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Fish or Treat


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#1 Guest_FirstChAoS_*

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Posted 30 October 2014 - 02:37 AM

It's almost the fishiest holiday of the year. And while we have our annual Fishmas thread we have nothing for Halloween. Yep, the fish are already trick or treating and some greedy ones are trying to get as much food as possible.

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Why is it the fishiest holiday with maybe only veterans day (Sergean Majors, Warrior Darters, semotilus corporalis, etc. coming close? After all no one dresses up in fish costumes. (the thought did occur for me for the NANFA convention given how people in comic, sci-fi, and anime conventions dress up. But I found that to be an idea with way too much time and effort behind it for a joke.) Well, for one we have this among our fish.

HALLOWEEN ITSELF: The holiday itself is represented by the Halloween Darter, Percina Crypta. Found in the Apalachicola, Flint, and Chattahoochee river systems in Alabama and Georgia. Naturserve shows this species is imperiled or critically imperiled in its range. It feeds on insect larvae, making sure even the littlest bugs have something to get scared of. This darter lurks in swiftly flowing water over bedrock, boulders, or gravel.

PUMPKINS: A classic symbol of halloween is the Jack O'Lantern a pumpkin carved and lighted. This tradition dates back to Europe where turnips were carved to ward off evil spirits. Yet the north american fish fauna has a pumpkin of its own. Lepomis gibbosus the Pumpkinseed sunfish.And just as a pumkin is thought to ward off evil spirits a pumpkinseed wards off invaders from its nest, agressively chasing them away.
Pumpkinseeds eat a variety of food from insects and worms, to crustaceans, molluscs, and smaller fish. In waters with larger snails pumpkinseeds have larger mouths and stronger jaw muscles to handle them.
The coloration of a pumpkinseed serves to camoflage it in the sunlit shallows. And it's opercular tab serves as an eyespot which gives the fish an illusion of being larger than it is.
I have considered carving a pumpkinseed into a pumpkin before but I suck at carving anything more detailed than the typical crude jack o'lantern face,.

What is Halloween without Monsters? Just look at some of these monsters who lurk in our waters,

GHOSTS: What is halloween without ghosts. And the north american fish fauna indeed has a ghost haunting it. Notropis buchanani the Ghost shiner is a silvery or translucent (as ghosts should be) minnow from much of the Mississippi River drainage and some Gulf Coast rivers in Texas. This species haunts river shallows over detritus, clay, and silt and can be found in quiet pools, eddies, and backwaters. Turbidity and siltation do not bother it much, after all take it for a ghost to dwell in murky places.

How do you bust these ghosts if they become a problem? USGS suggests increasing CO2 levels to sedate them, then netting them out of the pond.


GOBLINS: You picture goblins and you picture small nasty creatures who dwell in dark places. Does a goblin dwell among North American fishes? Yes, and at 10 to 13 feet long it is not small. Mitsukurina owstoni the Goblin Shark is found in deep waters below 330 feet and has been found many places in the world including the Gulf of Mexico. Dwelling in the dark means this fish needs special senses to percieve the world. The Goblin Shark has a enlongated snout covered with ampulae of Lorenzini which detect electrical fields allowing it to sense hidden prey. This fish hunts other fish, crustaceans, and cephalopods on both the sea floor and in the water column. It's body shape suggests it is slow and sluggish in movement. The Goblin Shark has a highly protrusible jaws that can almost reach the tip of its snout.


MUMMIES: A mummy among our fishes sounds like a contradiction. Mummies unearthed in tombs in Egypt tend to be dessicated and dried out for preservation. The only dried out fish tend to be found dead behind aquariums. However a fish sometimes called the Mummie is found in North American waters, though it is never wrapped up in a sacrophagus. The Mummie is one of the nick names of the Mummichog, Fundulus heteroclitus.

And just like the walking dead, these Mummies are hard to kill. They can dwell in very polluted or oxygen deprived streams that would kill other fish.And unlike Egyptian mummies which as dessicated before being buried. The Mummichog buries itself to avoid dessication. They are often trapped in small pools when the tide goes out and if the pool dried dogging down into the mud is how they wait it out until the tide comes in. They have also been unearthed in the mud below deep pools in the winter.

Unlike the mummy off Halloween fame which is usually alone. (seems the Pharohs mummified pets and servants raely rise with him) the mummichog travels in large numbers. In fact its name means just that.

