Sanopus splendidus, the splendid toadfish, photographed in Cozumel, Mexico. (Image Credit: Jim Lyle. Used with permission.)

Behold, the splendid toadfish (Sanopus splendidus) — a fish that would not seem out of place wandering about Sesame Street, ready to exult the letter of the day with Cookie Monster. T is for toadfish, perhaps?

Toadfishes belong to Family Batrachoididae, a group of bottom-living, predatory species found along the coastline of the Americas, Africa, Europe, southern Asia and Australia, with a few freshwater species found in rivers. They have a large, broad head and wide mouth, much like their amphibian namesakes.

Like toads, most toadfish species have very drab, mottled coloration to help them blend into their preferred habitat of rocky bottoms and crevices. So compared to its relatives — the oyster toadfish (Opsanus tau), for example — the splendid toadfish is indeed, quite splendid, as you can see here:

Sanopus splendidus, the splendid toadfish, photographed in Cozumel, Mexico. (Image Credit: Jim Lyle. Used with permission.)

Opsanus tau, the oyster toadfish, seen here preparing to be launched on a NASA Space Shuttle mission. You read that correctly. (Image Credit: NASA)

Whether dazzlingly striped or conservatively camouflaged, toadfishes are fascinating animals. For one, unlike most humans, toadfishes have gone into space orbit on two NASA Space Shuttle missions — including one with astronaut John Glenn – as part of experiments studying how creatures maintain balance and equilibrium in low gravity.

Toadfishes also exhibit parental care. Sticky eggs are laid along a cave surface or some other solid substrate, and the nests are guarded by males. The hatched larvae remain in the nest until they absorb their yolk sacs, and are ready to crawl away to find their own hiding cave.

Sanopus splendidus, the splendid toadfish, photographed in Cozumel, Mexico. (Image Credit: Jim Lyle. Used with permission.)

Their secretive behavior and breeding strategy has some interesting implications. It is difficult for toadfishes to swim across great distances (Greenfield et al. 2008), so populations of toadfish can become easily isolated by geography and potentially evolve into new species.

For example, our splendid toadfish can only be found in one place in the world: the popular vacation destination of Cozumel, an island in the tropical, Atlantic state of Quintana Roo, Mexico.

The splendid toadfish is an apparent favorite of the Cozumel diving industry. There are a few YouTube videos showing scuba divers tempting Sanopus spendidus out of their caves for a good photo op, teasing the eager little toadfish with dangling dances of artificial lures — leaving them about as frustrated as Cookie Monster being tied up in Martha Stewart’s kitchen:

This next toadfish got luckier — it got to snack on an invasive lionfish!

Quite amazingly for such an exuberantly colored fish, the splendid toadfish was not recorded by science until 1974, when Bruce Collette, a longtime zoologist with NOAA and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, helped describe the splendid toadfish as a new species.

The splendid toadfish is just one of many fascinating toadfish species. Some have photophores — light-emitting spots that glow in the dark — while others generate buzzing mating calls that can even be heard by humans.

What other splendid species remain undiscovered?

Dr. Bruce B. Collette, senior systematic zoologist with NOAA and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. (Image Credit: Smithsonian)

Addendum 2013.11.05: I had mailed Bruce Collette, co-describer of the splendid toadfish, to ask if he would lend any anecdotes about the species, and I was thrilled when Dr. Collette sent back a reply. Collette is the Chair of the IUCN SSC Tuna & Billfish Specialist Group and the Senior Scientist at the National Marine Fisheries Service Systematics Laboratory of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Collette is currently at his lab in Doha, Qatar, for an IUCN Red List workshop assessing the threat status of the fishes in the Persian Gulf, but took time to share a few insights:

What was it like seeing the coloration of this species for the first time — what made you describe it as “splendidus“?

This species was independently discovered by the other the two other authors of the species, Craig Phillips and Walter Starck, who would not talk with each other. Separately, I had received specimens of another species, Sanopus barbatus, so I persuaded the other two authors to participate in a joint paper describing Sanopus barbatus by the three of us and S. johnsoni by Starck and me. I can’t remember which of us proposed the name splendidus, but it seemed appropriate then and now.

Forty years after its description, what are some fascinating things we’ve learned about the splendid toadfish? And what aspects of its biology do we still not know?

I wonder why its distribution seems to be limited to Cozumel, but even stranger is the fact that no other specimens of S. johnsoni have been collected.

Toadfishes are one of your areas of expertise. What drew you to study this fascinating group of fishes?

My first experience with toadfishes was with a little venomous species that we collected on board the fishery vessel Oregon in the Gulf of Panama many years ago. I originally thought it might be a stargazer but found it was the first record of a species of Thalassophryne since it was originally described. This led to a revision of the subfamily Thalassophryninae which sort of made me an expert on toadfishes with several subsequent papers as noted in Greenfield et al.

Thank you for your time, Bruce.

Interview edited for punctuation and formatting and enhanced with links.

And for herpetology enthusiasts out there, head over to the Anole Annals website to read this fascinating account on Collette’s academic beginnings studying Anolis lizards in Cuba in the 1950′s.

Sanopus splendidus, the splendid toadfish, photographed in Cozumel, Mexico. (Image Credit: Jim Lyle. Used with permission.)

Sanopus splendidus Collette, Starck and Phillips, 1974
Splendid Toadfish (click for names in other languages)

Class Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Order Batrachoidiformes (Toadfishes)
Family Batrachoididae (Toadfishes)

FishBase Page: http://www.fishbase.org/summary/12024

Citations:

Collette, BB. 1974. A review of the coral toadfishes of the genus Sanopus with descriptions of two new species from Cozumel Island, Mexico. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 87(18): 185-204. 

Greenfield, DW, R Winterbottom, BB Collette. 2008. Review of the toadfish genera (Teleostei: Batrachoididae). Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences Series 4 59(15): 665-710. 

Many thanks to Dr. Bruce Collette for providing his time and insights.

All of the splendid photos of splendid toadfish featured in this post are taken by Jim Lyle, retired professor of chemistry at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Professor Lyle took these photos during his past travels scuba diving in Cozumel, and I am grateful for his permission to reuse the photos. Take a look through his diving albums here.

And thanks to doctoral researcher Natalie Sopinka at University of British Columbia for suggesting toadfishes as species to feature on Better Know a Fish. 

— Ben Young Landis

An adult Thorichthys ellioti. (Image Source: http://www.aquariumlife.com.au)

Let’s just get this out of the way: disappointingly, the fish genus Thorichthys is not named after Thor, neither the Norse god of thunder nor the Marvel Comics character.

Thor, god of dramatic poses. (Image Credit: Marvel Studies/Disney)

Waiting in line at the cinema last night, I recalled that there was a genus of fish named Thorichthys, after staring at all the advertisements around me. Ichthys comes from the Greek word for fishes (ἰχθύς), so does Thorichthys literally mean “Thor-fish”? I had to dig around to find out.

My go-to reference for ichthyological information is FishBase.org. There, I looked up the genus Thorichthys — which are species of freshwater fishes topping around 6 inches (15 cm) and found in the rivers of Atlantic Central America, in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.

Thoricthys belong to Family Cichlidae — the cichlids (pronounced sick-lids) — an incredibly diverse group of fishes found on four continents, sporting a dazzling variety of colors, shapes and behaviors. Some cichlids nurse their babies via their body slime, and others nest in empty snail shells. Many cichlids are cornerstones of the aquarium fish trade, while one in particular dominates the farmed seafood industry. Countless fascinating stories remain to be told about cichlids.

Thorichthys ellioti (Image Source: http://www.aquariumlife.com.au)

The next step was to figure out who came up with the name Thoricthys in the first place. As mentioned in past posts, the taxonomy or naming of lifeforms is a complex, regulated affair not unlike that of legal proceedings, and the process is the same: determining which scientist’s assessment is valid and whether it should be upheld over past rulings. As such, these procedures leave a paper trail — including the original description of a new species by a scientist and the scientist’s own explanation for choosing a particular name. 

Thorichthys, it turns out, was named by a U.S. ichthyologist named Seth Eugene Meek, of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Meek created the genus Thorichthys in his 1904 report “The fresh-water fishes of Mexico north of the isthmus of Tehuantepec”, for a new species from Veracruz-Llave he named Thorichthys ellioti (pictured throughout this post), as well as for a few other previously known species he wanted to reclassify under his new grouping.

Thankfully for the digital age and the open source movement, no trip to a far away library is needed to dust off moldy tomes from a century ago. A scanned copy of Meek’s report is available online from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, free to be viewed by anyone. Scroll down to page 222, and we can find Meek’s original etymology for the fish genus Thorichthys:

Description of the new genus Thorichthys by S.E. Meek in 1904. (Image Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library/University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne)

It would seem that Meek named Thorichthys to mean “leaping fish”, with θρωσκω (throsko) meaning “to leap” or “leaping” in Ancient Greek. Discussing another Thorichthys species on the next page, Meek writes:

From a discussion on Thorichthys helleri by S.E. Meek in 1904. (Image Source: Biodiversity Heritage Library/University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne)

Alas, we are still left without a “Thor-fish” in the end, though Thorichthys ellioti would be a rather petite tropical fish for such a thunderously Nordic name anyway. But we did end up with a glimpse into the past, a virtual journey through the scientific process 100 years ago — just picture yourself as Meek, seeing these sparkling, jewel-like little fishes for the first time, eager to study them and determine whether they might be a new species to share with the world.

And once written, those scientific records enter into history, to be debated and discussed for decades on — even the basis for discussions as lighthearted as one triggered by a comic book movie, one century later.

