There are fish in the south
Welcome to pay attention to the public number [Lao Sa has found] (sashuchang2016)
On February 7, 2017, the staff of the Australian Shedd Aquarium sadly bid farewell to an old friend named Grande, who means "grandpa" in English, and the four-foot-long Australian lungfish definitely deserves this title.
It settled in the aquarium in 1933, when Roosevelt was seeking re-election as president, and the grandfather of many of the aquarium's staff today was not yet born. Granddede began to be in poor health at the beginning of the year, and due to organ failure, the "grandfather" limit finally arrived.
But it still waited until after Trump was sworn in, which gave it the era of an additional U.S. president name — roosevelt was followed by a dozen U.S. presidents, most of whom had hung on the wall and walked into history, but Grandemont had lived peacefully in the aquarium.
▲ Granddede's photograph at the Shedd Aquarium in the 1930s, when it was a fully fledged lungfish
For this reason, no one can say exactly what age Granddede was, only that it should be over ninety years old.
Mitchell, the head of the "Grandfather", summed up the longevity secret of this old fish as "good care, good weight loss and an unchanging environment". He said Grande was not a romantic fish, that most of the time it had holes under the planks and a thick layer of mucus on its body, and that its most exciting time was every Wednesday, when Mitchell would feed it delicious earthworms.
If you ignore the factor of living in a closed aquarium environment, Grande is not a high lifespan, its brothers and sisters in the wild live to more than a hundred years old is not a new thing, more impressive is that they were like this 150 million years ago, there has been no change so far, lungfish are not advanced, but there is no evolutionary consciousness.
Granddede's family has a lot of magic, and it is a pity that they do not live in China. There are many legendary big fish in China's ancient legends, such as the big carp described by Zhuangzi (suspected to be a gray whale active near the Arctic Ocean), the mandarin woman in Journey to the West (the mandarin fish of "peach blossom flowing water mandarin fish fat"? Etc., all are spiritual animals. If the lungfish lived in China, it had almost all the characteristics of being a godfish.
Is it so magical?
Look at this animal.
First of all, it is monogamous... Yes, monogamous fish is indeed a bit rare, lungfish is one of them, Grande is called "Grandpa" is actually a mistake, it is female, her husband died in the eighties, since then although there have been many new lungfish in the museum, But Grande has never remarried.
Secondly, it has lungs... Well, it's a strange thing that fish have lungs, and lungfish do get their name from it. Grande's Australian lungfish have a lung, while its relatives, the American lungfish and the African lungfish, are even more excessive, and actually have left and right lungs like humans (even blood circulation is divided into two systems of systemic circulation and pulmonary circulation like humans). This is not progress, in fact, ancient fish are long lungs, and later because the gills become more and more powerful, the lungs gradually degenerate and become swim bladders.
Again, the lungs of the lungfish are not ornaments, it can live away from the water, and even sleep for a long time by reducing the metabolism to 1/60. There is a television report in Africa that a lungfish was bricked in mud bricks for four years, but it miraculously survived and eventually escaped.
I remember that there is such a passage in Zhuangzi that "The Fish of the Rut"——
"The Zhuang Zhou family was poor, so they went to lend money to the Marquis of Jianhe. Jianhe Hou Yue: 'No! I will get the gold, and I will lend three hundred gold, can I? Zhuang Zhou was indignant, saying: "Zhou Zhou came yesterday, there are those who call in the middle way, Zhou Gu looks, and there are carp in the ruts." Zhou asked: When the carp comes, what is the son? Right: I, Hagaku no Bochenya. Do you have the water of ascension and live me? Zhou Yue: No, I am the king of Wuyue in the south, and the water of the Xixi River and the son, can I? The fish said indignantly: I am lost, I am nowhere. I have to live with the water of the ascension. Jun Nai said this, it was better to ask me for the fish as soon as possible! ’”
▲ Carp, that is, crucian carp, if Zhuang Zhou encountered a lung fish, there must be not so much nonsense, let Mr. Zhuang Zhou hurry to find someone, anyway, three or five years will not die of thirst
Lungfish seem to be the least developed brain, and the skull is said to be very primitive. This seems to confirm the truth that Mr. Shan Tianfang told me that simple-thinking guys are easy to live long.
You say, isn't it worth thinking about so many people who are busy with health?
Well, people will say, Lao Sa has been thinking about Chinese monsters recently, how can he be so interested in Australian lungfish? Is it possible to say that a certain Southeast Asian continent has also been the sacred territory of whom since ancient times?
Not really, but it was mainly The Grande's family that gave me a new conjecture about an ancient sacred fish in our country.
The most famous of the lungfish's relatives is not Grande, but the Latima fish that lives in the Comoros, which shocked the world when it was first discovered.
▲ The Latimai fish is said to be named after a female librarian at a local museum, but looking at its form, people are very suspicious of Ms. Latimai's appearance
Discovered in 1938, the Ratima has a large lung-like balloon (with the same spiral valve structure as a lungfish) and the fact that its fleshy even fins with supporting bones can rotate in all directions, meaning that the fish crawls on the ocean floor like a salamander or a frog – in fact, its morphology is almost unchanged from that of the ancient total finfish.
Scientists believe that it is this total fin fish with certain land breathing ability and fins that resemble limbs climbed onto land during the Late Devonian period, giving birth to later amphibians, and then evolving into reptiles and mammals.
All the fossil evidence suggests that the fish was extinct 60 million years ago, but it suddenly appeared alive in 1938, letting people know that they are still tenaciously living on the earth like the lungfish born 350 million years ago.
It can be seen that in the depths of the ocean, there are probably some animals that we think have long been extinct still living.
This led me to subversively speculate about the archetype of the "Aoyu" in ancient Chinese legends.
▲ The ancient Chinese legendary god fish, the Aoyu, is said to be a dragon-headed fishtail monster formed after the carp jumped the dragon gate
It's certainly not a carp, it's just a legend that you take a carp on a plane and it's never going to turn into such a monster. And such a large-headed, jagged, angry-eyed, fierce-looking giant marine animal seems to be somewhat beyond today's understanding of fish. However, is it possible that the ancestors of the fish were also a ferocious fish that lived in ancient times?
Needless to say, there is really an ancient fish that has similarities with it, that is, the dinosaur fish belonging to the shield fish.
▲ Fossil skulls of fish
▲ How, is there a bit of a fish style?
The fish, which first appeared in the late Silurian period, flourished in the Devonian Period, dominated the ancient ocean, with a huge head of bone (similar to a fish), with a body length of up to eight meters, and a huge mouth that can be opened up to one meter square, which is somewhat similar to the fish.
However, according to science, the fish was extinct long ago before the Mesozoic Era, so how can it be that the ancient Chinese saw and listed as a god fish?
Seeing the examples of the Ratima and the lungfish, can't we open up some of our imaginations, why can't the fish have a descendant like the lungfish, which has survived in the deep sea and has lived until today? In that case, they are accidentally haunted, seen by the ancient Chinese and added mysterious colors, so it should not be a big fuss, right? The fish belongs to animals that like to warm the sea, and perhaps its descendants live in the South China Sea today.
However, if this is the case, then the friends who go to Sanya for the winter after that do not dare to swim casually, and when they encounter such a monster, it is Wu Song, I am afraid that there is no drama.
【End】