In the stories related to deep-sea adventures, in addition to sharks, octopuses, which are extremely familiar to marine creatures, there will be a lantern fish with a lantern on its head, or wise or murderous, such as the deep-sea monster that Nemo encountered in "Finding Nemo" is based on the lanternfish.
Stills from Finding Nemo
This lanternfish is actually called "ān kāng" fish, which is widely distributed in tropical and subtropical deep-sea areas such as the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and is a worldwide fish.
Of course, the animation has an exaggerated component, and the ferocity of the lanternfish does not end here, but what is heartbreaking is that its ugliness is very real.
There are more than two hundred species of sturgeon in the world, most of which live in the dark depths of the Atlantic and Antarctic oceans, and some also live in shallow tropical environments. They vary in appearance and body color, but for us, ugliness is probably their most intuitive common feature.
Some species of sturgeon
It is usually dark grey to dark brown, with a large head and crescent-shaped mouth, and sharp, translucent teeth. Some sturgeon can be very large, reaching up to 3.3 feet long (about 1 meter). Most, however, are much smaller, usually less than 1 foot (about 0.3 meters).
Their fat surface has no scales and is covered with rough leather. At first glance, it looks like a toad, so it also has nicknames such as "toad fish" and "stuttering fish" ("stuttering" means "toad" in some places).
Sturgeon
This ugly and frightening appearance makes them more suitable for horror films than children's films, and they are also one of the strong contenders for the title of "the ugliest animal on earth".
Most of the sturgeon live in seas of 200-4000 meters all year round, with the most bizarre-looking ones usually living in the lonely and dark deep sea. This also makes them a typical representative of "there is no light in the deep sea, everyone will grow and play", and their appearance is extremely indulgent.
Deep-sea sturgeon
This kind of appearance can be said to be the existence of "solitary life" in the human world, but the catfish shows what is called "capital" can really make the spouse willing to "eat soft rice" to the extreme, and it is the soft rice of the male fish eating the female fish.
Human research on sturgeon began in the 19th century when scientists attempted to describe and classify sturgeon. Curiously, they found that the samples under the suborder Horned Trout were all females, and did not see any traces of male horned trouts, let alone what the males looked like.
Sometimes researchers find fish that are structurally similar to those of the horned trout, but these fish are much smaller, only 6 or 7 mm long, and with other differences, they are eventually classified into another population.
It wasn't until 1922 that the Icelandic biologist Bjarni Saemundsson discovered a female horned trout. Curiously, two fish much smaller than it are attached to the female's abdomen through the snout.
At first he thought that the little fish might be the children of the female, but if conjecture was true, this peculiar parenting puzzled him: at what stage of life did these young fish combine with the mother? Unfortunately, Themondsson did not delve deeper.
By 1924, Charles Tate Regan, who was working at the British Museum of Natural History at the time, also discovered a female sturgeon with small fish attached to it. So Reagan dissected it, and he was surprised to find that these small fish did not belong to other species, but they were not the children of the female fish, it was its companion!
The arrow refers to the male
Only then did scientists realize that the "missing" male fish of the horned squid had actually been ignored by them.
These males are much smaller than the females, who are generally 20-100 cm long, while the males are often only a few centimeters or even a few millimeters. Ted pietsch, director of the Fish Museum at the University of Washington's Burke Museum and an expert on anglerfish, said that for ceratias holboelli, females can be more than 60 times longer and weigh more than 500,000 times more than males.
Extremely small male fish
In the average horned sturgeon, the female can also reach 40 times the size of the male. The huge difference in body size makes it possible for the male to "eat soft rice" behavior, and the male does not live up to the benefits of the difference in body size, which maximizes the "eating soft rice" by degrading the predatory ability.
We know that most sturgeon have a stick-shaped luminous object on the top of their heads, like a fishing rod hanging from a bait, called "quasi-bait". This is a biofluorescence that evolved from the first spine of the dorsal fin and is emitted by symbiotic bacteria.
Different trout may have different luminous bacteria, but they can all lure prey in a dark, deep-sea environment. These squid fish wait like fishing for other prey such as small fish and shrimp to be hooked, and sometimes they also shake the bait to increase their authenticity.
