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SIEGE OF THE SEA DEVILS

hey everyone, happy friday and welcome back to another excellent episode of Weird Biology!

this week, we’re examining a charismatic and almost perfect oceanic killing machine! you might be picturing a shark, but you’re wrong. 

it’s the flamboyant, fantastic, and fucking ecological nightmare, the 

NAAAAAANTS INGONYAAAAMAA

Lionfish are a group of 12 species in the genus Pterois (tare-oh-eese), meaning “winged”. these fish are among the most striking and beautiful in the ocean! they’re also full of poison knives, but more on that later.

also called Dragonfish, Firefish, Turkeyfish, Tastyfish or PEZ DIABLO (Devilfish, or “underwater satan” if you use Google Translate), Lionfish are native to the Southern Pacific and Indian oceans. they are mostly found on coral reefs, where they can grow up to 17 inches long and reach about 3 pounds. 

3 pounds of pure whoopass.

small but mighty! SMALL BUT MIGHTY!

see, when it comes to sheer badass ability to survive anywhere, Lionfish are damn near perfect. most reef fish are specialized creatures with a fairly low set of tolerances. not Lionfish! for starters, they’re common in every level of the water column up to 1000 feet down. that’s impressive for a regular fish, let alone a reef specialist. they can also tolerate temperatures as low as 60 F, which again, fucking ridiculous. this fish could probably survive on the moon.

on top of that, their reproductive rate is insane. unlike many reef fish who follow a yearly cycle, Lionfish reproduce monthly. and every month a female Lionfish may lay- wait for it- 15,000 eggs. add in the fact that they have maybe three natural predators and it’s a wonder we aren’t knee deep in them right now.

good news! the Lionfish will submerge us before the oceans do!

Lionfish may look like delicate lacy parasols, but that bold coloration is actually Nature’s equivalent of wearing a bright orange hazard vest! but if we’re doing a direct comparison, in the Lionfish’s case it’s more like the equivalent of wearing a bright orange hazard vest while standing on the roof of a burned-out van, waving a submachine gun at traffic.

see, those lacy fins are are concealing dozens and dozens of long, razor-sharp spines venomous enough to incapacitate a human. any predator unwary enough to get a mouthful of the Lionfish’s poison shiv collection will experience immediate debilitating pain, paralysis, and almost certain death. (this venom isn’t strong enough to kill a healthy adult, but it really fucking sucks and can floor you for at least a day. do not touch.)

it’s time to play our favorite biology game, How Many Poison Knives Is This Animal Packing? if you guess wrong, you die.

Lionfish are voracious eating machines, in addition to being basically a floating wedding dress full of poison ice picks. they feed on fish, invertebrates, mollusks, and smaller Lionfish. these flamboyant cannibals feed by disorienting their prey with a jet of water, and then swallowing it headfirst like a Hardees breakfast sandwich.

and they’ll cram as many fish/shrimp/members of their own species into that ravenous maw as possible- a Lionfish’s stomach can expand to 30 times its original size on a binge! and in lean times, the Lionfish can slow its metabolism to a literal crawl. they can survive a three-month fast and lose only 10% of their body weight. jesus. 

can anything stop these frilly nightmares?

SPOILER ALERT: no.

the question is unfortunately relevant. in 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida and demolished a public aquarium. Florida had bigger things to worry about, so nobody noticed that six Lionfish had been tragically swept out to sea. in the complete absence of natural predators, those six Free-Willied Lionfish (plus many others released from the pet trade) have become MILLIONS. 

Lionfish have launched a hostile invasion of Carribean waters, and are now found from the Gulf Coast to North Carolina. this is a big fucking problem.

and that’s no joke.

apart from how dangerous they are, the Lionfish’s natural fish superiority allows it to easily outcompete meek and innocent native fish. this is putting stress on invaded reef ecosystems, and the problem is only getting worse as Lionfish continue to spread further north. Lionfish are even learning to tolerate mildly brackish water and have been found in estuaries four miles from the fucking ocean.

at this rate, we’re all going to wake up and find a Lionfish in our beds.

it’s their bed now. accept your inferiority before Earth’s true dominant species.

the fate of these oceans rests on the questionable shoulders of the Lionfish’s only (un)natural predator:

you.

the only current way to slow their spread is to just eat the absolute hell out of them. that’s right, Lionfish are edible. and not just that, they’re completely fucking delicious and heart-healthy! they’re called Tastyfish for a reason. and for all their prowess, Lionfish have yet to evolve a defense for projectile weapons. (that’s what happens when you put all your skill points into Melee, Lionfish.)

and remember: eating a Lionfish is taking part in the front lines of a battle for the future of your oceans. also, they’re just delicious.

so do your part, and eat up! 

WORLD IS A FUCK, 410,757,864,530 DEAD LIONFISH

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thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series here.

if you enjoy my work, maybe buy me a coffee to support Weird Biology.

