Woah, right?  Helluva fish.  Well, hold your horses there, Tex.  It’s actually a model.  I was a bit suspicious that the specimen was just so…perfect…so I dug around a bit and hey presto:

There’s Mr. Bell again, working on the model at an earlier stage.  And here:

Spectacular photos to be sure, and mantas DO grow that big, but I think most folks on the Facebook have been thinking this was a real specimen, based on the photo circulating.

Which led me to look again at  another famous manta photo.  This one:

I had never questioned this photo, it was just THAT manta photo that everyone in the biz knows.  BUT, on further examination I grew suspicious here too.  One thing I had always marveled at was how the fins were so straight out.  If you’ve ever seen a dead ray out of water, they’re generally pretty floppy.  Especially the big ones; they just can’t support theirown bodies out of water.  But then I got another hint from the text in the 2nd paragraph; the bit about it being mounted for display.  I went looking for a better pic and found this: 

A few things give it away as being a model and not an actual specimen. First, there’s a seam from wing tip to wing tip.  Second, behind the right gills there are some puckers in whatever they clad it with, presumably cloth.  But most obviously – to me anyway – IT HAS NO ANUS.  On the ventral side of a manta, just in front of the base of the tail (behind the little white square in this photo), should be a v-shaped cloaca.  So, a case of Edwardian prudishness gave the game away.  Having finally twigged, I realised the little one the man is holding, which was supposedly born post-mortem, looks as fake as a rubber chicken.

EDIT:  I did a bit more sleuthing and found this:

“This signed photo postcard shows “THE GREAT MANTA” that was captured by Captain A.L. Kahn on August 26, 1933. The huge ray was reported to have weighed over 5,000 pounds and measured more than 20 feet across the wing. The critter was caught when it became fouled in the anchor line of the “MISS PENSACOLA II” and was unable to free itself. The ray was towed to Feuerbach and Hansen’s Marina in Brielle, New Jersey where it was hoisted ashore with a travel lift.”

Also this flyer from when the 1933 model went on display (although, frustratingly it doesnt say WHERE), which I believe contains a picture of the REAL manta in the upper left, with suitably floppy wings.  Apparently the coast guard shot it 22 times with a rifle.

So there it is: two famous manta pics that aren’t. They are amazing animals, but these are both models, with nevertheless interesting back stories.

The post The mysterious case of the missing manta bits first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Most submissions to the “These are a few of my favourite species” series are interesting, to be sure.  Cute, even.  You got your fuzzy faced seals and your pretty nudibranchs and such.  They’re…nice.  But the rest of the DSNers can take a hike cos mine’s a bona fide winner.  While your nudibranch is gradually oozing across a rock, mine is romping into the end-zone and spiking the ball.  Your carrier shell, your torpedo ray and your carnivorous sponge are all one trick ponies.  Mine is a genuine triple threat.  Y’see, the sarcastic fringehead has it all: extraordinary adaptaion, amazing behaviour and perhaps the all-time best animal name.  Ever. Anywhere.  Eat that, brachiopod (do you even eat? really? WTF is a lophophore???). Don’t just take my word for it; let David Attenborough break it down for you. Stick around for the true awesomesauce at around 2:00, then give it up for the undisputed baddest blenny around

The post These are a few of my favourite species: sarcastic fringehead first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The image of a seal (those goofy ball-on-the-nose guys!) mounting a penguin (those dapper black and white gents with the endearing waddle) is so absurd as to be ostensibly hilarious, until you really think about what’s happening here, and then it’s not funny at all, just disturbing and fascinating.  To start with, an adult fur seal is much larger and heavier than a king penguin and there’s a good likelihood that breathing of the penguin could be compromised from the weight of their attacker.  But it gets worse because, like other pinnipeds, fur seals have a baculum or penis bone, which increases the degree of trauma that might result from a successful penetration.  The gender of the hapless victim penguin (which was unknown for the reported cases and is hard to tell externally), would not really matter either because both male and female penguins have a cloaca or common opening that serves for solid and liquid waste disposal and also as the sexual portal of entry for normal carnal relations.  I don’t know much about penguin intelligence or cognitive ability, but we should at least consider the possibility that this is psychologically traumatic for the penguin.  Perhaps the ultimate moment of pause, though, comes when you read the researcher’s observation that in one of the instances, when the fur seal was finished raping the penguin, he killed it and ate it.  That’s just brutal.