A young Thorichthys ellioti. (Image Source: http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums)

Thorichthys ellioti Meek, 1904
Spotcheek Cichlid (click for names in other languages)

Class Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Order Perciformes (Perch-like Fishes)
Family Cichlidae (Cichlids)

FishBase Page: http://www.fishbase.org/summary/26501

Citations

Meek, SE. 1904. The fresh-water fishes of Mexico north of the isthmus of Tehuantepec. Field Columbian Museum Zoological series v. 5. doi: 10.5962/bhl.title.2229

Note for Taxonomy Geeks: The appears to be a division in the accepted scientific name for this species between academic researchers and aquarists. Academic researchers have kept with Thorichthys ellioti (at least based on my very cursory Google Scholar search), whereas the aquarium trade appears to be using Thorichthys maculipinnis as the accepted name for the this species. 

As a standard for this website, I use names listed by FishBase, which itself often references the American Fisheries Society or the United Nations FAO. Thus, I chose to use T. ellioti here. For more about the T. maculipinnis assessment, see this article from www.cichlidae.com.

Additionally, the naming history of Hero versus Cichlasoma versus Thorichthys is completely glossed over here. I will leave it to a true cichlid taxonomist to explain why and how Thorichthys remains a valid name today. I really just wanted an excuse to talk about fish and The Avengers at the same time, can’t you tell?

Lastly, there is at least one other fish with “Thor” in its name: Arnoglossus thori, a type of Mediterranean flounder. Even so, the species name thori appears to be honoring a Danish research ship Thor, which carried out the 1908-1910 expedition on which this species was discovered. Now I want a ship named Thor….

— Ben Young Landis

Spotted sucker (Minytrema melanops) swimming in the Head Spring of the Ichetucknee River, Florida, USA. (Image Credit: Ben Young Landis/CC-BY)

I recently traveled to Gainesville, Florida, for the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers. Before meeting up with other science and nature writers, however, I joined local friends for a canoe tour of the nearby Ichetucknee Springs State Park.

While South Florida may be world-famous for its beaches and nightlife, northern Florida is renowned for its natural springs. Yet for many of us accustomed to the urbanized world, “spring water” is but a label on a plastic bottle — an advertiser’s suggestion of purity and quality, hitched to the name of some exotically named location.

But for the people of Florida, natural springs are the primary source of drinking water, as well as a major tourism draw. Rainwater filters through Florida’s karst and sand geology to enter the immense, natural subterranean storage system that is the Floridan aquifer — before reemerging into our earthly realm in the form of cool, crystal-clear water, feeding rivers verdant with life:

The Ichetucknee River is one such ecosystem. Even though we visited on a clouded, rainy day, the radiant blue of the Ichetucknee’s waters easily fought through the gray-gloom light to greet our eyes.

The Head Spring of the Ichetucknee River, in Florida, USA. (Image Credit: Ben Young Landis/CC-BY)

Our canoe ride down the six-mile (10 km) span of the Ichetucknee River saw us drenched in steady rain.

Oddly, this made for a soulful, primal experience — we three paddlers alone on the water, rarely coming across another traveler. It was us and the river and its denizens: the curious otter undulating itself towards the riverbank, looking back at us with its glossy eyes; the wiry, still coils of a brown water snake hung from a cypress branch; troupes of damselflies alighting here and there on our hands and heads, as if anointing us with some silent sign of approval from the river.

A gray, quiet day on the Ichetucknee River. (Image Credit: Ben Young Landis/CC-BY)

After the canoe tour, we returned to the top of the Ichetucknee to snorkel in its head spring. By this time, a bit of sunlight brightened the landscape — and the waters.

It was, without exaggeration, like swimming in an aquarium.

The Head Spring of the Ichetucknee River. (Image Credit: Rachel Pawlitz)

The fishes swimming in this azure pool would not be unfamiliar to many North American anglers. Largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) hovered in the shade, while various species of sunfish (Lepomis spp.) peered and pecked along the thickets of aquatic plants.

One fish new to me was the spotted sucker (Minytrema melanops), which cruised along the spring bottom, using their underslung jaws and fleshy lips to suck up sand and sift out crustaceans and aquatic insects (White and Haag 1977). Wary feeders, their sleek, spotted bodies easily swam out of the way as I approached, like herds of deer browsing and pausing across a meadow.

Spotted sucker (Minytrema melanops) swimming in the Head Spring of the Ichetucknee River, Florida, USA. (Image Credit: Ben Young Landis/CC-BY)

Spotted suckers belong to Family Catostomidae, collectively known as “suckers” after their mouth shape and feeding habits. All are freshwater species, with nearly 80 in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and curiously, one in Siberia and one in China. Their names are as diverse as their range of shapes, sizes and colors — quillback, chubsucker, hog sucker, buffalo, jumprock, razorback, redhorse. And during breeding time, many sucker species get pimply — they develop bumpy growths called tubercles on their fins, and depending on the species and gender, on their heads as well.

The spotted sucker has a wide geographic range, spanning southern Ontario down through more than 22 states in the U.S., including Wisconsin, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, North Carolina, and the Gulf Coast states like Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

But I will count myself as lucky to have swum with them here at Ichetucknee Springs. Spanish conquistadors once searched Florida for the mythical fountains of youth, and my brief time on and in these waters certainly had similar effects — turning back the clock to a simpler, wilder state of mind, flowing as bright, clear and free as the springs themselves….

A school of spotted suckers (Minytrema melanops). (Image Credit: Ben Young Landis/CC-BY)

Minytrema melanops, the spotted sucker. (Image Credit: Ohio Department of Natural Resources)

Minytrema melanops (Rafinesque, 1820) 
Spotted Sucker
Click for name etymology (ETYFish Project)
Click for names in other languages (FishBase)

Class Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Order Cypriniformes (Carp-like Fishes)
Family Catostomidae (Suckers)

FishBase Page: http://www.fishbase.org/summary/2996

Citations

White, DS, KH Haag. 1977. Foods and feeding habits of the spotted sucker, Minytrema melanops (Rafinesque). American Midland Naturalist 98(1): 137-146.

I must extend special thanks to my friends and colleagues Catherine Puckett and Rachel Pawlitz for guiding me on the Ichetucknee tour, in particular for my use of Rachel’s underwater camera and for Catherine’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Ichetucknee’s flora and fauna. I highly recommend reading Catherine’s essay on writing, womanhood and serpents, titled “Beauty and the Beast”, published in the nature writing anthology Trash Animals from University of Minnesota Press.

I would also like to draw attention to a new website called The ETYFish Project, created by Christopher Scharpf and Kenneth J. Lazara. This amazing new resource is a growing index of the etymology — name origins and meanings — of scientific names of known fishes. Needless to say, this is an unfinished and continuing task, but the current collection is already unbelievably impressive. I will link to ETYFish etymologies wherever possible from here on.

— Ben Young Landis

Last month, I visited Gainesville, Florida, attending the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers, as well as taking in a fishseeking side trip.

My flight itinerary back from the conference was daunting — three flights spanning 13 hours — and with a sigh, I packed myself into the snug sardine can that was my second flight. Exhausted, I slumped into my aisle seat once my two rowmates settled in, and promptly fell asleep.

I woke up in time for the beverage service. When my seat neighbor reached out to take his drink from the flight steward, my groggy eyes perked open: the gentleman next to me had a large shark tattoo on his forearm.

A leopard shark (Triakis semifasciata) as an arm tattoo. (Image Credit: Ben Young Landis/CC-BY)

It wasn’t just any shark. This tattoo was not a gross caricature or cartoon. It wasn’t the stereotypical ferocious-looking white shark or hammerhead. There was no deadly, toothy grin, and the spotted markings were not randomly placed. Here was a tattoo particularly drawn and detailed after a very specific shark species.

Clearly, I was sitting next to another fish enthusiast. And clearly, I had to learn the story behind the tattoo.

“I’ve had many people ask me about the tattoo, but only two knew what it was,” said my neighbor, who introduced himself as Chris.

On his arm was a tattoo of a leopard shark (Triakis semifasciata), a member of the hound shark family, Triakidae. Leopard sharks are unique to the Pacific coast of North America, from Oregon south to the Gulf of California.

A leopard shark, Triakis semifasciata. (Image Credit: NowPublic.com via Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife)

Chris explained that he has been scuba diving since he was 14. He likes to draw species he had seen in the wild, then turn them into tattoo designs (on his other arm was a turtle).

Like many of us, Chris said that growing up, he wanted to be a marine biologist. But a knack for all things mechanical steered him down a career path in heavy machinery.

“I tinker,” he said, humbly.

Starting on bicycles as a child, Chris worked his way up to trucks, pumps, CNC (computer numerical control) builds, cars and then tractor-trailers. He told me of his responsibilities as a welder, mentoring young guns not yet wise to the risks of dangerous chemicals and hazards, and of his assignments inspecting manufacturing plants, requiring him to be able to visualize and piece together entire facilities in his head.

Despite his profession as a mechanic, Chris said he tries to get back in touch with the ocean whenever he can. His parents and his upbringing seemed to have instilled a life-long appreciation for nature.

“My mom was in Greenpeace, and my dad was a logger,” he laughed. “That pretty much says it.”

A baby leopard shark (Triakis semifasciata) at the Central Coast Aquarium in Avila Beach, California, USA. (Image Source: Yelp)

Chris talked about his various stops around the country, stints in San Diego and Seattle, St. Croix and Florida. But Oregon seemed to have been a place of many fond memories, and it was in Newport, Oregon, where Chris took his advanced open water diving coursework. If he wasn’t riding dirt bikes on the dunes, he was underwater in Yaquina Bay.

