“A newly discovered pink-and-tan psychedelically striped fish with a flat face, frowning mouth and arm-like fins could be part of a formerly unknown family of vertebrates.”
For those who care to read the rest of the story I appended it below…
What I like about this is how it illustrates that we are always in a state of
becoming or Abraham would say expanding. And so what does this
mean to me?
That the current state of reality is not static, not fixed, it’s fluid, it’s malleable,
Everything is in a state of becoming. Given that, why would I want to spend
a moment reflecting with angst on anything, when so many possibilities, endless
potential possibilities exist.
Love, Bethie
It’s unlike anything weird-fish expert and University of Washington ichthyologist Ted Pietsch has ever seen.
“I’m still thrilled. It’s an incredible thing. It’s remarkable,” said Pietsch, who specializes in anglerfish or frogfish, strange swimmers who grow their own lures to catch prey.
The newly found 4-inch fish lives in Indonesian coral beds, crawling in and out of crevices on its bent pectoral fins. It was spotted by the owners of a commercial dive company who kept mum on their discovery to protect it until they found additional fish.
The couple, Buck and Fitrie Randolph, are part-owners of Maluku Divers along with Andy Shorten. The Randolphs spotted the fish in January on Indonesia’s Ambon Island. In March, they saw juvenile fish. This week a female was seen protecting an egg mass of about 20 to 30 young.
“What you usually see is variations of a fish you’ve seen before,” said Shorten, who was reached in Indonesia. “We’ve never seen a fish with remotely this kind of face.”
Shorten, who said he’s done about 2,000 dives, said they e-mailed photos to authors of leading fish identification books.
“They all said, ‘We’ve never seen that before,’ ” Shorten said. Eventually the divers were referred to Pietsch.
A world expert in anglerfish, Pietsch is certain that the new fish is related to frogfish because of its characteristic armlike fins and the sheath that held the eggs. Mother anglers typically wrap their bodies around the eggs to protect them from predators.
But the fish — which Pietsch plans to name the Maluku frogfish — is different from other anglers in remarkable ways. It lacks a lure, has tiny pelvic fins and — most remarkably — has a flat face with forward facing eyes. Most fish have eyes on the sides of their head and very few have them located close enough that their range of vision overlaps. These fish could have humanlike binocular vision giving them better depth perception.
That sort of vision in fish “is extremely rare,” Pietsch said. “It must feed in a completely different way from other anglerfishes
(excerpted from the seattlepi.com – Lisa Stiffler, reporter)
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