A deep trawl has brought up a potentially new species of a fish whose extreme mating methods include permanent physical fusion
sometimes describe anglerfish as looking like a satanic potato,” says James Maclaine, senior curator of fish at London’sMany anglerfish are globular and lumpy in shape. They have a long prong sprouting from their forehead with a glowing tip that lures prey into their enormous, tooth-filled jaws. If their appearance is curious, then the method of reproduction that some species have developed – known as sexual parasitism – is even more so.
A young female black seadevil anglerfish. Males of this species do not attach permanently to the female.Anglerfish reign supreme in the permanent darkness of the ocean’s midnight zone, between 1,000 and 4,000 metres down. There are at least 170 deep-sea anglerfish species. “No other vertebrate group comes close to anglerfish in terms of variety and number of forms at that depth,” says Maclaine.
The truth about the sex lives of anglerfish was discovered in 1925 by Charles Tate Regan, an ichthyologist at the Natural History Museum. When people saw smaller fish attached to larger anglerfish, they presumed they were juveniles stuck to their mothers. And when other specimens of these little fish were found on their own, they were thought to be a totally different family of anglerfish.
But in both cases they turned out to be diminutive males that belonged to families of anglerfish that had already been discovered. In some species of anglerfish, including a very rare footballfish , the small male tracks down a female and bites on to her. When she releases her eggs, he fertilises them then swims off into the dark to search for another mate.The ocean is one of the world’s last truly wild spaces. It teems with fascinating species that sometimes seems to border on the absurd, from fish that look up through transparent heads to golden snails with iron armour.
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