"All these things I should keep to myself
But I feel somehow strangely compelled...."

- Neil Finn, Sinner

Just for fun...( two other pics from the Monterey Bay Aquarium... )

Grainy Jelly
Aquarium of the Pacific
Kyocera Switchback phone camera
01 February 2009

Nifty! Forwarded by a co-worker.

The brownsnout spookfish has been known for 120 years, but no live specimen had ever been captured.

Last year, one was caught off Tonga, by scientists from Tuebingen University, Germany.

Tests confirmed *the fish is the first vertebrate known to have developed mirrors to focus light into its eyes,* the team reports in Current Biology. "In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes - how to make an image - using a mirror," said Professor Julian Partridge, of Bristol University, who conducted the tests.

See here for more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7815540.stm

Very cool - this is one of those fish that I've only been aware of as a line drawing in a Peterson's Field Guide and wondering what they were actually like. And to have seen one actually alive must have been something.

Squeeee!

Lampwork Nudibranchs.

I think they're even pendants...

While she was sampling fish yesterday, DP noticed a few of these tiny tuna-like fish among the sardines. She brought a few of them back to identify because the fishermen were calling them wahoo, and she didn't think that was quite right. She thought they might have been bonito. We asked several people around the office, and they thought so too. They seemed to be shaped right, and the teeth were right, and the number of finlets, but what was throwing everyone off is that bonito are supposed to have oblique stripes along their backs. These did not have any, but they did have vertical bars all along their bodies. CK downstairs, an avid sportfisherman, went and got a copy of Western Outdoor Lies News that had very nice picture of a wahoo on the front cover (he had kept it because he got his picture in it with a bluefin he'd caught)- and VT and I decided these little guys were definitely not wahoo - the stripes were not quite the same, and they definitely did not have the sharply beaky face of a wahoo...
( the fishie in question... )