The Mummichog has a diverse diet including diatoms, eel grass, foaminifera, shrimp, various small custaceans and molluscs, and sometimes other fish. They will scavenge dead fish and other carrion, and during spawning time have been found to eat their own eggs and sometimes other mummichog.

And don't think you can avoid this fishy Mummy by leaving the earth, the mummichog is the first fish to be brought into space.


WITCHES: A wicked witch riding a broom stick with a black cat is a common Halloween image. Stories of them turning men into toads and trying to lure kids into their ovens are common. However the real horror is what happened to those labeled witches. Whether healers, people of other religions, wise women, or convenient scapegoats people were burned, hanged, or crushed due to accusations of witchcraft. But is their a witch lurking among american fish? Yes, the Witch Flounder Glyptocephalus cynoglossusis a deepwater flatfish found from the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to North Carolina.

This deep water fish is rarely caught below 10 to 15 fathoms with the best catches from 60 to 150 fathoms. The witch lurks on fine muddy sand, clay, or mud substrate in North America but have been found on rock reefs in Scandanavia. The coloration of the Witch Flounder seems less variable than that of other flatfish.

The witch flounder eats small crustaceans and molluscs as well as worms and starfish. Is this witch persecuted? Well, it is a commercially fished species caught in otter trawls and often sold as Torbay Sole.


HAGS: What happens when you take the concept of a wicked witch and remove the humanity from it? They you get hags like the Mara or Maera who sits on peoples stomaches and gives them nightmares, or the Peg Powler who dragged children into rivers. Does North America have a hag lurking in its waters? In deep waters the world over lurk hagfish family Myxinidae. These primitive fish lack jaws and are the only creatures with a skull but no vertebral column. Hagfish eat a wide variety of food from polychate worms, hermit crabs, shrimps, brittlestars, cephalopods, fish, and even the flesh of birds, sharks, and whales. They are imfamous for their gruesome manner of eating dead and dying creatures by knotting themselves to pull out chunks of flesh, entering their body, and eating them from the inside out. The digestive tract of hagfish is unique among chordates as it encloses food in a permeable membrane similar to that in insects.

The hagfish has a more gruesome act, when threatened by predators it secretes up to five and a quarter gallons of slime. This slime clogs fishes gills allowing the hagfish to knot itself to escape their jaws and its own slime.

Have humans found any use for the hagfish? Surprisingly yes. Their skin is used to make eelskin belts and wallets and the slime of the inshore hagfish is used similar to eggwhites in the Korean peninsula.


(information found from wikipedia, USGS, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, and a few other web pages I forgot to cite).


Of course we have other monsters. Blood sucking vampires (lampreys), prehistoric lake monsters from the mesozoic era (sturgeons), frenzied slashers (blue fish), and creepy creaturess who pluck out eyes (cutlips minnows) and chunks of flesh (cookie cutter shark).


I finish thus up with one last holiday treat, fish in natural Halloween costumes.
http://thefisheriesb...oween-costumes/

#2 mattknepley

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Posted 30 October 2014 - 05:31 AM

Great stuff, Josh! Lot's of fun and information on a theme. You oughta save some future holiday writeup for AC...
Matt Knepley
"No thanks, a third of a gopher would merely arouse my appetite..."

#3 Michael Wolfe

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Posted 30 October 2014 - 06:48 AM

When you were talking about witches I thought for sure you would mention black cats... Ameiurus melas.

And as far as costumes. We did dress our daughter up as a fish when she was little. And of course there are those crazy fish hats that Mike is always bringing to the auction.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. - Benjamin Franklin

#4 Guest_jblaylock_*

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Posted 30 October 2014 - 03:13 PM

I've always been terified of ID'ing Ghost Shiners....

#5 Guest_Skipjack_*

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Posted 30 October 2014 - 05:23 PM

I like it.

#6 Guest_Casper_*

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Posted 30 October 2014 - 06:51 PM

That was fun Josh. I know you spent a good bit of time on it. The menominee made fish costumes to call the Sturgeon.

#7 Guest_FirstChAoS_*

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Posted 31 October 2014 - 12:10 AM

When you were talking about witches I thought for sure you would mention black cats... Ameiurus melas.


That species both crossed my mind then slipped my mind. My original idea was much bigger, with in depth details on the fish mentioned in passing at the end. I had sort of been working on this since last week, but only sort of as I could only force myself to do work on it for four days due to low motivation, and the last of it was a last minute rush due to the holiday almost being here.

#8 Guest_fritz_*

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Posted 31 October 2014 - 03:40 PM

Very entertaining Josh.

You can add:

devil ray Mobula hypostoma




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