Those giant mouths and super long needle-teeth just aren’t very efficient at larger sizes.

Most of the especially freaky ones are only about actual-football-sized or smaller. 

Large deepsea fish are extremely rare, due to the amount of food they need. Also, keep in mind that anything with a body shape like that, the large mouth and stretching stomach, is like that because it mostly eats large prey items. For an anglerfish to have a reason grow that large, it would need to primarily eat large prey items. Now, off the top of my head, the only deepsea animal that gets that large (aside from giant squid, which would probably put up too much of a fight) is the sleeper shark, an extremely slow-moving shark that almost entirely eats dead things. There aren’t many of those, so the angler in question wouldn’t get much to eat, and would pretty quickly wipe out all the sleeper sharks in the area. Plus there’s the fact that a mouth like that gets slower and slower as the animal gets bigger, and the angler’s tactics rely on a fast bite. 

Now, if you want to invent an anglerfish-like animal that grows to that size because it lives in shallow water (think frogfish), lurks on the bottom, and eats things like seals? That could work.