It was the leopard sharks he had seen on his dives that Chris modeled his tattoo after. ”Out in Oregon, there’s a lot of wildlife,” he told me. “And when you see this [species], and you know that it’s local… that’s pretty awesome.”

And what better creature to leave an imprint on one’s heart — and arm — with such sleek form, elegant spots, and even disposition? As most sharks do, leopard sharks swim about the seas like journeymen traveling the land, quietly going about their business, corralling small fish or digging up clams, worms and rays to eat. The leopard shark is adaptable to all circumstances — equally at home in kelp forests or seagrass beds, salt marsh lagoons or aquarium exhibits. It is a fine design of mobile, natural machinery, and an antithesis of toothy, cartoon savagery.

A leopard shark (Triakis semifasciata) at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. (Image Credit: Chad King/NOAA MBNMS)

My impression of Chris was that of a quiet, down-to-earth person, appreciative of his life and gifts. Talking about fish, though, clearly puts him in a lightened mood. Our conversations later in the flight would turn to some of his household menagerie — including the unfortunate, urine-prone habits of a tiny, territorial sugar glider that belong to his kids. But inevitably, we would come back to the subject of fishes.

“My friends, they call me a fish,” Chris said. “We’ll be out fishing for steelhead and it’ll be 30 degrees, but I’ll still go in the water with my pants on to go after them.”

As for the fish tattoos, Chris said he hopes to add quite a few more to his arm.

“But my wife asks me, ‘How much more?’”

A leopard shark (Triakis semifasciata) at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. (Image Credit: Chad King/NOAA MBNMS)

Triakis semifasciata Girard, 1855
Leopard Shark
Click for name etymology (ETYFish Project)
Click for names in other languages (FishBase)

Class Chondrichthyes (Cartilaginous Fishes)
Order Carcharhiniformes (Ground Sharks)
Family Triakidae (Hound Sharks)

FishBase Page: http://fishbase.org/summary/2543

— Ben Young Landis

Two slices of onagadai (Etelis coruscans) brushed with soy sauce, flanked by pollock roe to the left and salmon roe to the right. (Image Credit: Ben Young Landis/CC-BY)

[We return with a visit to the sushi bar...]

“I always enjoy learning from you, chef,” I said to the man behind the sushi bar. The Japanese man smiled back, and cocked his head briefly in a polite, acknowledging nod.

“And I wish I had more customers like you,” he replied. Then his head of tussled, bleached-blond hair bowed to focus on the next dish at hand, and my head bowed to the bowl of of chriashizushi before me.

Chirashizushi. (Image Credit: Ben Young Landis/CC-BY)

I make a regular pilgrimage to this chef — who has a preference for privacy and does not like his name used, a preference I gladly respect for all the wonderful tastings and conversations he has shared on all my visits.

I would make my usual order of chirashizushi — a medley of sliced fish fillets (sashimi) and shellfish over a bowl of sushi rice. It  is a convenient way to taste a variety of fish species, and a chance for the chef to sneak in a sample of the rare or unusual.

This week, the extra treat was onagadai or onaga, the deepwater longtail red snapper (Etelis coruscans).

Etelis coruscans, the onaga. (Image Source: Guide to the Coastal Resources of Guam, Vol 1. The Fishes.)

The species was described to Western science by French zoologist Achille Valenciennes, who writes in 1862:

L’ételis flamme… is a large and beautiful fish, which the fishermen of Réunion call le Vivaneau flamme, because of the vivid and brilliant red color which it is painted.

Flamme means flame,  and vivaneau is a French name for fishes in the family Lutjanidae, the snappers. The snappers are more than 100 species of predatory fish found in tropical and subtropical waters worldwide, with many species common in recreational and commercial fisheries, such as the red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) commonly traded in the East Coast of the United States.

The name “snapper” can be particularly confusing in the United States, because on the West Coast it can be erroneously used for rockfishes (Sebastes spp.), another group of commonly sold food fishes.

Vivaneau la flamme (Etelis coruscans), caught by the New Caledonia fishing vessel Black Shark. (Image Source: http://www.black-shark-nc.com)

True snappers live in different depths, depending on the species. Some are found in mangrove forests, estuaries and shallow coral reefs, while others are found in deeper waters. The onaga, for example, are caught in depths 600 to 1,000 feet (180-300 m), and up to 1,400 feet (450 m) in some places.

“That’s why it’s so expensive,” the chef said, interrupting my admiring gaze at the fillets. A subtle, winking boast of his pleasure to share such a prize.

You can tell that onaga prefer a certain depth of water by its red color and large eyes. These are common traits in fish that are active at night or in depths where little sunlight penetrates.

The red wavelengths of sunlight are the first to be absorbed by water and lost with increasing depths. Animals with red coloring will appear as dark blue instead, blending into the surrounding waters. Large eyes allow the creatures themselves to sense whatever sunlight remains available, as well as any bioluminescence — biochemically generated light. And scientists are only beginning to understand how fish reflect and sense ultraviolet light — the entirely foreign language of biofluorescence, undetectable by human eyes.

The large eyes of the onaga (Etelis coruscans). (Image Source: mitchssushi.com)

Onaga and hamadai are the names for Etelis coruscans in Japan. The species can be found elsewhere in the Western Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. It is also well-known in the Hawaiian Islands, where the traditional name is ‘ula’ula koa’e — “the red snapper with the tail like a tropicbird” (Titcomb 1972).

This onaga in my chirashizushi was from Hawaii, said the chef. “The ones from Japan would be way too expensive.”

I smiled and thanked him again, bowing my head. And onward the onaga went, into other depths.

Onaga (Etelis coruscans) caught in Hawaii. (Image Source: gyotakumaui.com)

From which an onaga begins. A snapper larva measuring 3.9 mm (0.15 in), possibly belonging to Etelis coruscans or Etelis carbunculus. (Image Credit: NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center)

Etelis coruscans Valenciennes, 1862
Onaga
Click for names in other languages (FishBase)

Class Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Order Perciformes (Perch-like Fishes)
Family Lutjanidae (Snappers)

FishBase Page: http://www.fishbase.org/summary/1385

Citations

Amesbury, S.S., and R.F. Myers.  2001.  Guide to the Coastal Resources of Guam, Vol 1.  The Fishes. www.uog.edu/marinelab/fish/thefishes.html.

Titcomb, M. 1972. Native use of fish in Hawaii. University of Hawaii Press. 175p.

Valenciennes, A. 1862. Description de quelques espèces nouvelles de poissons envoyées de Bourbon par M. Morel, directeur du Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de cette île. Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des sciences v. 54: 1165-1170; (suite) 1201-1207.

— Ben Young Landis

O, Facebook. That tar-pit of humanity. Drawing in every speck of dirt and whimsy blowing by, sucking us in and draining our mortal life. A dark, mirror pond of selfies, foodstuff, engagement rings, and baby beings (human and otherwise), forever tempting new victims into its depths.

But it can be a great place to score new fish photos from friends.

Clinton, a fellow writer, is notorious among our circles for his photo posts. Selfies in the dentist’s chair. Selfies at the salon at the shampoo sink. The socks of the day. The necktie of the day.

I jest in fondness — Clinton’s posts are hilarious, and he is particularly interactive whilst traveling, posting questions to us live on the road then getting crowdsourced advice back, not to mention taking requests for scenes for snapshots.

So it was when I saw that he was traveling to Peru on business. Naturally, I requested fish photos. And naturally, my wish was granted:

Pseudoplatystoma tigrinum and P. fasciatum for sale at a fishmonger’s booth at the Belen Market in Iquitos, Peru. (Image Copyright: Clinton Colmenares; used with permission)

Clinton writes:

I took these photos at the Belen Market in the Belen district of Iquitos, Peru. Iquitos is the largest city in the world that’s not accessible by road. Belen is an especially poor and rough barrio in Iquitos.

The market makes practically everything available, from vegetables to fresh meat (pick your own chicken, or grub worm) and fish to outdated antibiotics that haven’t been on the market for years and portions that portend to cure everything from low libido to cancer.

There are, no doubt, other commodities for sale, of which I did not partake.

Nor did Clinton partake in the wares of this fishmonger’s table: specimens of the catfish genus Pseudoplatystoma, known as the sorubim or surubíes.

Sorubim species are strikingly marked in coloration. Two species can be seen in Clinton’s photo:

Pseudoplatystoma tigrinum and P. fasciatum for sale at a fishmonger’s booth at the Belen Market in Iquitos, Peru. (Image Copyright: Clinton Colmenares; used with permission)

Based on the markings — and assuming the fish were actually caught near Iquitos – the three specimens on the left would seem to be the tiger sorubim (Pseudoplatystoma tigrinum).

The lone specimen to the right would seem to be the barred sorubim (Pseudoplatystoma fasciatum) — alternatively Pseudoplatystoma punctifer, depending on the taxonomic study tackling the matter (see Buitrago-Suárez and Burr 2007 versus Carvalho-Costa et al. 2011).

Pseudoplatystoma tigrinum above and P. punctifer/fasciatum below, taken from the Amazon River near Iquitos, Perú. (Image Credit: Brooks M. Burr/Magnolia Press)

The sorubim species haunt various river basins in tropical South America, and their colloquial names vary by location and language. Local names listed for the tiger sorubim include tigre zúngaro in Peru; surubim tigre and pintado in Brazil; bagre rayado in Ecuador and elsewhere; and one assumes a smattering of indigenous names. In the U.S. aquarium hobby trade, some sorubim species are labeled as “tiger shovelnose catfish” — recognizing their distinctive flattened snouts and markings.

