#teleostei

[every-day-creechur]

Nile Robber Alestes dentex

Found in Central and West Africa. Alestes dentex is known to feed on seeds, zooplankton, and insects.

image by afropavo

[animalids]

Hairy frogfish (Antennarius striatus)

Photo by Mike Bartick

[kararadaygum]

..

[faunalregion]

[pyro-madder]

Leptoid scale | the particular type of scales that make up the integumentary system of Teleostei, more than 90% of the current species of “fish”.

Introducing... Garowana ! Not a Hecatia character, but actually a persona for myself, because I was lacking one. Not that it’s necessary to have one as an artist, but seeing other people’s... I wanted to give myself a face too ^^’

Garowana was born from a silly private joke between myself and four college friends during a group project. Therefore she has four comrades, and together they make up the Tegumen, defenders of justice and biodiversity~

[terrible-tentacle-theatre]

The Bestiary: Cleaner Mimic

Disclaimer: While this article is founded in scientific fact, it contains hyberbole and conscious exaggerations for the sake of comedy. Do not take my ramblings at face value. You can find the sources at the end of the article and tools for scientific fact-checking under the “Learn more” link on my blog.

This, is a coral reef.

My god.

The average coral reef, contrary to most popular belief, is a damn deadly place. It’s akin to one of those kung-fu movies that feature a beautiful, classy lady clad in a traditional qipao who inevitably turns out to be the one person in the entire movie that you should definitely not have fucked with. Bladed fans are not pleasant, people.

Coral reefs are like that lady. Silk hiding steel. The steel magnolia. And several other allegories involving steel and other metallurgy products.

Don’t let the pretty coral structures fool you is basically what I’m saying here. The same laws of nature apply in the prettiest blue oceans as the ugliest swamps, because Mother Nature, creative as she may be, has no sense of human aesthetics. The most colorful ones are usually also those who will slit your throat and snatch your purse the quickest.

Take the giant moray (Gymnothorax javanicus) for example. Long and pretty colored it may be, it’s still a suicidally dumb idea to approach it without proper precautions. Its body can reach up to three goddamn meters, and it has a second set of jaws inside its mouth to pull you into its maw with.

…

…No.

No, I’m not going to make another Alien reference. It’s too easy. Fuck off.

And if you think „oh it’s easy, just stay away from the cave”, it has another unpleasant surprise in stock for you: it’s got buddies. Buddies such as the roving coralgrouper (Plectropomus pessuliferus), a fuckoff huge predatory grouper that will very gladly team up with the moray to hunt your ass down if you’re sufficiently tasty-looking and sufficiently a fish. The grouper sweeps through the open water for prey while the moray mops out gaps and crevices, ensuring that you have nowhere to run. Symbiosis is a wonderful thing.

It’s like Touhou, except instead of a bunch of tiny bullets you’re expected to dodge two huge fuckin fish, and you don’t get a single Fantasy Seal. ZUN is taking notes somewhere.

I think I got my point across. Coral reefs are no laughing matter, beautiful as they may be. It’s the same fish-eat-fish world out there as in all other waters.

While our specific example here (the moray and the grouper) inhabits the pretty murderlands of the Red Sea, the same rule of thumb applies anywhere else too, such as in warm waters of the the Indo-Pacific region. This is where today’s review subjects spends its little existence of piracy and treachery on the sea.

Close your eyes for a moment and picture that you’re a humble, ordinary cleanerfish (Labroides dimidiatus).

You eke out a respectable living on the coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific in the business of (surprise, surprise) cleaning. You avoid getting your day ruined by some big mean mother fucker with teeth the size of your whole body by offering to clean the filth, dirt and the gore of your devoured fellows off of said mother fucker’s body. It’s a good business and you’re basically under a protectorate from the entire reef: nobody will eat the best guy who keeps their scales clean.

Life is all good.

Until one day your customers show up at your door with torches and pitchforks, calling for your blood, that is.

So what the hell happened, you ask? Until yesterday you were a widely popular small local business, and now everyone is calling you a cheater who exploits their trust for your own gain.

What happened is this guy.

Yo.

Grip something sturdy: no, this isn’t another picture of the same fish. Clearly some JoJo-tier bullshit is going on here.

What you just touched… was your own future self!

Meet the cleaner mimic (Aspidontus taeniatus), also known as the false cleanerfish. While not a mimic in the classic chompy treasure chest monster sense, it’s every bit as sneaky and assholish. You might think it’s just another cleanerfish, but it’s actually a clever master of some goddamn clever cloak-and-dagger disguise bullshit.

