astro
January 25, 2006, 9:48pm
1
Scientists Discover World’s Smallest Fish
BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) – Scientists have discovered the world’s smallest fish on record in an acidic peat swamp in Indonesia, with a see-through body and a head that is unprotected by a skeleton, researchers said Wednesday.
Mature females of the Paedocypris progenetica, a member of the carp family, only grow to 7.9 millimeters (0.31 inches) and the males have enlarged pelvic fins and exceptionally large muscles that may be used to grasp the females during copulation, researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, published Wednesday by the Royal Society in London.
"This is one of the strangest fish that I’ve seen in my whole career,’ said Ralf Britz, zoologist at the Natural History Museum in London, who helped analyze the fish’s skeleton. “It’s tiny, it lives in acid and it has these bizarre grasping fins. I hope we’ll have time to find out more about them before their habitat disappears completely.”
The previous record for small size, according to the Natural History Museum in London, was held by an 8-millimeter species of Indo-Pacific goby.
The new fish was discovered on Sumatra island by fish experts Maurice Kottelat from Switzerland and Tan Heok Hui from the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research in Singapore. They were working with colleagues from Indonesia and with Kai-Erik Witte from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
“You don’t wake up in the morning and think today we will find the smallest fish in the world,” Kottelat told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his home in Switzerland.
He said the record of finding the world’s smallest fish was not important, preferring to focus on what he said was “scientifically significant.”
“What’s important is finding a complete vertebrae in a body so small,” he said
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It’s actual size, but it seems much bigger to me.
Well, they said I was impossible.
Squink
January 25, 2006, 10:30pm
4
Scientists have discovered the world’s smallest fish on record in an acidic peat swamp in Indonesia, with a see-through body and a head that is unprotected by a skeleton, researchers said Wednesday.
Fools! Did they think we had **Forgotten ** about 2004’s World’s Smallest Fish?
Their new Fish is 9,000,000 Angstroms too long!
Ale
January 25, 2006, 10:35pm
5
Pfff!, that´s the average of my fishing catches, so there!
How…small…is it?
waits for someone to come up with witty punchline
Faruiza
January 25, 2006, 11:00pm
7
It’s so small, the Lollipop Guild and Lullaby League get together regularly just to beat it up.
Speak for yourself matey; those have been my exact waking thoughts every day of these last twenty years; I’m gonna have to find myself a new quest now. Bastard.
chrisk
January 26, 2006, 12:20am
9
Well, come on now. They don’t really know they’ve found the world’s smallest fish… they’ve just discovered one smaller than any yet known.
You still have a chance to discover an even tinier species and break their record!!
There’s always the “six impossible things before breakfast” quest. That’s worked for a lot of people.
chrisk:
Well, come on now. They don’t really know they’ve found the world’s smallest fish… they’ve just discovered one smaller than any yet known.
You still have a chance to discover an even tinier species and break their record!!
Oh, I don’t intend to search for any fish; I just want to wake up thinking “today we will discover the smallest fish in the world”. The anticipation is half the feast.