That they are even considered home aquarium fish is astounding. These catfish grow into gigantic predatory gamefish – the tiger sorubim has a maximum recorded length of 1.3 meters (4.25 feet), while another species, the spotted sorubim (P. corruscans; video below) has recorded maximums of 1.6 meters (5.45 feet) and 100 kilograms (220 pounds).

The sorubim are also highly prized commercial foodfish — to the point that fillets from other species have been sold and passed off as sorubim.

One study conducted DNA analysis on 33 fillets and 30 whole fish being sold as surubim across supermarkets in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and found more than half did not belong to sorubim species (Carvalho et al. 2007). Those fillets belonged to non-Pseudoplatystoma catfish species — including a marine catfish from Asia — and some even belonged to an entirely different group of fishes, the drums.

And what of the whole fish being sold? All of them were genetically confirmed to belong to Pseudoplatystoma species, mixed between the tiger sorubim and the spotted sorubim. Hard to fake a whole fish.

Farmed Pseudoplatystoma fillets distributed by Acme Markets. (There’s a supermarket chain called Acme Markets??) (Image Credit: Albertsons, LLC)

It looks like, however, that people are looking after the sorubim.

While searching for sorubim videos on YouTube, I found a Colombian news station story on how police had confiscated a shipment of undersized sorubim — in this case P. magdaleniatum, a species found only in the Magdalena River in Colombia:

I also found a nice two-part news story showcasing a spotted sorubim farm in Brazil — a fantastic sequence showing how these surubim pintado are raised from tiny fry and grown in large ponds to market size, before finally heading off to the processing plant:

I love that they have a giant statue of a sorubim in front of their fish farm (jump to the 10:35 mark).

So thanks again, Clinton, for granting my Facebook photo wish. It was one snapshot out of many from your trip to Peru — but one that helped us better know a fish.

Now please take a selfie with this blogpost.

Pseudoplatystoma tigrinum  (Valenciennes, 1840)
Tiger Sorubim
Click for names in other languages (FishBase)

Class Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Order Siluriformes (Catfishes)
Family Pimelodidae (Long-whiskered Catfishes)

FishBase Page: http://www.fishbase.org/summary/8695

Citations

Buitrago-Suárez, UA, BM Burr. 2007. Taxonomy of the catfish genus Pseudoplatystoma Bleeker
(Siluriformes: Pimelodidae) with recognition of eight species. Zootaxa 1512: 1-38

Carvalho, DC, DAP Neto, BSAF Brasil, DAA Oliveira. 2011. DNA barcoding unveils a high rate of mislabeling in a commercial freshwater catfish from Brazil. Mitochondrial DNA 22(S1): 97-105. doi: 10.3109/19401736.2011.588219

Carvalho-Costa, LF, NM Piorski, SC Willis, PM Galetti Jr, G Ortí. 2011. Molecular systematics of the neotropical shovelnose catfish genus Pseudoplatystoma Bleeker 1862 based on nuclear and mtDNA markers. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 59: 177-194. doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2011.02.005

— Ben Young Landis

A scene from the California fishes exhibit at the 2014 Picnic Day at University of California, Davis. (Image Credit: Ben Young Landis)

What simplicity and gentleness this scene sings.

As children, we are often told that we have outgrown something. A toy or a book that is no longer suitable, because we are too old for that thing. A shirt or skirt that no longer fits, because we simply have grown in size. We are then asked to fit ourselves into new shapes and new frames — in our heart and in our form, in our words and in our ways.

But not here. Not this boy. Safety, food, and shelter aside, the child has no expectations of the world around him — he simply observes the nature of things around him, and places himself intuitively before that context. This laboratory bench is built for adults to sit at, but the child sees the bench, and noting its height in relation to him, instinctively places and rests his arms upon the bench, as if the bench had always been designed for that purpose, and for his very body.

The fish intrigue him, but not because someone ordered him to do so. It is a simple response: I do not know this creature. It appears to be not harmful. I wish to observe the creature more closely.

Unimpeded by others and their opinions, he does so.

Certainly, there are many facts about these white sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus)  that might further fascinate the boy. The otherworldly vacuum-tube jaws they use to suck and sift prey from the mud bottom. That a female white sturgeon can release 100,000 to 3,000,000 eggs at each spawning. That like humans, white sturgeon begin to mature in their teenage years — and they are known to reach 100 years in age.

But the child, by his nature, is curious. The form and shape and liveliness of the sturgeon are sufficient to draw his gaze. What are they? What are those spikes on its back? Why does it have whiskers?

That is the unpolluted response. It is ugly — an adult nearby might whisper, and the innocence breaks. We do not look at ugly things.

Unconstrained, and with sufficient time, the sturgeon may attain a length of 6 meters (20 feet). Unconstrained, and with sufficient time, we may yet learn to unlearn the rigor and rules of adulthood, and remember the childhood instincts we have so outgrown. To simply take the world in, and to place our arms at rest at whatever ledge or moment that Nature presents to us.

To gaze, to be at peace, and to be curious — if only for a brief scene.

An adult white sturgeon from the Fraser River, British Columbia. (Image Credit: bcfishtours.ca)

Acipenser transmontanus Richardson, 1836
White Sturgeon 
Click for name etymology (ETYFish Project)
Click for names in other languages (FishBase)

Class Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Order Acipenseriformes (Sturgeons and Paddlefishes)
Family Acipenseridae (Sturgeons)

FishBase Page: http://www.fishbase.org/summary/2594

— Ben Young Landis

Hyperoglphe japonica, the Pacific barrelfish or medai. Image Credit: Ben Young Landis/CC-BY)

“And also tonight we have bluenose.”

The name caught my ear. I had never heard of such a fish. Yet here was the chef listing it as part of today’s specials, to the sushi bar patron to the right of me.

Time to google. The cell signal was poor in this elegantly refitted, brick-walled building, and the photos loaded slowly.

I held up the phone. “Sensei, is this the fish?”

The Google.

“Yeah, looks like that!”

Bluenose, the Google explained, referred to Hyperoglyphe antarctica, which is being marketed as “bluenose sea bass” (ah, sea bass, that pesky catch-all term again) or “Antarctic butterfish”, while FishBase listed its United Nations records name as “bluenose warehou”.

“In Japanese, we call it me-dai. We got this from Kyushu.”

Kyushu is the third largest island of Japan, located to the nation’s southwest, and close to the Korean Peninsula. Kyushu city names that might be familiar to American ears include Kumamoto—source of the famed oyster species—and Nagasaki—site of the second atomic attack in human history.

But the Kyushu location threw my original identification in doubt. The listed localities for “bluenose” are in the Southern Hemisphere, in the seas off of South America, southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

So when eating Japanese, speak as the Japanese. Another Google search—this time including the Japanese name, medai—turned up the correct identity for the sashimi now presented before me.

Hyperoglyphe japonica at the Izu Mido Sea Paradise aquarium. Image Source: seapara.jp

Medai is the Japanese name for Hyperoglyphe japonica, a very close relative of the bluenose—and as you can see, they are very similar in appearance. Medai, however, are only found in the seas around Japan.

The words medai is written in kanji characters as 目鯛, with “me-” (目) meaning “eye” and “-dai” (鯛) being the term in Japanese for snappers and porgies, but also as a general term for other similarly shaped fish (see previous stories on ishidai and onaga-dai).

“Eye” of course is referring to the large, round, doll-like eyes of this sleek but otherwise generic-looking fish:

The name “medai” refers to the relatively large eyes of the species, Hyperoglyphe japonica. Image Source: pomkn.cocolog-nifty.com

Taxonomically, medai and bluenose are not snappers nor porgies, but their generic-looking bodies belie some pretty strange things about the group they do belong to.

Medai and bluenose belong to the Family Centrolophidae–known as the medusafishes and barrelfishes in English. They’re called this because as young fish, many species hide under drifting seaweed or floating debris like barrels—while other species live among the bells and tentacles of jellyfish (or “medusa” as they are called classically, as if jellyfish were the mythical medusa’s head of deadly hair, drifting about the sea without a body).

And so these baby fish float out in the open sea, growing up in these mobile nurseries, feeding on different critters in the debris. The juveniles have cartoonishly large, snub-nosed heads, until they grow larger and stretch out into more “fishy” shapes, at which time they swim down to deeper waters to live. Medai can grow to 3 feet (90 cm) and are found around in depths of 500 feet (150m) or more.

As adults, medai do retain that snub-nosed look—a look that unites a broader group of fishes they belong to, the Stromateoidei. Ichthyologist Richard L. Haedrich, in his 1967 review of this odd taxonomic group, writes with a wink about their shared facial bone structure:

There is no mistaking the “stromateoid look”…once recognized, the stromateoid expression is not likely to be forgotten. It is a fat-nosed, wide-eyed, stuffed up look, smug and at the same time apprehensive. Some stromateoids might even be accused of a certain prissiness.

Haedrich’s review (which, for you fish geeks out there, is a great piece of natural history writing) mentions the other characteristic uniting this taxonomic group: they all have a “pharyngeal sac” in the back of their throat.

Imagine if you had a little fleshy sac in the back of your throat, filled with soft teeth like a cat’s tongue, which chewed up your food a little before you swallowed it. That’s what all these stromatoid fishes have, to different extents: medai have less toothy sacs, while other stromateoids have more complexly toothed sacs (Doiuchi and Nakabo 2006).

