Animal Crossing Fish - Explained #116
Brought to you by a marine biologist who has a long life to live...
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Have you ever noticed that some animals, like elephants, parrots, and us, humans, live a pretty damn long time compared to like, most things we regularly associate with, like dogs, rodents, etc? Why is that? The short answer is that it’s probably a lot of factors bouncing off each other and just the luck of the draw, coupled with lifestyle, habitat, and genetics that all feeds into some animals living for centuries while some only live for a few weeks. Today’s fish, the red snapper, is long-lived in the bony fish world. How we scientists age fish in order to manage fisheries is something I had the pleasure of being a part!
The Red Snapper is available 24/7/365. Although it’s rarer than, say, the Sea Bass and Olive Flounder, two fish that are also around all the time, it feels more satisfying to catch it. I don’t know...maybe it’s the red color, the “being slightly uncommon”...it certainly has nothing to do with it being worth some bells, because after playing this game since March, bells ain’t something I need.
Anyway. Snappers are a 113-species Family of fish called Lutjanidae. They are all mostly marine carnivores, growing to pretty large sizes up to 3 ft (1m), although there are species that reach 5 ft (1.5m). The Northern Red Snapper (Lutjanus campechanus) is a large sport fish of this family that lives in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, mostly along the coasts of southeastern US states.
Picture from Sportfishing Magazine.
Most people don’t really consider how long fish live, and that’s fair. Most fish you will interact with in your life would typically be aquarium fish. Besides goldfish, who can live for ten years if people would just take care of them right, live around 2 to 5 years when it comes to the small species. You’ll be surprised to know that the Northern Red Snapper regularly lives to be 50 years old in the wild, with the oldest on record being over 100 years of age. How is this possible?
Well...longevity is one of those areas of science where we haven’t really untangled what it means and why some animals are blessed with a long life, while others live fast and die “young” (I put that in quotes, because 2 years for a hamster is OLD, like 90 is old for us). We have noticed some patterns, though many of them come with exceptions, because, well, that’s life. (ba dum tiss) We tend to see larger animals and animals that live in colder climates living longer than smaller, tropical species. We see this in mammals especially, and the thought is metabolism, or how quickly you expend energy doing normal life things, is a factor. However, a wrench gets thrown into this when you factor in some species of parrots that are smaller than dogs, but live five times as long. It may also have to do with ecology. If you’re a small animal, there’s a bigger chance that you will end up a meal for someone else. A mouse has many predators while an elephant really doesn’t have to worry about that much. That ecological pressure to grow up and have offspring faster may actually select, evolutionarily, to have a shorter lifespan. Ya know, ya just “get done” quicker.
But like I said, the secrets to longevity are still alluding us. In the fish world, how long fish of a given population live is really important to fishery manager and marine biologists. Long-lived species, like red snapper, sharks, orange roughy, sturgeon, etc. are particularly vulnerable to fishing pressure. Because they live such a long time, they also don’t mature until later on in their lives, which makes setting a quota for fishermen to catch every year a slippery slope. But we still do it! How?
Otoliths! These are tiny, hard “ear bones” in a fish’s head, and we can age individual fish with them. Like the growth rings you see in a tree, the otoliths shows growth rings that correspond to about a year of life. Otoliths come in all different shapes and sizes dependent on species. I, personally, collected hundreds of these from fishing catch while working as an observer, and they tell us so much, especially when coupled with other data, like where the fish was caught and its length. With this data we start untangling how long fish live and when in their lives they first start getting caught in a particular fishery. We can then ask the VERY important question: Are the fish able to reproduce before getting captured, or are we catching juveniles who haven’t replaced themselves in the population yet?
And there you have it. Fascinating stuff, no?