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IMAGE SOURCES

img1- Pensecola News Journal img2- Oceanea.org img3- Wikipedia img4- Don Johnson img5- Hakai Magazine img6- Florida Keys Treasures img7- CNN img8- dmagazine.com

Frisbee eating an algae tab then remembering she’s a carnivore

These images are floating around and it’s said that these are “skeleton panda sea squirts.” Elsewhere I’ve searched calls them “Gaikotsu Panda Hoya.” Perhaps different names for the same thing. I’m not 100% sure, though.

I’m posting the original vid, and y’all should definitely listen to it with sound on because Sir David Attenborough’s narration is stellar as always (and also you don’t wanna miss the squeaks at the end), but I watched this the first time with the sound off cos I was at work at the time, and had “Hall of the Mountain King” playing in my head the whole time XD

I can feel…the serotonin and dopamine dropping…i need to make…Crafts

i must make…

b e a d l i z a r d

w. wait. hold on a second. are. sharks whales????????

Nope! Sharks and whales are VEEERY different. They haven’t shared an ancestor since... well.... since the devonian, I suppose. That was over 450 million years ago!

See, it’s...

Oh, bother. Alright, fine, I’ll do an infographic. It’ll be easier to explain, because there’s a lot of stuff to digest.

Let’s go back in time to.... THE CAMBRIAN!!

Disclaimer: I made this in like an hour while slapping together what I knew about these two animals and decorating it with cute images. It isn’t totally accurate, and I’m simplifying a lot for ease of reading. Please don’t eat me, I’m not a bio major!

Transcript below the cut!

[Transcript start: The image is a simple-looking infographic with a green background and chalk-like white lined drawings of various fish.

The Cambrian Explosion, which took place about 541 million years ago, featured a whole bunch of neat stuff crawling around. This included things like: 

Opabinia - a shrimp-like organism with lots of side-fins and a tuby-like appendage which it used to scoop things into its mouth

Trilobites - the ancestor of arthropods, which we consider ‘bugs’ these days.

Dickinsonia - an organism which looks a lot like a leaf, with a middle section and ray-like parts coming out of it and forming most of its body. 

Andsome of the first fishes - the jawless fish, who were our earliest ancestors. The jawless fish resemble lamprey eels - things which don’t have a moving jaw bone.

During the Devonian period (approximately 490 million years ago), the fish line evolved jaws, which was great for them, because they could now smile winningly. (And eat stuff better.) This was the last common ancestor shared between sharks and whales.

The jawed fish evolved into two groups - one was the cartilaginous fish (or fish which have no bones, only cartilage, except for their teeth) - and the other was bony fish, which had a skeleton. These body fish were technically whale ancestors - because the group eventually evolved the species which first came up on land. These were creatures similar to lungfish, who were able to process oxygen out of water and could move themselves through mud using their flippers.

Meanwhile, the shark ancestors continued their lineage in the oceans and evolved into many more funky shapes, including rays (like stingrays) and skates.

As for the fish on land - they were the ancestors to what we know today as the tetrapods - the things which eventually became the amphibians, lizards, dinosaurs... and mammals! 

One of these mammals was the whale ancestor, which looked quite similar to what we think of as a regular land animal - it had four limbs, and a body plan not dissimilar to dogs, cats, etc. Although it could walk on land, it decided to make an evolutionary U-turn and go back into the water again.

They evolved to be optimized for swimming, and eventually lost their hind limbs. They still needed to breathe air, though, and they are still considered mammals, because they birth and nurse their young! 

This begs the question: If sharks and whales aren’t related to each other that much, why do they look so similar?

That’s a great question! That’s because of something we call Convergent Evolution.

It turns out some shapes just work really well when you’re trying to swim in water. Having fins, flippers, and being fish-shaped just gives you advantage, so many water dwelling creatures end up evolving similar bodyplans - like whales and sharks did.

There’s still a reliable way to tell the two apart, though. Check their tails! See if you can tell the difference.]

Convergent evolution is wild, bc like, crabs keep evolving to look the same but aren’t closely related, nature is just like: BIG MEATY CLAWS, little legs, pincers, head, tiny eyes, let’s do it again!

and trees look the same but oak trees are more closely related to rose bushes than they are pine trees, fucked up

nature just likes these damns shapes:

but on the other hand, mammals flying with powered flight?? That shit only happened ONCE and it had to do some janky shit to get there, especially with bat immune systems

like bat’s immune systems are HYPER-POWERED as well as repress most of their inflammatory reactions because in order to fly they needed a bonkers-high metabolic rate which unfortunately also create waste products from the process called “free radicals” that damage cells

however, despite these free radicals they manage to live up to FORTY YEARS, which is super long for a species their size, because their immune system are basically always ON and in an anti-viral state that make them incubators for disease due to warfare between their jacked immune systems and disease 

bats are so gdamn weird, I love them, no other mammal has been able to copy off their homework and accomplish the same shape, and for that they are the anti-crab of the natural world, God bless

Sea Lion relaxing on sea grass 

(via)

every time I start thinking about lepidodendrons I always end up thinking about what it would be like to Jurassic Park one back to life and settle the 10099880 questions about how they existed once and for all