What was this sac originally evolved for? This appears to still be an unanswered question, since the diet of stromateoid fishes are not well known. Ironically, jellyfish might also be the answer here. Haedrich speculates:

Shelter is not all the jellyfish provide. Many stromateoids have been observed actively feeding on their hosts…the diagnostic pharyngeal sacs of stromateoids may have been perfected partially in response to this sort of diet.

As in somehow, this pre-chewing process facilitates digestion of jellyfish tissue, as one presumes that the gelatinous and often toxin-injecting tissue of jellies might be a little hard on a stomach, unprocessed.

Speaking of chewing, I’ve probably fed you more science than you can digest in one sitting. I certainly learned a lot from this happenstance introduction to a new species, let alone getting into all the strange details of a whole group of fishes. Of course, I also enjoyed tasting medai sashimi for the first time—it has a delicate but firmly muscled texture like that of snapper and other tai, but has a more buttery, sweeter taste more akin to hamachi and other fishes of the jack family (in fact, medai is sometimes passed off as higher-priced species like hamachi by dishonest merchants; see Iguchi et al. 2012).

Now let’s go catch some medai.

A 6kg medai caught off of Hachijō-jima. Image source: gyoshin.jp

Hyperoglphe japonica, the Pacific barrelfish or medai. Image Credit: Ben Young Landis/CC-BY)

Hyperoglyphe japonica (Döderlein, 1884)
Medai
Click for names in other languages (FishBase)

Class Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Order Perciformes (Perch-like Fishes)
Family Centrolophidae (Medusafishes and Barrelfishes)

FishBase Page: http://www.fishbase.org/summary/13043

Citations

Haedrich, RL. 1967. The stromateoid fishes: systematics and a classifcation. Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College 135(2): 31-139.

Iguchi, J, Y Takashima, A Namikoshi, M Yamashita. Species identification method for marine products of Seriola and related species. Fisheries Science 78(1): 197-206. doi: 10.1007/s12562-011-0433-9

Doiuchi, R, T Nakabo. 2006. Molecular phylogeny of the stromateoid fishes (Teleostei: Perciformes) inferred from mitochondrial DNA sequences and compared with morphology-based hypotheses. Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 39(1): 111-123. doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2005.10.007

— Ben Young Landis

For many Europeans and North Americans, December brings out the festive traditions of the Christmas tree or tannenbaum, where evergreen trees often get decorated with electric lights, glowing and twinkling away into the night.

And at one researcher’s lab, fish are lending a hand in the tree lighting.

Professor Jason Gallant of Michigan State University studies a strange-looking group of fishes from African rivers called elephantfishes. Gallant keeps a few species of elephantfish at his laboratory, and recently turned over the light controls of his lab’s Christmas tree to these fish—which have the ability to produce electrical signals:

The species controlling these lights is Brienomyrus brachyistius, a species of elephantfish found in West and Central Africa, from the Democratic Republic of Congo north to Gambia.

Elephantfish got their funny name because many species have oddly shaped mouths, either stretched out in a long snout or equipped with a long appendage on their chin—both resembling an elephant’s trunk.

However, some species like Brienomyrus brachyistius have a stubby mouth and a squared-off head, somewhat resembling a sperm whale. So these species have been given a rather ridiculous sounding name—“baby whale”—by the tropical fish pet trade.

Brienomyrus brachyistius, a species of elephantfish in the family Mormyridae. (Image Source: efishgenomics.zoology.msu.edu)

Their strange heads aside, elephantfish are also famous for having electric organs—highly specialized muscles which the fish use to discharge electricity in specific frequencies and signal patterns.

Jason Gallant’s research focuses on the genetics and evolution of these electric organs in elephantfish and in other unrelated fish like the electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). I asked Gallant to tell us more about his fish-activated Christmas tree lights, and what researchers are learning about the electric abilities of elephantfish.

Your fish-triggered tree lights are a great way to visualize the unusual way these elephantfish are equipped to sense and communicate with their world. Explain to us what we’re actually seeing when the lights flash on and off. 

Weakly electric fish like elephantfish produce electric discharges for communication and navigation in their environments with a specialized organ called an electric organ. The electric organ is composed of many tiny cells called electrocytes. Each electrocyte produces a pulse is very much the same speed and voltage as the action potentials produced in the nerves and muscles of your body.

The electric organ is an organ with incredible precision and synchronization. When the fish’s nervous system instructs the electric organ to discharge, all of the cells do that simultaneously. The combined voltage of all these cells forms a weak electric field, which we can detect as pulses using our instruments.

The Christmas tree device we built monitors the water for each electrical pulse produced by the fish, then turns on an electronic switch hooked up to a normal household outlet where we plugged in the lights. So the fish are actually controlling the lights: each time the fish generates an electric pulse, the lights get switched on!

Professor Jason Gallant of Michigan State University studies electric fishes and the evolution and origin of their electric organs. (Image Copyright: Jason Gallant/Michigan State University)

So do elephantfish send out electric signals to talk to each other? What might they be saying to each other? Or are they also using electricity to feel their way through their habitat, like a sonar scan?

Absolutely—the fish use the electricity in a manner analogous to “Morse code” to communicate with each other. The shape and timing of the waveform conveys information about the species and sex of the individual, whereas the sequence conveys information about social contexts—information like aggression, trying to court a mate, and the like.

• Click to listen to the amplified electric signals of the elephantfish Brienomyrus brachyistius (MP3 recorded by Jason Gallant; file hosted by National Public Radio)

This communication is facilitated by specialized receptor organs, called knollenorgans, which are specially wired to only receive electrical information coming from other fish—these receptors are effectively deaf to the fish’s own discharge, through a common nervous system trick called a corollary discharge.

The fish also use their electric discharges to navigate through their environments—the system works somewhat like sonar, but at the speed of light instead of sound! Electricity, unlike the acoustic information used by sonar is not reflected or refracted by objects, but rather is resisted or conducted by objects. In this sense, objects in the environment act like different types of “lenses”. The fish has a second array of electroreceptor cells, called mormyromasts, that detect distortions of the electric field as “bright and dark” spots over the surface of their body, giving an electrical readout of the environment. Admittedly, it is a strange sense for us very visual primates to imagine, but the fish are enormously acute and can discriminate tiny differences in objects with this sense.

Elephantfish are reported to have a large cerebellum compared to other fish. What’s the implication of these large brains?

Yes, the rumors are true—elephantfish have one of the largest vertebrate brains when scaled to body size because of their enormous cerebellums, which house the neural circuitry necessary to decode the electrical information they constantly send and receive.

The mormyrid fish Brienomyrus brachyistius can discharge electricity to communicate with one another. (Image Copyright: Jason Gallant/Michigan State University)

Among the questions you are researching is how electric organs evolved in fish, especially since they are known in at least six widely unrelated groups of fish—torpedo rays, skates, elephantfish, catfish, electric eels, stargazers. How are these “muscle batteries” similar or different among these fishes, and why do think natural selection has encouraged these electric organs to evolve time and time again?

Great question!  This is something that left Charles Darwin scratching his head.

Some fishes, like the torpedo ray and stargazer are only produce strong discharges, and the function is apparently to defend or kill potential prey. At his time, Darwin knew of these strongly electric fish, as well as the electric eel. But he was very bright and realized that there were all sorts of fishes that also had organs that resembled the organs of the strongly electric fish, but did not apparently produce electricity.

Nearly 100 years later, at the beginnings of modern neurophysiology, amplifier technology were common in the laboratory, and a bright fellow by the name of Hans Lissmann provided the first recording of Gymnarchus niloticus, a weakly electric fish. He provided the first clues into the solutions for this problem—fishes likely evolved (in the majority of cases) weakly electric discharges first.

• Click to listen to the amplified electric signals of the aba fish Gymnarchus niloticus (MP3 recorded by Jason Gallant; file hosted by National Public Radio)

Lissmann and others went on to demonstrate with clever experiments that the fishes used this ability for communication and navigation in their environments. Scientists now think (though there is little evidence to suggest it) that electric discharging abilities probably evolved from sound producing organs, and electroreception may have evolved second.  In the electric eel, the 600 Volt killer pulse probably evolved following this.

Our lab’s research has been asking the question of “how” these fishes build their electric organs. In all cases, electric organs start out as humble skeletal muscle precursors, and then through additional (and unknown) developmental steps, become electric organs. So, we asked the question, “are all types of electric organs different from muscle in the same ways?”

As it turns out, there seems to be a set of 30 or so normally muscle related genes that are always expressed in the same fashion in every electric organ we’ve looked at to date. This suggests that there may be only one way to build a functioning electric organ from muscle, and that six groups have come up with this solution by natural selection independently. This may seem difficult to believe, but many researches have shown that convergent molecular evolution occurs readily in nature, though we are among the first groups to provide this evidence for such a complex organ.

You are also studying how electric signals in elephantfish can change as they evolve into different species. How do these species come to “speak” different signals?

This is also a great question—the short answer is we don’t know, but we’re working on it. Many groups of species, like the Paramormryops electric fish from Africa, the birds of paradise, Hawaiian crickets and Drosophilla flies, have evolved species at astonishing rates.

With its blunt, squared nose, Paramormyrops kingsleyae does not resemble the other elephantfishes that do sport long jaws or trunk-like chin organs. (Image Copyright: Jason Gallant/Michigan State University)

In almost all cases, they are accompanied by corresponding diversity in communication signals.   Because we define a species in biology as populations that can interbreed and produce fertile, viable offspring, the speciation process is very much related to mating behavior.

Since communication signals are almost always utilized in facilitating mating, scientists have often wondered whether rapid evolution of communication signals might be sufficient to drive the speciation process itself. Elephantfishes in the genus Paramormyrops seem to be excellent candidates for such a process, though we are in the early stages of figuring this out.  We have identified the major transitions of signal variation across populations of fishes, and the morphological  and physiological changes that happen in the electric organ underlying these variations. We’re now trying to figure out what the genetic basis of these changes are.