Why is this happening?  The behaviour seems confined to sub-adult male fur seals and the researchers speculate that it may result from sexual frustration.  Why then would a fur seal have blue balls? Probably because the dominant adult male in the colony is preventing them from mating with his harem of ten or more females.  Fur seals are one of those pinniped species that has a “beach master” like this, so the social structure of a seal colony may predispose sub-adult males to this sort of behaviour.  That’s consistent with other cases of (to use a heteronormative phrase) aberrant sexual behaviour in marine mammals, such as long term homosexual pairing in adult dolphins, blowhole sex and inter-species sexual aggression and rape between dolphin species.  As one marine mammal biologist I spoke to put it, it appears that opportunities for apparently aberrant behaviours increase with increasing social complexity of the offending species.  In this case, the penguins are in the wrong place at the wrong time and of the wrong approximate size and end up bearing the brunt of frustrated sub-adult seals.  What makes this case so extraordinary is the giant taxonomic gulf between the two species; it’s one thing for a bottlenose dolphin to rape a spotted dolphin, but it’s another thing altogether for a mammal to rape a bird.  It’s probably only possible because this particular bird is flightless and not all that formidable an opponent while on land.

One of the more interesting aspects of this behaviour is its potential role in the ecology of infectious disease (forgive me, but I come from an animal health background and when you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail!).  In one published example, bottlenose dolphins have problems with malignant oral and genital cancers that are caused by a papilloma virus and are sexually transmitted by the oral-genital contact that is common in the mating system of dolphins.  When I look at the images of the seal raping the penguin, I see extraordinary behaviour, but I also see the raw material for the evolution of “host switching”, the process whereby pathogens and parasites can effect a jump from one host species to another.  In this case it’s not a jump between species, but potentially between classes of vertebrates, and those opportunities may not come along all that often.  So, beyond the immediate morbidity (and in one observed case, mortality) of this behaviour, it will be interesting to see if any long term changes to the health status of penguins (or fur seals, for that matter) in this population occur in the future.  In the meantime it remains one of the more extraordinary bits of marine animal behaviour I have ever seen described.

Cited:

William A. Haddad, Ryan R. Reisinger, Tristan Scott, Marthán N. Bester, P. J. Nico de Bruyn (2014) Multiple occurrences of king penguin (Aptenodytes patagonicus) sexual harassment by Antarctic fur seals (Arctocephalus gazella).  Polar Biology. 10.1007/s00300-014-1618-3

Bossart G.D. (2007) Emerging Diseases in Marine Mammals: from Dolphins to Manatees. Microbe 2: 544-549

The post The Antarctic is a rough neighbourhood first appeared on Deep Sea News.

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This is not the ocean:

Indeed, even THIS is not the ocean:

Before you start thinking that the folks at DSN are losing their marbles, bear with me!  The truth is that none of these three all-too-familiar and quintessentially marine images reflects the actual reality of what most of the ocean is like.  Here’s why.  At their most basic, the above three images can be represented like this (respectively):

Our experience of the ocean is almost entirely defined by our interactions along its margins: along the coast, sitting the bottom or floating on the surface.  More often, it’s some combination of these, like a coral reef, which can be all three: coastal, benthic and also in reach of or transcending the surface at least some of the time.  In all of these marginal habitats, life is heavily influenced by the margin itself: benthic things have specific adaptations to interacting with the substrate, while pelagic things have adaptations for interacting with the surface, and so on.  In many of these places it’s sunny, it’s warm and there are lots of animals, at least relatively speaking.   The point of my post is that the rest of the ocean, an overwhelming majority in fact, looks like this:

That’s because the part of the oceans not included in coastal zones, on the bottom, or within sunlight’s reach of the surface make’s up about 94% of the volume of the ocean (and of course, the other 6% looks like this at night time, or 50% of the time!).  Average ocean depth is around 12,100 feet, with sunlight penetrating the top 650 feet or so.  The other 11,450 feet consists of pitch dark and perpetual blackness, with no margin or structure to disrupt the inky 3-dimensional void.  It’s also uniformly and numbingly cold; below the reach of sunlight it is about 4°C or 39°F everywhere in the world, regardless of whether you are off Greenland or Hawaii.  About the only thing that isn’t uniform throughout this habitat is pressure, which varies greatly with the depth of any given cube of water, but is generally a great deal more than any experienced along coasts or at the surface, although it must be said that bottom-dwelling communities in the deepest parts of the ocean experience the greatest pressures of all.

There are animals in the void too, of course, but they are sparse in the extreme and without extrinsic light and without any habitat structures they are foreign in form.  Often delicate and flimsy, diaphanous or gelatinous, they exist in a world without walls, floor or ceiling, without any structure at all to define the boundaries of their environment or even to serve as some spatial point of reference.  There are animals here that will not during their lifetime experience a solid surface, or even a fluid one such as the boundary where water meets air; they and their ancestors appear and disappear from the void, never alighting on anything.  To them, a wall might be as incomprehensible as a black hole is to us.  They are born, live out their life histories and die in a frigid, timeless, structureless void.

I’m not a religious guy, but the bible opens with a statement to the effect that “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep” and I can’t help but be struck that the world described by this passage, before God supposedly created light and began to shape the world, bears a striking resemblance to the vast majority of the oceans that exist today.  We think we know the oceans, but we don’t, not really, because the majority of the oceans are an icy black void inhabited by creatures as alien as any we can expect to find in that other unceasing void, the one we call space.

The post We don't know the ocean first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I am not going to lie to you, before moving to San Francisco I barely knew the rules of baseball. But during the mere three years that I have lived here, our local team (the Giants in case you have been living under a rock) have won no less than two World Series championships, and three in the last five years! With such a successful team, I couldn’t avoid getting hooked.

My first time in the Giants’ ball park (or any ball park) was during the 2012 season, and the first thing that caught my eye was the colors. Both the team and the crowd colors: orange, black, and white were everywhere. I know what I will say next may sound strange to many, but having spent a large portion of my life underwater, the first thing that those colors reminded me of was fishes.

In fishes, colors come from pigments and/or tiny crystals and mirrors inside cells called chromatophores (from the Greek khrōma meaning “color,” and phoros meaning “bearing”). Orange and black are common colors in fishes, and they are what we call pigment colors. In fishes, there are several types of chromatophores that contain pigments, but the two types associated with Giants colors are erythrophores (orange/red), and melanophores (black/brown). Most of the orange and red that we see in fishes comes from pigments known as carotenoids (yes, the name comes from carrots), and the black and dark brown comes from a type of melanin.

Most of the white coloration that we see in fishes is produced in a slightly different way. There are usually no pigments involved, instead, white is what we call a structural color, and is produced via reflection of white using tiny crystals and plates. And this brings us to the Royals, which were a formidable adversary in the World Series. Like white, blue in fishes is also a structural color, and many times it is also iridescent.