Taking on the appearance of the cleanerfish and imitating its signature “business is open” dance (spreading its fins and waving its tail up and down), the mimic now enjoys the same protectorate, since nobody would eat the dude who gives everyone regular massages and scrubdowns. It could probably live its entire life comfortably, enjoying its undeserved safety, if not for the fact that it ruins its own chances at this through an acute case of chronic backstabbing disorder.

See, it’s like this: The mimic sets up shop on some coral reef, preferably close to a cleanerfish station. This is because it needs a location which fish regularly visit for cleaning off their filthy, filthy scales. Then, this diminutive conman sets its plan into action.

The plan is simple:

Look like cleanerfish.

Act like cleanerfish.

Wait until unsuspecting “clients” show up at your place for a good cleaning.

Bite a chunk out of their fins and RUN.

HAHAHAHAHAHA FUCKING SUCKERS

Instead of a scrubbing, all the poor clients got was becoming scrubs themselves.

So you can probably see why the poor cleanerfish’s reputation thus goes downhill. Afterall, the only way to distinguish your friendly neighborhood cleaner-man from the asshole who steals your organs is by the position of their mouths, which is not what you’re normally looking at when you enter a massage salon.

The cleanerfish has its mouth on the end of its head like this:

Meanwhile, the mimic has its mouth a little underslung its head like so:

Just look at this smug little shithead. Even his face is perpetually locked in a haughty grin. If the ocean was an imageboard, the cleaner mimic would be all the smug anime girl reaction images.

That's it. That's literally it. Other than this one tiny detail on a fish that's already tiny as shit, the two are virtually indistinguishable. If it wasn't already a false cleanerfish, this guy would be a catfish instead.

So long story short, everyone on the coral reef is getting catfished big time by this guy and they take all his dirty little tricks hook line and sinker. This, of course, develops into full on drama. Blogs are deleted. Callout posts are written. Receipts are collected. And the poor bastard at the center of it all is the falsely-accused cleanerfish.

BATESIAN MIMICS DON’T INTERACT

If the local fish are sufficiently dumb, the cleaner mimic can fuck with a reef community for its entire life. Surprisingly enough, however, most local fish are not sufficiently dumb. Regular clients of the cleanerfish will learn to distinguish it from the mimic if they fall for the Nigerian prince scam enough times, and reportedly give the duplicitous little fucker a chase, forcing it to abandon its usual diet of nipped-off fins and skin for a relatively more vegetarian regimen of tube worms and fish eggs. And all because it couldn’t keep its teeth off of the locals. Good job, false cleanerfish. Good job.

And you know the worst part about this entire bullshit? If you’re a fish, and you roll up to a cleaner station to get your act tidied up, and the local cleanerfish starts working on your scales, you still can’t be sure it’s not a cleaner mimic. Because, see, the mimic only attacks its cleaning clients in about 20% of encounters. Now your weekly bathtime comes with a side order of Russian roulette. I hope you’ll have a fun time.

Of course, there is one way to know if your masseuse is in fact a mimic: if it opens its mouth and it looks like this, bail the fuck out of there. No amount of personal hygiene is worth that shit.

Sources

Encyclopedia of Life (EoL)

Ocean Biogeography Information System (OBIS)

FishBase

World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS)

National Geographic

Vail, Manica & Bshary. 2013. Referential gestures in fish collaborative hunting. Nature Communications. 

[todropscience]

This is the Korean seahorse (Hippocampus haema), a new species of singnatid -a family of fish which includes seahorses, pipefishes, pipehorses, and weedy seadragons- This new species is described based on 140 specimens from Korea & Japan. Scientists conducted morphological and molecular analyses on 182 specimens collected in Korea and Japan between 1933 and 2015, in order to clarify the taxonomic status of the sea horse species found in Korea and Japan waters. 

-  Coloration of fresh specimens, commonly found in Korean waters, previously believed to be a single especies.. A Hippocampus haema, B H. coronatus and C H.sindonis.

The korean seahorse is found in Southeastern coast of Honshu (Japan), from Izu Peninsula (Shizuoka Prefecture) to Boso Peninsula (Chiba Prefecture) where it lives in weed habitats, especially in floating Sargassum, within shallow areas (0–20 m depth).

Reference (Open Access): Han et al., 2017.  Seahorses of the Hippocampus coronatus complex: taxonomic revision, and description of Hippocampus haema, a new species from Korea and Japan (Teleostei, Syngnathidae). ZooKeys.

[animalids]

Rockweed gunnel (Apodichthys fucorum)

Photo by Marlin Harms