Paramormyrops kingsleyae is another species of elephantfish being studied for its electric communication abilities. (Image Copyright: Jason Gallant/Michigan State University)

At some point we experience an encounter with nature that hits us to the core. Was there a memorable experience in your life that helped steer your interests toward fish biology, and electric fishes in particular?

Sometime between first and fourth grade my fate was sealed. I’ve always kept fish and have been fascinated by them—but when I was in fourth grade, Jurassic Park came out, and I was astonished by this chemical called DNA which seemed like one of the most powerful chemicals on the planet.

After several amazing science teachers, I made it to college, and all it took was a very enthusiastic faculty member, who taught my first course in animal communication, to introduce me to electric fish, and the questions have basically ruled my life ever sense!

Thank you for your time, Jason!

The Electric Fish Lab at Michigan State University headed by Dr. Jason Gallant, seated far right. (Image Copyright: Jason Gallant/Michigan State University)

Brienomyrus brachyistius  (Gill, 1862)
Baby Whale
Click for name etymology (ETYFish Project)
Click for names in other languages (FishBase)

Class Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Order Osteoglossiformes (Bonytongues)
Family Mormyridae (Elephantfishes)

FishBase Page: http://www.fishbase.org/summary/5208

Citations

Gallant, JR, LL Traeger, JD Volkening, H Moffett, PH Chen, CD Novina, GN Phillips, R Anand, GB Wells, M Pinch, R Güth, GA Unguez, JS Albert, HH Zakon, MP Samanta, MR Sussman. 2014. Genomic basis for the convergent evolution of electric organs.  Science 344(6191): 1522-1525. doi: 10.1126/science.1254432

Gallant, J, M Arnegard, J Sullivan, CD Hopkins. 2011. Patterns of geographic signal variation and its morphological correlates in a mormyrid electric fish provide insights into evolution of electrogenic signal diversity. Journal of Comparative Physiology A 197(8):799-817. doi: 10.1007/s00359-011-0643-8

A Note: This post is the 42nd installment of a more than 32,000-part series, “Better Know a Fish”, and it is also being published on the final day of the U.S. television program “The Colbert Report”, which inspired this website’s name with its “Better Know a District” segments. Fans of the show will know that Stephen Colbert has done much to feature science and scientists on his program, so to that and to his great milestone, I tip my hat to Stephen—and his very hungry fish.

— Ben Young Landis

Rest in peace, Pablow the Blowfish.

Unbeknownst to me and probably also to you, Miley Cyrus is an aquarist. Followers of the American singer’s Instagram were reminded of her piscine pets in February 2015 when she posted this photo:

And so, it was goodbye for Pablow, gone to fish heaven. But Pablow was deserving of a more soulful elegy than just a few achy-breaky-heart emojis—which Cyrus finally provided months later. Cyrus wrote on her Facebook page on May 18 to introduce the song, which debuted during one of her Happy Hippie Foundation performances:

Some of you may remember a few months ago my dear blow fish Pablow past away. I wrote this song for him…He made me so happy and I miss him everyday….

After her cries of sorrow for Pablow, Cyrus croons a dilemma shared by some fish enthusiasts:

On Saturday night we all went out to eat
But I can never decide so someone chose sushi
I got soup and I ordered rice
But watching my friends eat my friend ruined my appetite

Her wishes for her fish did verge on the biologically impossible, however:

I heard of a seahorse named Sadie
I heard that she was quite the lady
Maybe you’ll find her and you could make babies
That would be kind of crazy

It would indeed.

From the Instagram photo, Pablow looks to be a balloonfish (Diodon holocanthus), a species found in tropical and subtropical seas around the world. Pablow is indeed, a type of blowfish or pufferfish—belonging to a very specialized group known as Diodontidae, the burrfishes or porcupinefishes.

Members of this fish family are covered in sharp spines. Some species have short spines that always stick out like thorns on a rose stem or the burred edges of an agave leaf, while other species have longer, bonier spines that lay flat when the pufferfish is relaxed, but stand up and stick out when its body is inflated. The balloonfish is in this latter group.

The other trait of porcupinefishes that people—and presumably Miley—often find endearing is their seemingly smiling expressions.

Balloonfish in particular have these big, curious, aquamarine eyes that seem to go on forever if you stare into them—it’s not hard to see how Miley fell in love with those baby blues and that soft smile…

And it’s that soft smile that gives these fish their technical name.

All pufferfish have fused, rodent-like teeth, which they use to crunch and break up shellfish and other hard-bodied prey (and nip at annoying human fingers).

A pufferfish before and after a dental procedure by veterinarians at the Shedd Aquarium to trim its overgrown teeth. (Image Credit: Shedd Aquarium)

In fact, like rodents, pufferfish kept in captivity can suffer from overgrown teeth, if they are not fed enough hard-shelled foods to wear their teeth down. This can result in some dental work for these buck-toothed faces—you can read one example from the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago.

The majority of puffers have four teeth—a pair each in the upper and lower jaw. Appropriately, this group of pufferfishes is named Tetraodontidae—meaning “four teeth” in Greek.

But in the ballonfish and other porcupinefishes, those four teeth are further fused, becoming one single tooth each in their upper and lower jaw—and leaving these puffers with a permanent, perfectly even smile.

And correspondingly, the balloonfish genus name Diodon and the family name Diodontidae means “two teeth” in Greek.

Alas, poor, Pablow. We hardly knew ye. But thanks for being a great celebrity pet, and for giving us all a chance to talk pufferfish biology.

We’ll miss you, too.

Diodon holocanthus (Image Source: Wikimedia Commons/Sebas1000)

Diodon holocanthus  Linnaeus, 1758
Balloonfish
Click for names in other languages (FishBase)

Class Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Order Tetraodontiformes (Puffers and Filefishes)
Family Diodontidae (Burrfishes)

FishBase Page: http://www.fishbase.org/summary/4659

— Ben Young Landis

Sad Miley GIF Credit: Jeff Leeson/Mashable.

I have my cable company to thank for a fantastic fish story involving the Vietnam War, college basketball, a chance storm, and a country boy named “Red”.

And it wasn’t because of a T.V. show.

Allow me to set the scene…

* * *

I was tired. I had been traveling for a couple of weeks, and all I could do on this Monday night was sit in front of the television, and turn off my brain.

Of course, in the United States, most programs and channels will literally erase all logic and intelligence from your nervous system. The overabundance of arcane reality shows and poorly staged dialog. The endless blather of hyperbolic news pundits and home-shopping salespersons — although at the least, the sales hosts can be commended for their energy and patience to improv ways to say “buy this thing now!” And supposedly edgy comedies which ignore the rule that sarcasm and irony work best when applied sparingly and strategically.

So that is how I came to be staring at the screensaver channel of my cable T.V. service.

“Dude, I can’t believe we’re BOTH going to be in Star Wars.” Image via AT&T U-Verse.

Flipping through channel after channel, I was stopped by these beautiful underwater scenes. The requisite shots of cute little clownfish snuggling in sea anemones, a sea turtle gliding over a reef, and schools of anthias and butterflyfishes.

As the montages drifted in and out, repeating on loop over the elevator music track, my eyes kept lingering on this assemblage of large-eyed, pink-bodied fishes.

What the heck are these things? I said to myself.

They floated languidly. Enormous eyes peering back at me through the LCD screen.

“Bigeyes” was the name that sprang to my mind, a group of fishes classified under Family Priacanthidae.

And they have very big eyes. That was the extent of my knowledge about these fish.

So, as I do in these cases of unfamiliar fish, I headed to Google Scholar to look up original research articles about that family. I also needed to guess at what species of bigeyes were swimming on my T.V.

In zoology, scientists write a variety of research papers. Some papers describe individual new species, previously unknown to the scientific community. Some describe the ecology, behavior, or genetics of a particular creature.

Every once in a while, an intrepid scientist — usually someone with a lot of patience and passion — writes a monograph. These are often solo efforts where the author picks a particular group of organisms — often a family or genus — and compiles every piece of information possible about that group. Monographs are meant to be an exhaustive review of everything we currently understand about this group of animals: how they reproduce, where they live, what they eat, how many species there are of them and whether they all actually belong to that unique group. Not to mention their role in our ecosystem, what their evolutionary history might be, and the potential threats to their future survival. They’re epic works in their own right.

There weren’t a lot of published studies on bigeyes. But my eyes picked out a prize from the search returns:

REVISION, PHYLOGENY AND BIOGEOGRAPHIC COMMENTS ON THE CIRCUMTROPICAL MARINE PERCOID FISH FAMILY PRIACANTHIDAE
Wayne C. Starnes, 1988

A monograph on bigeyes! Even better, the document itself was available as a digital document — all 87 pages worth — and was free to download.

It was exactly what I was looking for. Bigeye physiology was discussed, along with color photos and distribution maps for each species. There were electron microscope photographs showing the bizarre spikes that dotted the body scales of bigeyes — a unique characteristic. Plus an illustration of a larval bigeye, which looked comically disproportioned — even bigger eyes on a tiny body.

It suddenly occurred to me that I might be able to contact the author himself. Who better to share a few quotes about bigeyes than the person who wrote the definitive review?

I managed to find an online bio for Wayne C. Starnes, who turned out to be the Research Curator of Fishes for the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences — a beautiful building in Raleigh which I have had the pleasure to visit. “He retired from this position in 2014,” the bio read, and listed his email address.