But back to my World Champion Giants, in the superstitious world of baseball, fishes are not surprised with their win. After all, California’s official state marine fish IS the Giants-orange Garibaldi! The first time the Giants used the now traditional orange, black, and white was back in 1933, but they only permanently changed to these colors in 1951, and moved to San Francisco from New York shortly after that, in 1957. Fishes, on the other hand, have sported their orange, black, and white colors for millions of years.  No word on whether fishes will be filing a class action lawsuit for copyright infringement…

The Giants have another connection with our ocean friends: McCovey Cove is a part of the San Francisco Bay where baseballs occasionally end up “sleeping with the fishes”. There have been 68 Home Run “Splash Hits” into McCovey Cove by Giants players and 38 by opponents. Of note, Barry Bonds has hit 35 of them! The next closest is Pablo “Panda” Sandoval with only 7. Because baseballs float in seawater (at least for a while), there are many colorful fans that patrol McCovey Cove during games to collect splash hit baseballs.  But as far as I know, no fishes (or fans) have ever been hit.

Since I don’t know much about baseball’s history and tradition, I enlisted the help of fellow California Academy of Sciences curator and Giants fanatic Brian Simison to add some more baseball spice to this article. Thanks Brian!

The post What do baseball and fishes have in common? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

When you hear “vampires” you usually think “Twilight”, “Vampire Diaries” or “True Blood”. However, a very interesting group of fishes have also taken up the name. Vampire Blennies (a.k.a. Fang Blennies or Sabertooth Blennies) have elongated fangs that give them great versatility. Blennies are a diverse family small fishes that are poor swimmers usually with secretive behavior. Most hide in crevices in the reef or swim always in contact with the bottom to avoid being eaten. But unlike other Blennies (and human vampires), Vampire Blennies are often out in the open because larger predatory fish are scared of their fangs and painful bites!

Many Vampire Blennies use their large fangs and powerful jaws to snack on other fishes. The Bluestriped Fangblenny darts towards much larger fish and removes scales, chunks of skin and/or pieces of fin to feed on. But fish learn to recognize them and stay away as much as possible.

And that’s why the False Cleanerfish adopted an incredible strategy. It looks exactly like the Cleaner Wrasse, a fish that removes parasites from the skin of other fishes. By looking like the Cleaner Wrasse, the False Cleanerfish easily gets close to other fish, but instead of cleaning, it bites!

Unlike the species discussed so far, perhaps the most incredible group of Vampire Blennies, the genus Meiacanthus, uses their fangs for defense, not attack. They have a very specialized venom gland enveloping the base of their canines. When attacked by larger fish, they use their long sharp fangs to inject venom into their attacker.  During my last trip to the Red Sea, when attempting to carefully take a small tissue sample of a live Black-Lined Vampire Blenny and return it to the reef, it bit me! Even though there are scattered reports of painful bites, my bite wasn’t painful at all. I was just shocked to see that a small fish like that (about 2 inches long) could cut my skin in one bite with such ease: the fangs were extremely sharp and strong.

The Meiacanthus defense mechanism is so effective at deterring predators that most are mimicked by other blennies, cardinalfish or even juvenile breams. Predators tend to avoid Meiacanthus due to previous bad experiences, so by looking like them, the mimics get protection. Moral of the story? In the coral reef, looking like a vampire is a good thing and will keep predators away!

The post Interview with the Vampire Blennies first appeared on Deep Sea News.

If you can think of anything involving sex, from group sex to monogamy for life to males with penises on their heads, you can probably find good examples in fishes. Here I want to focus on a particularly interesting and bizarre aspect of fish sexual life: sex changing! Hermaphroditism (the expression of both female and male reproductive organs in the same individual) in fishes can occur in many ways, but most commonly, a fish starts off as one sex, and changes to the other at a certain stage in life (sequential hermaphroditism). A change from female to male is called protogyny (from the Greek “proto”=“first” and “gyno”=“female”), and a change from male to female is called protandry (from the Greek “proto”=“first” and “andros”=“male”).

Wrasses are well known for their sex changes, which are usually accompanied by dramatic color changes, and most are protoginous hermaphrodites. But unlike our own species, where girls dress to impress, in wrasses it’s usually the opposite: males are the ones who put on the fancy dresses.