In addition to their sharp teeth, they have huge mouths and flexible bodies, which give their mouths an amazing ability to open and close, and can swallow prey twice as large as they are.
However, these characteristic males do not have, they do not have a luminous bait, nor do they have large mouths and pointed teeth, because they do not need to prey, but by attaching to the female to obtain nutrients directly from the female, they themselves contribute sperm cells during the breeding season.
This relationship between the sexes is called "sexual parasitism", and this parasitism occurs between male and female individuals of the same species, and it is not only a nutritional connection, but also an adaptive trait conducive to the reproduction of the species.
To put it bluntly, it is eating soft rice in the name of love. Interestingly, some horned sturgeons have "obligate parasitic" characteristics, and such males only mature sexually after merging with their mates, and if the male does not find a female in the first few months of life, he will die.
So the male can be said to have spent a lifetime looking for the female. In some species, males' highly sensitive sense of smell can help them lock on to female pheromones; some males have an underdeveloped sense of smell, so they rely on their excellent vision to find the female's glowing bait.
It can be seen that males are not useless, and they also need to work hard in order to eat soft rice.
Once the female is found, it will lock the female's abdomen tightly with its teeth and then turn the whole body upside down. The physiological tissues of the two then fuse, and their circulatory systems are even connected, but it is still unknown how this happens.
Blend of male and female fish
After fusion, the male does not need to move or prey like other sturgeon, and its eyes, fins and some internal organs will atrophy until it truly becomes part of the female.
To be precise, it becomes a pair of testicles on the female fish. In this way, males can permanently rely on nutrients in the female's blood.
Interestingly, studies have shown that attached males can also grow larger, much larger than any free-swimming male horned trout. These males are still alive and are able to reproduce as long as their mates are alive. It can be seen that this soft rice is not eaten in vain.
Unlike other sexual parasites, female horned trout have a "total acceptance" attitude and do not choose their mates. In some sturgeon, the female may even be a host for many males, sometimes carrying up to 8 parasitic partners.
Female sturgeon attached to two small fish
In this way, the male fish's soft rice is also very bad. After all, she is willing to "sacrifice" herself for the female, but she cannot be the only one for the female. But if you only talk about material things and don't talk about feelings, it is nothing.
When the female is ready to breed, it and the male release sperm and eggs into the water, still fertilizing outside the body, even for females with multiple male partners. The simultaneous release of sperm and egg may be achieved through hormonal communication.
Not for those horned trout that may rarely touch each other in the deep sea, this weird mating style is a necessary adaptation to keep the mates up close and make sure enough small sturgeon is produced. What's more interesting is that some males, if they can't find a female, will change sex and then support themselves, which can be said to be quite inspirational.
There are also many horned sturgeon that are not fusion reproduction. As they breed, the male also clings to the female, releasing sperm as the female spawns, and the male swims away. In this case, the organization of the two does not converge.
Looking at the growth process of the sturgeon, I have to lament that the years are a "fish killing knife". In the case of the yellow sturgeon, for example, the cubs are translucent, the dorsal and pectoral fins are slender, and have yellow and black markings, which is not inferior to some ornamental fish.
However, the grown-up yellow trout does have some freewheeling, not as frightening as other squid, but more ugly and cute.
Grown up yellow sturgeon
From this point of view, they could have "eaten by appearance", but in the end they went farther and farther on the road of becoming ugly.
However, who would have thought that this sturgeon, which has the title of "ugliest", would one day conquer human beings. Of course, this is not based on its appearance, but on "strength", after all, the phenomenon of eating soft rice only exists in some male fish.
Although the sturgeon is ugly to the extreme, they are also the ultimate delicacy.
Underneath their humble appearance, their flesh is lobster-like, and their livers are known as "deep-sea foie gras". In the Kanto region of Japan, the meat of sturgeon and puffer fish are called "puffer fish in the west and trout in the east", and are known as the best food in the world.
Japanese-style hot pot with squid
Having tried so hard to look so ugly but still not escaping the mouth of mankind, the heart of the trout must have collapsed.
anglerfish. national geographic.
anglerfish. wikipedia.
joseph castro. animal sex: how anglerfish do it. live science. 2015.1.6.
matt soniak. the horrors of anglerfish mating. 2014.7.22.