I decided to write Starnes with a few questions. Could he confirm my guess that these specimens were Priacanthus hamrur, the moontail bullseye? And what are those big eyes for, and why was he drawn to write an entire treatise on this taxonomic family? And as I usually do when interviewing fish biologists, I included this question: “What got you interested in fish in the first place?”

Two hours later, Starnes wrote back.

Image via AT&T U-Verse.

His email read:

Ben — I think you are probably correct on the identification of the photo individuals but I’ll study them further. Do you know where they are from?

I’ll need to get back to you on the rest of it in a couple days, as I’m behind on a couple projects, plus an ms review, and getting the house painted before it’s too cold to apply the paint.

If you don’t hear in a couple days, shoot me a ping as a reminder. All for now.

-W-

I replied and explained the underwhelming reality that all I had were screen captures from this random stock footage my cable company happened to show, and thus had no clue to the location of this clip. I added my gratitude, and looked forward to his reply.

A week later, Starnes wrote back.

He agreed that my suggestion of Priacanthus hamrur, the moontail bullseye, was probably a best guess for the fish in the footage, absent any other clues. There weren’t any other fish species in the scene, which could have helped narrowed the geographic possibiliies. And we both admitted not knowing our coral species well enough to use that to our advantage.

As for the eyes, Starnes says these fishes are primarily nocturnal and hang out in dark recesses much of the time. “Though some species are occasionally taken in trawl fisheries, indicating they do make some forays away from structure, maybe primarily at night,” he wrote. “It is assumed that the large eyes and reflective properties are connected with making the best use of the reduced available light and that they can forage on invertebrates, etc., that become active at that time.”

And then, Starnes began to tell his story. This was just the start of his 2,000-word email reply — and I read every word with amazement.

I was drawn to bigeyes via a series of influences, I guess. First off, having been primarily a freshwater-oriented ichthyologist, I wanted to expand my horizons into the marine realm a bit. This was when I was still in grad school, working on the taxonomy and ecology of freshwater fishes, such as minnows and darters, etc.

He continued:

Anyway, I happened to acquire a single bigeye (P. arenatus) from a shrimper during a coastal collecting trip to South Carolina. It was a beautiful fish and piqued my interest and I decided to look into the group.  In consultation with my later good friend and colleague, Jack Randall at the Univ. of Hawaii, an expert on reef fishes worldwide, I learned he was of the opinion there was probably undescribed diversity in the group, and [I] decided to take it on as a gradual side project, even after I left grad school at the Univ. of Tenn. and eventually worked at various gigs in the Division of Fishes at the Smithsonian for nearly 14 years.

Working as such, it took about ten years and exactly 1,000 (by sheer coincidence) examined specimens to fathom the group’s diversity, synonym, etc., and even then some questions remained due to insufficient materials, etc.

Those 87 pages took him ten years to compile and complete. Starnes added that he has continued to work on bigeyes, with Japanese coauthors as well as contributing to a few United Nations reports, and has described several new species of bigeyes.

Then, Starnes explained his path to a career in ichthyology — in a tale filled with twists and coincidences enough for three fingers of Tennessee whiskey and a warm fire to listen by.

Image via AT&T U-Verse.

Starnes began:

As for the happenstance of my becoming an ichthyologist, I can’t imagine there are many folks that got there via a less parsimonious and serendipitous route! The following are a set of circumstances and events, any one of which had not occurred, or maybe even just changed by a couple minutes, I might have been in a whole different career.

He opened with his childhood in Tennessee:

First off, predictably enough, I was fascinated by things aquatic as a child and spent every minute I could catching stuff from streams, ponds, etc., plus fishing. I was fortunate to grow up near a creek in east Tennessee, where I probably spent a thousand hours or more roaming, etc.

In high school, I became more of jock and a nature boy and, plus there was a bit of stigma to the latter in those days (before Nat. Geo, Nature, NOVA, etc., were ever heard of to make it a bit cooler). I drifted away from the critters for a few years (except fishing) and worked my way thru University of Tennessee, earning a degree in Transportation in 1969. Viet Nam was in full swing and I received an ROTC commission into the Army to serve as a lieutenant. By this time, I’ve still never had a single college biology course.

Starnes then turned the clock back to those college days:

As it happens, I was a decent enough basketball player to play on a team of former UT players in municipal league, charity events, etc., [having been] recommended by a former high school rival who was an All-American at UT. Another fellow on the team (former UT team captain) was, too, an avid fisherman, and we began to cut a few classes (e.g., I despised Accounting) and fish together, etc. (The former rival fellow, who scoffed at fishing at the time, dubbed me “Fish”, a name that stuck for a lot of years.)

A turn to sports could not avert Starnes from his fate as an ichthyologist, having found a basketball teammate as a fishing buddy. Now, a southern storm would blow Starnes towards another nexus of events:

One spring day my fishing buddy, his girlfriend, and I decided to rent a boat from a dock on a reservoir near Knoxville.

The owner, named “Red”, was a crusty sort right out of Hee Haw, including the overalls, etc. As he puttered out to fetch the boat from a float it was tied to, a storm was threatening more by the minute. When he returned to the dock, we asked him, “Red, if we head out and a storm hits and we have to return, do we have to pay for the whole day?” His reply was: “If you leave the dock, it’s ten dollars!”

Well, $10 was a lot of dough to someone working thru college in 1968. We thought about it for a minute and decided to, OK, give it a shot.

As we went up to the car to get our gear, the storm became closer, rain and lightening were coming in, etc. So we just looked at each other and said, “naah”, threw our gear in the trunk and tore out of there, spinning and throwing gravel up the drive. Turning back, I saw Red standing, rope in hand, totally agape at the end of the dock. I began laughing uncontrollably to the point I was even incontinent for a second. I’ll never forget that image.

Well, within 15 minutes, the storm blew over and, at this time, we happened to be right next to Douglas Dam on our way back to Knoxville. We thus decided to just pull over an fish off the bank downstream from the dam for a few minutes. The flow was very low and Sauger were apparently running upriver and we proceeded to slay them, about filled the trunk.

After so much success, we looked at each other and said “what the hell are we going to do with all these fish”, neither of us having ready access to a kitchen. We then got the bright idea to go to another UT player’s (a year behind us and still playing) apartment, which was in a married students’ complex.

There we would have a helluva fish fry! As we opened the trunk and started unloading the catch, a small crowd gathered. Among them, who just happened to walk out at that minute, was a grad student in Aquatic Biology at UT who was much impressed with the fish, etc., started throwing around some scientific names, etc.

I was drawn by this, got to talking and, long story short, starting going on field trips with him all over TN and nearby states for the rest of my undergrad days, learning a great deal about the regional fauna, etc., by just picking it up in the field. If you don’t know, TN is one of the absolute candy stores of fish and other aquatic diversity.

With college near completion, the Vietnam War loomed on Starnes’ horizon.

Despite this experience and what seemed an obvious knack for fishes, etc., I never seriously considered changing majors at that late date and, besides, I had to meet my commissioning date or face consequences. There was just not time to make any changes, even if I had decided to. I kept the interest up and it ate at me more and more that I might like fishes as a career, though was unsure how very many folks could make a living at it (not an altogether unfounded concern…).

My second year in the military, I was in Nam, and, on a particularly bad day during Tet 71, I had the epiphany that, if I got out alive, you only live once, and I would go back and somewhat start over in a whole new pursuit.

So, I did that, with a combination of GI Bill, working at a textbook store quite a few hours a week, and some assistantships here and there along the way. It took a while to be accepted into Zoology, as they had a rather jaundiced eye toward my Business undergrad major, grades that had suffered from fishing forays, etc. but I finally prevailed.

So you see, “encounters and experiences”, not to mention nuances, were critical in how I got here. Just think, if I had not been into basketball, had not known that player, later met my fishing buddy, and Red [had not] been such an ass, and that storm had not come up just as it did and pass by, and the Sauger had not been biting, and that other basketball player had not lived in that apartment complex with that grad student neighbor, and that neighbor had not walked out at just that moment, I might have spent a career working for SeaLand or somewhere! A couple minutes either way could have steered my ship on another course.

I may have at least had an aquarium, though….

Ichthyologist Wayne C. Starnes holding a robust redhorse (Moxostoma robustum) from the Pee Dee River. (Image courtesy of W.C. Starnes)

And that is how Wayne C. Starnes began his career in fish biology — and how the Vietnam War, basketball, a storm-interrupted fishing trip, and a good ol’ boy named Red eventually led to a monograph on the Family Priacanthidae.

Starnes would go on to receive his Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1977 — and it’s been fishes ever since. He says it’s been a great ride. Over the course of his career, he’s had opportunities to work all over the United States, in South and Central America, as well as in Thailand, Samoa, and Puerto Rico. He says he is proud of his work on a major project with endangered fishes in the Colorado River basin, and of his work as a coauthor on The Fishes of Tennessee, the reference on the fish fauna of the Volunteer State.

I’ll let Dr. Starnes have the last word:

Well, that turned out to be a rather fat nutshell, but hopefully you could track it. Sorry for the delays, but retirement hasn’t proven to be much slower than before (and I’m mostly glad of that!).

-W-

A small school of Priacanthus hamrur at the Red Sea. Photo by Alexander Vasenin/CC BY-SA 3.0.

Priacanthus hamrur (Forsskål, 1775)
Moontail Bullseye
Click for names in other languages (FishBase)

Class Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Order Perciformes (Perch-like Fishes)
Family Priacanthidae (Bigeyes and Catalufas)

FishBase Page: http://fishbase.org/summary/5791

Citations

Starnes, WC. 1988. Revision, phylogeny and biogeographic comments on the circumtropical marine percoid fish family Priacanthidae. Bulletin of Marine Science 43(2): 117-203(87).