In these fishes, sex change is controlled socially: a dominant male usually controls a harem of females, and when the male dies the most dominant female in the harem becomes a male. Sex change happens in stages. First, just a few hours after the male goes missing, the dominant female starts behaving as a male. This behavioral change triggers hormonal shifts that cause her gonads to become male gonads and her colors to change into male colors. The entire process is completed in just a few weeks.

Clownfish of the genus Amphiprion (made famous by the movie “Finding Nemo”) are great examples of protandrious hermaphrodites. The movie “Finding Nemo” (which had clownfish as stars) is biologically inaccurate in many ways, but for the purposes of this article, let’s just say that to be biologically correct, Marlin (Nemo’s dad) would have to start behaving as a female just a few hours after Nemo’s mom was eaten by a barracuda. You can only imagine what conversations between Dory and Marlin would be like if the movie script had followed this more accurate sequence of events.

However, differently from wrasses, clownfishes don’t keep harems, rather, a single pair of breeding adults (with a female usually much larger in size) dominates an anemone that can also host several immature clownfish. If the dominant female dies, the male changes into a female and the next immature clownfish in the social order becomes a male to form a new breeding pair.

If you thought that it was cool for wrasses and clownfish to be able to change from one sex to the other, you are in for a treat now. Perhaps one of the most amazing and shocking sex lives in fishes is found in Caribbean Hamlets. They are simultaneous hermaphrodites, which is to say that every individual is both male and female at the same time. But to avoid self-fertilization (which is bad because it decreases the genetic variability of the offspring), they trade roles in a strategy known as “egg trading”. After meeting in the same familiar spot in the reef (let’s call it the “bedroom” rock), the pair of hamlets rises in the water column and a mesmerizing spawning event happens: the fish acting as a male embraces the one acting as a female while releasing sperm, and the fish behaving as a female releases eggs. The embrace lasts a few seconds and the pair goes back down to the reef. A few minutes later they rise again, but now the roles are reversed! This fantastic courtship and spawning behavior is easy to observe in shallow reefs of the Caribbean and happens every day during a very romantic time (just before sunset).

From reading this article you might think that we know a lot about sex-changing in fishes, but in reality we have just scratched the surface. For example, in a recent paper, Kuwamura and colleagues showed that male cleaner wrasses (which are born females and change into males) can change back to females when there are only males in a group. This gives an entirely new meaning to the word “options”!

Kuwamura, T., Kadota, T. & Suzuki, S. 2014. Testing the Low-density Hypothesis for Reversed Sex Change in Polygynous Fish: Experiments in Labroides dimidiatus. Scientific Reports 4: 4369.

The post Male, female, or both? When it comes to sex, fishes do it all! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Woah, right?  Helluva fish.  Well, hold your horses there, Tex.  It’s actually a model.  I was a bit suspicious that the specimen was just so…perfect…so I dug around a bit and hey presto:

There’s Mr. Bell again, working on the model at an earlier stage.  And here:

Spectacular photos to be sure, and mantas DO grow that big, but I think most folks on the Facebook have been thinking this was a real specimen, based on the photo circulating.

Which led me to look again at  another famous manta photo.  This one:

I had never questioned this photo, it was just THAT manta photo that everyone in the biz knows.  BUT, on further examination I grew suspicious here too.  One thing I had always marveled at was how the fins were so straight out.  If you’ve ever seen a dead ray out of water, they’re generally pretty floppy.  Especially the big ones; they just can’t support theirown bodies out of water.  But then I got another hint from the text in the 2nd paragraph; the bit about it being mounted for display.  I went looking for a better pic and found this: 

A few things give it away as being a model and not an actual specimen. First, there’s a seam from wing tip to wing tip.  Second, behind the right gills there are some puckers in whatever they clad it with, presumably cloth.  But most obviously – to me anyway – IT HAS NO ANUS.  On the ventral side of a manta, just in front of the base of the tail (behind the little white square in this photo), should be a v-shaped cloaca.  So, a case of Edwardian prudishness gave the game away.  Having finally twigged, I realised the little one the man is holding, which was supposedly born post-mortem, looks as fake as a rubber chicken.

