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Today is Wet Beast Wednesday!

Today’s wet beast is: Pipefish

Olive’s wet beast fact: You’re probably thinking that these worm-on-a-string lookin ass creatures look like straightened seahorses. That’s bc they are part of the Syngnathidae family with Seahorses and Sea Dragons. Funky!

Stay tuned for more Wet Beast Wednesdays!

without-ado

Micromelo undatus; an uncommon species of small sea snail (x)

c-rowlesdraws

Perhaps Elcor mouths are stretchy? or extendable?

Oh, kind of like a goblin shark or slingjaw wrasse? Interesting idea…

although both of these creatures are predators who use their extendable jaws to snap up prey quickly and by surprise— elcor are herbivorous, and aren’t sneaking up on anything anyway. They’d need some other reason to be able to tuck away their mouth/feeding apparatus.

mossworm

is there a name for this

godmybackhurts

@plaguedocboi why this happen

plaguedocboi

At extreme depths, life must be watery and blobby because hard parts would be crushed by the pressure. The bibby is mostly squish and cartilage with minimal bones so they look soft and cute!

e-102

MY ASS!!!!!

smallbabywerewolf

sadcatsoliloquy

we can all learn something of resiliency from these beautiful, deeply stupid creatures

e-102

sunfish are intelligent actually, they're active swimmers and dive and hunt during the day while hanging out near the surface at night. that's right, they're actually predators.

read this: (source)

sunfish are even strong enough swimmers to breach, (insane considering they average 540 – 4,400 lbs!!!) which is a much different image than the useless floating dummies that everyone seems to think they are :[

all this sunfish disparagement drives me wild. you can learn so much from the ocean sunfish because its actually an ingeniously evolved fish that's perfectly adapted to migrate between depths.

here's some additional reading: (Tweet) (Informational article)

bogleech

People tagging like gore or animal death need to know the one in the first image is possibly just fine! That entire area of the body is pure muscle and it looks already healed. It will just be living its life like a bitten cookie.

thatfeyboy

Looking at sunfish yes there is some muscle there, but the tail(called the clavis, as it's actually a fusion of the anal and dorsal fin) is mostly cartilage

So it wouldnt have a lot of blood to bleed and have a decent chance of healing over, though id worry about it's diving ability. That being said the clavis is a rudder, not propulsion(which comes from the still separate parts of the dorsal and anal fin) so maybe it's steering is just a little wonky. The type of mola mola looks like a hoodwinker sunfish, though it could be a young mola mola/ocean sunfish too. My personal favorite is the slender sunfish. Added the baby because there just such odd things. They have a vertical mouth and mostly eat squid!

bogleech

What do you mean a vertical mouth?!?

Oh my god

thesunincarnate

Local electric eel boy gently blurred, more news at 8

nollimet

Just some late night post card making ft Gars

ilovecoelacanths

omg wait. coelacanth enjoyers out there have i told you about the best website in existence yet. do you even know about www dot dinofish dot com one of my favorite places to keep up to date on coelacanth information

ilovecoelacanths

best website

go to https://www.dinofish.com/ trust me on this one

ilovecoelacanths

also this is one of my favorite images ever btw. if you even care.

le coelacanthe

jofiah

hold on a sec

ilovecoelacanths

>:]

dailyfeesh

Daily Fish 14 - Redtoothed triggerfish

Photo by dividetheocean

fishyfishyfishtimes

Daily fish fact #585

Fish anatomy!

Fishes have a great number of fins, which help them balance themselves and move around their environment. Some fish have fins that are highly specialised for certain tasks, for example the elongated and large pectoral fins of a flying fish allow them to glide and the pelvic fins of gobies tend to be fused together to form a suction disc!

thatonegaycactus

But consider:

fishyfishyfishtimes

I see nothing incorrect about this diagram! Go on!

milagro-24-deactivated20240120

ampervadasz

wrenchswango

typo in the group chat

a-sentient-cup

@official-megumin

paleoart

New seafood place opened in town, what do you order?

Available as prints and other merch formats!

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fishyfishyfishtimes

Daily fish fact #509

Amazon molly!

This species is 100% female (something that their common name references), and it reproduces through gynogenesis! This is essentially parthenogenesis, but the eggs of the fish must be stimulated by the presence of sperm — however, the sperm does not actually fertilise the eggs and contributes no genetic material to the offspring.

fishyfishyfishtimes

I hear your confusion! Here’s an explanation given by @3lbmassofjelly in the past, because screenshotting is faster than writing it myself!

dizzyahellfire

So are all mollies female or just this one in particular? Either way this is truly amazing.

fishyfishyfishtimes

Only this species of molly is all female! Other ones have a normal female-to-male ratio, as far as I know.

yogurtlamp

if the male doesn't contribute any genetic material, does that mean that the only genetic variation that can occur comes from mutations? are the offspring genetic clones of the parent?

also, if the only purpose of the sperm is to stimulate the egg, then what's the point of evolving the need for sperm?

fishyfishyfishtimes

Yes, as the daughters only have the genetic material of their mother to work with, they are her genetic clones save for any mutations they'll have!

I don't unfortunately know why the amazon molly uses gynogenesis instead of the sort of parthenogenesis where the mother gives birth to babies all by herself. Perhaps it isn't a case of deliberately evolving the need for sperm from being fully independent and instead somewhere along the lineage of amazon mollies (about 100 000 - 200 000 years ago), a mother fish had a mutation that made her eggs' membrane permeable for sperm but rejected any further contribution? As all her offspring were (and are) her clones and no new genetic material was brought into the lineage (besides for mutations) it remained distinct and this feature unchanging. Why or how this would come to be (or if this is even close to what happened), I can only theorise! Goes to show how fascinating the natural world is: out there is a fish that thrives just by cloning itself...