I am indebted to Dr. Wayne Starnes for taking time out of house painting, manuscript reviews, and the sweet life of retirement to answer an email out of the blue to sake the curiosity of a humble writer. Thank you so much for sharing with us this glimpse into your career — and your love for the fishes.

Starnes’ passages were edited for layout, spelling, and punctuation, with web links added for context. 

Download the PDF version of The Fishes of Tennessee (1993) for free from the University of Tennessee Press.

And thanks to AT&T U-Verse for deciding that random undersea stock footage would be a great backdrop for your OnDemand ads….

— Ben Young Landis

The yellow-tipped squirrelfish (Sargocentron seychellense), an actual species of squirrelfish found in the Seychelles. (Image by the renowned ichthyologist John E. Randall/CC BY-NC 3.0)

Bond. James Bond.

Those three famous — no, infamous — words of cinematic dialog bring us to the subject of squirrelfishes.

Yes, squirrelfishes.

In the latest James Bond movie Spectre, there’s a throwaway line towards the climax where Bond and company hide out in a rare books store, now serving as a safe house. Bill Tanner, M’s chief of staff, remarks that he thought the store had gone out of business.

“Hildebrand & Company – Rarities & Antiquities” read the store’s door placard.

The line is an inside joke referring to one of Ian Fleming’s short stories featuring the James Bond character — “The Hildebrand Rarity” — first published in Playboy magazine in March 1960, and later under the anthology For Your Eyes Only.

The eponymous fish is identified as a squirrelfish by the story’s antagonist, Milton Krest, the vile, wife-beating, ill-mannered millionaire American (naturally) whose yacht Bond reluctantly becomes a guest aboard. Krest — who pillages island nations in the Pacific to collect biological specimens in the name of science, but really as a front to dodge taxes — blurts out a description of his quarry to Bond:

He read out: “‘Hildebrand Rarity. Caught by Professor Hildebrand of the University of Witwatersrand in a net off Chagrin Island in the Seychelles group, April 1925.'” Mr. Krest looked up. “And then there’s a lot of scientific crap. I got them to put it into plain English, and here’s the translation.” He turned back to the paper. “‘This appears to be a unique member of the squirrel-fish family. The only specimen known, named the “Hildebrand Rarity” after its discoverer, is six inches long. The color is a bright pink with black transverse stripes. The anal, ventral, and dorsal fins are pink. The tail fin is black. Eyes, large and dark blue. If found, care should be taken in handling this fish because all fins are even more sharply spiked than is usually with the rest of this family[…]'”

The smallmouth squirrelfish (Sargocentron microstoma), another species of squirrelfish found in the Seychelles. (Image by the renowned ichthyologist John E. Randall/CC BY-NC 3.0)

While Bond thoroughly detests everything about Krest — his crass rudeness above all (the literary Bond counts rudeness among his top peeves) — Bond himself is no angel either. For those of you who have never read the original Bond novels, they certainly are a time capsule of Anglo-American masculinity and racial bigotry in 1950’s and 1960’s. They’re also a quirky glimpse into Fleming himself, whose career as a naval officer and adventuring author gave him a certain appreciation for the undersea world — yet his prose nevertheless projected various antiquated, human prejudices against nature.

Case in point: “The Hildebrand Rarity” story itself opens with Bond free-diving on a coral reef in the Seychelles. Fleming — as Bond — rather lovingly and quite accurately describes the natural behavior of parrotfish, squid, and other marine organisms. But sighting a large stingray, his attitude reverses:

[Bond] rarely killed fish except to eat, but there were exceptions — big moray eels and all members of the scorpion-fish family. Now he proposed to kill the sting ray because it looked so extraordinarily evil.

Bond somewhat redeems himself later in the story: he tries to foil Krest’s attempt to collect the Hildebrand Rarity, by scaring one inquisitive fish away from Krest’s rapacious hands (Krest’s collection method: dumping rotenone solution into the sea to kill fish en masse).

Spoiler alert: the little fish doesn’t make it, and winds up in a jar of formaldehyde. But the specimen does figure in the eventual demise of Milton Krest. How it does, I shall leave a mystery.

What isn’t a mystery is that the “Hildebrand Rarity” seems to be a fictional species. There are more than 15 species of squirrelfishes known to cross the waters of the Seychelles, but none really fit the coloration and size mentioned in the passage.

Comprising the Family Holocentridae with their soldierfish relatives, squirrelfish are reddish-colored, sharply spined fish found in tropical oceans around the world. All have large eyes — apparently reminding someone at some point in history of the glossy, black eyes of squirrels. The large eyes help squirrelfish see in the night — their preferred time to feed. During the day, squirrelfish are reclusive, and hole up in crevices and caves with other nocturnally inclined species, such as bigeyes. Another key characteristic of squirrelfish is the prominent, sharp spine on each side of their head, which in some species carry a light venom.

The sammara squirrelfish (Neoniphon sammara), a species found in the Seychelles and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. (Image by the renowned ichthyologist John E. Randall/CC BY-NC 3.0)

But what of “Professor Hildebrand” of University of Witwatersrand? Fleming had a habit of weaving in names of celebrities and real-life people in his James Bond works. Might there have been a naturalist named Hildebrand at the South African university mentioned?

There doesn’t appear to have been any prominent Hildebrands in the history of that academic institution, but as others have pointed out, Fleming may have drawn inspiration from a real-life American ichthyologist: Samuel Frederick Hildebrand.

Born some 25 years earlier than Fleming, Samuel F. Hildebrand was a government agent in his own way: Hildebrand had a four-decade career working as a scientist and administrator for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (Higgins 1950, Schultz 1950). Over the course of its history, the Bureau of Fisheries counted many prominent names among its staff, including the celebrated scientist and conservation writer Rachel Carson. In 1940, the Bureau of Fisheries was combined with the Bureau of Biological Survey to form a new federal agency — the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — responsible today for monitoring the status of wildlife species and inland fishes in the United States, and enforcing the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Hildebrand’s research career spanned the fishes of Panama and the Mississippi, but his career achievement was his appointment as the director of the U.S. Fisheries Biological Station in Beaufort, North Carolina, first in 1914 and again in 1926 (Manooch and Manooch 1988). Marine scientists know this facility today as the Beaufort Laboratory of the NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center, which shares the quaint, picturesque Pivers Island with the Duke University Marine Lab (where I personally have fond memories of).

Another of Hildebrand’s scientific legacies is his research on mosquitofish (Gambusia spp.) for mosquito larvae control. From 1920 to 1924, Hildebrand also worked for the U.S. Public Health Service, at that time nested within the Department of Treasury. The 1921 Annual Report of the Surgeon General commends Hildebrand:

The Bureau of Fisheries continued its cooperation in the investigation of fish in relation to mosquito control by again detailing Ichthyologist Samuel F. Hildebrand to continue his observations and studies, particularly of Gambusia affinis. The cooperation of the Bureau of Fisheries and Mr. Hildebrand has been most valuable. The conditions under which Gambusia affinis can be effectively employed in reducing mosquito production are being more clearly defined and their field of usefulness for this purpose considerably extended[…]

The introduction of mosquitofish in waterways around the world has had significant impact for public health, but also resulted in them becoming nuisance and invasive species in some ecosystems.

It is utterly fascinating to find out how different threads in the world connect. When I set out to pen this post as an April Fool’s Day joke, I hardly expected to unravel such an interesting mix of biology, biography, and history — that taking a peek at an obscure, fictional fish — albeit one with such a glamorous literary and cinematic pedigree — would somehow tie into the history of fisheries science and public health research. The “Hildebrand Rarity” may have been a figment of a writer’s imagination, but all the marvelous ways that fish and the study of fish intertwine with human history is very real indeed.

Samuel F. Hildebrand was the Director of the U.S. Fisheries Biological Station at Beaufort, North Carolina, which today is part of the NOAA Fisheries Science Center. (Reproduced from Manooch & Manooch 1988)

The blue lined squirrelfish (Sargocentron tiere), also a species of squirrelfish found in the Seychelles. (Image by the renowned ichthyologist John E. Randall/CC BY-NC 3.0)

The March 1960 cover of Playboy magazine. (Copyright Playboy Enterprises, Inc.)

Sargocentron sp. nov.
The Hildebrand Rarity
(Note: Fleming never lists a technical name for the Rarity in the story, but given its petite size, we’ll offer it as a potentially new species of this genus.)

Class Actinopterygii (Ray-finned Fishes)
Order Beryciformes (Sawbellies)
Family Holocentridae (Squirrelfishes and Soldierfishes)

FishBase Page: Maybe someday!

Citations

Higgins, E. 1950. Samuel Frederick Hildebrand as a government scientist. Copeia 1950(1): 8-11.

Manooch, CS, AB Manooch. 1988. History of the Federal Fisheries Laboratory at Beaufort, North Carolina. Marine Fisheries Review 50(1): 72-76.

Schultz, LP. 1950. Samuel Frederick Hildebrand. Copeia 1950(1): 2-7.

U.S. Treasury Department. 1921. Annual Report of the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service of the United States for the fiscal year 1921. Washington: Government Printing Office.

— Ben Young Landis

Ian Fleming Publications Ltd (UK) owns and administers the literary copyright in Ian Fleming’s fiction and non-fiction books. Excerpts from “The Hildebrand Rarity” reproduced here for educational purposes only. 

“Spectre” and “James Bond 007” are the properties of Danjaq, LLC (USA).