EDIT:  I did a bit more sleuthing and found this:

“This signed photo postcard shows “THE GREAT MANTA” that was captured by Captain A.L. Kahn on August 26, 1933. The huge ray was reported to have weighed over 5,000 pounds and measured more than 20 feet across the wing. The critter was caught when it became fouled in the anchor line of the “MISS PENSACOLA II” and was unable to free itself. The ray was towed to Feuerbach and Hansen’s Marina in Brielle, New Jersey where it was hoisted ashore with a travel lift.”

Also this flyer from when the 1933 model went on display (although, frustratingly it doesnt say WHERE), which I believe contains a picture of the REAL manta in the upper left, with suitably floppy wings.  Apparently the coast guard shot it 22 times with a rifle.

So there it is: two famous manta pics that aren’t. They are amazing animals, but these are both models, with nevertheless interesting back stories.

The post The mysterious case of the missing manta bits first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The cognitive dissonance between what happens (biologically) in that video, what the two intrepid heroes do, and what’s reported, fills me with dismay for society.  If that seems hyperbolic, bear with me.  Let’s break it down:

What the story says

Benchley-esque narrative: blah blah “terrifying moment”, “heart stopping”, “full force”, “massive beast”, “shouting in terror”, “inches from the shark’s jaws”, “brunt of the assault” blah blah.  The only kernel of truth is the very last sentence “the whale shark is only known to eat small fish and plankton and have never been known to harm or kill a human”  Talk about burying the lede…

What actually happens

Two RealMenTM are spearfishing in the pelagic zone.  You know, where whale sharks live.  To aid in their quest to bag a tuna, our intrepid heroes chum the water with a bag of cut fish.  One curious tuna flirts with death, but is saved by the arrival on scene of a harmless and curious whale shark: as I said, a well known inhabitant of the pelagic zone and commonly associated with tuna schools.  Also, and this is important, with an impeccable sense of smell and a fairly sizable appetite.  So, whale shark arrives to investigate the source of that delicious smell, giving Hero number 1 a nudge during his sniff test.  Hero number 1 then screams like a horror film teenager.  Hero number 2 decides not to take that kind of crap from no stinking planktivore, so he grabs the animals dorsal fin for a ride, in violation of pretty much every tenet of wildlife interaction.  Doing that would and should get you summarily expelled from any well managed whale shark ecotourism operation in the world.  Animal objects and banks away to avoid the irritation.  Aaaaaand scene.

So to recap, our two heroes created a situation by going into the whale shark’s habitat with a bag of what the whale shark likes to eat.  A whale shark shows up (duh), doesn’t hurt anybody because they don’t, but gets harrassed anyway, and then journalist (that’s Kara O’Neill at the Mirror) beats it up into some sort of horror story in a case of victim blaming par excellence.  Let me tell you, if that’s a horror story, then I’m Rob freakin’ Zombie, because I’ve got several similar videos (sans the harassment of course).  Every time there has been physical contact between me and a whale shark it’s because I was too stupid or not quick enough to get out of its way; this is an animal the size of a school bus and you need you have your head on a swivel.  Hero 1 did not, got bumped, but no harm no foul because the critter is intrinsically harmless.  The real foul here is how the incident is portrayed, and that’s what fills me with dismay.  How are we ever supposed to get folks to understand, ergo care for, ergo protect marine life if we keep trotting out rubbish like this?  The two guys in the video should be ashamed, and so should everyone involved at The Mirror.

#Fail

The post ZOMG Whale shark attack!!!! Or not… first appeared on Deep Sea News.