Frogfish reveals how it evolved the “fishing rod” on its head
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Side note: regular anglerfish is delicious. At least when eaten in a little hole in the wall right off the docks in Iceland.
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Nice article Elizabeth. Wiley-Liss is more than evolution articles published Elsevier...
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So...are pygmy filefish used to reduce the size of full sized filefish? Or are they just fish that only work with the smallest files in the secretarial pool?
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Sad that this awesome video on frogfish wasn't included. Among other things, you can see the lures in action.
(About 21 minutes long, but if you know what Nebula is you can skip to about 1:20 to get to the meat.)
(About 21 minutes long, but if you know what Nebula is you can skip to about 1:20 to get to the meat.)
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I have to think this fugly fish has a deep-rooted poor sense of self. I wonder if Wicked's Glenda could do a makeover.
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That is a really awesome video. And yes it starts at about 1:20.
If you just want to see a few seconds clip of frogfish lures in action - this will rock your world - skip a bit further to 11:44 and watch 15 seconds to 11:59. There's another good 10-sec clip of a frogfish lure at 12:40-12:50.
Eh watch the whole video, you'll never look at a frogfish in the same way again.
As someone mentioned in the comments, the video has "post-doc biology researcher left unsupervised" energy and I love it.
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"Glub glub, glub glub. Glub glub glub glub glub, glub glub glub glub. Glub? Glub glub glub glub. Glub."
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And monkfish liver (ankimo) is a Japanese delicacy.
Edit: I should clarify, monkfish is itself a species of anglerfish.
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I am curious about the motivation for this research.
I don’t mind research „just because one can do it“. Sometimes it yields very interesting insights or cool stuff that may be useful in unexpected ways.
Why did these researchers choose to look into this?
I don’t mind research „just because one can do it“. Sometimes it yields very interesting insights or cool stuff that may be useful in unexpected ways.
Why did these researchers choose to look into this?
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My guess is that it's a good model for looking at one type of evolution. The lure is a highly-specialized trait that evolved out of part of the body that in most other fish (including close relatives) is just the front-most spine of the dorsal fin. A lot had to happen related to just that one spine, and much of what happened is spacially isolated within the fish.
If one is looking at something like the evolution of the opposable thumb in primates, as a counterpoint, one would have to account for the already complex structure/operation of primate hands and how the thumb interacts with the rest of the hand.
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The eye is far far more complex than a frogfish lure, and is often viewed as an example of ‘directed creation’. Especially as it appears if any one part is missing or wonky the whole thing is useless. But if you look up the evolution of the eye, it’s been researched and studied intensely.
There’s various guides out there in view laying out how the eye evolved (several times over in various species IIRC) and all the intermediate stages and their functionality. For example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye
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What's more, there's absolutely no rational reason for a deliberate Designer to do any of that. Anything with the power and intellect to assemble life directly could have simply created new, novel traits without going through a messy process involving imperfect duplication and successive accumulations of changes over generations. Each version of the eye, indeed each species itself, could be a clean-slate design tailored to any specification. There's no need to build "relatedness" into any of it.
And what we see in action with the cdesign proponentsists like Strategos777 is that they simply stop exploring possible explanations. "That's neat, but we know God did it, let's move on." That kind of blase attitude doesn't prompt the kind of investigative questioning that yields deeper understanding and new insights. Without evolution as a framework for asking questions, biology is mere stamp collecting.
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It would be interesting to work out what the perfect eye for different species would be.
Spiders have some neat telescopic eyes to fit in their tiny heads - could you use that idea for a hawk?
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To be honest, I would not have been surprised if the "lure" was just some poor creature (even of the same species) that had been caught and somehow merged with the frogfish's body, existing in a zombified state between alive and dead, slowly disolving into the host body as it's being used for fishing...
And before you think that's too extreme of a thought, just read about how their cousins, the anglerfish, reproduce.
And before you think that's too extreme of a thought, just read about how their cousins, the anglerfish, reproduce.
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The title said "Frogfish reveals how it evolved", but didn't appear to reveal it to the author of the study. Did I miss something?
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Not a completely unreasonable hypothesis at first blush. Merging species is thought to have occurred early in the tree of life. Eukaryotes were likely created when a bacteria like creature was engulfed by an arkeonic creature resulting in a cell with a nucleus separated by a membrane from the bulk of the cells machinery. The existence of algael cells inside coral polyps and inside lichens are other examples.
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I would never normally step into reading an article about this subject matter and I was already entertained before I got to your comment. That video was hilarious while teaching me things I didn't know I wanted to know
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I am loving those subheaders.
"That's Some Nerve"
"Fishing For Answers"
Bwhahah
"That's Some Nerve"
"Fishing For Answers"
Bwhahah
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