Distinctive hump on the top of their head. White flaky fillets offering a light to mild fish taste when cooked.ĭescription: Black and dark brown skin with black on white stripes. Tail tips have distinctive plumes that extend from both ends. One of the most sought after food fish in Florida.ĭescription: O live or gray body coloration with black blotches and brassy spots gently rounded preopercle fin.ĭescription: Light brown, with reddish brown spots on the sides. Table Fare: Outstanding! White flaky fillets offering a light to mild fish taste. The Gag Grouper is commonly confused with the black grouper darker skin tone and more pronounced patch patterns. Tail fin is wide and often refffered to as a broom tail. Very light fish tasteĭescription: Brownish gray in color with dark patch patterns on the sides. Average size 8-15 lbs, commonly caught over 20 lbs. Fillets are white and flaky when cooked offering a very light fish taste with a sweet flavorĭescription: Brownish red lining of mouth scarlet-orange blotches on sides in unorganized pattern. Red Snapper are fierce fighters and offer a great challenge to land. Lower portion of body off-white in color. Current Florida Record:10 lbs.ĭescription: Color reddish pink over entire body. Fillets are white and flaky when cooked offering a light to mild fish taste. Distinctive yellow stripe through center of body, with a “yellow tail” and white under belly. Maybe the threadfin dragonfish, with its winning smile and luminous purple photophore, will unlock the next big technological innovation.Description: Grey with yellow spots on back. This unique structure is of interest to scientists working to create a synthetic super black for products such as cameras, telescopes, and solar panels, especially as current production techniques are costly. "In bird feathers and in butterfly scales, you basically have microscale cavities that trap the light," Prum explains, but super black fish use their own internal optical mechanism for absorbing light via pigment granules. Richard Prum, an ornithologist at Yale University, was impressed by the "novel mechanism" that these deep-sea fish use to absorb light. Scientists believe the complex microstructures on the males' feathers evolved because a blacker black helps accentuate the bird’s brightly colored spots-with the ultimate goal, naturally, of impressing the ladies. This shot of a gray heron in Hungary won a silver award in the attention to detail category. "You basically have to suck up every ounce of that searchlight that hits you," he says. The deep-sea fish's only defense is to mimic endless water. "Except for every now and then, something will hit it, almost like a radar hit." ( See pictures of sea sapphires and shiny ocean creatures.) "Imagine a world where if you shine your flashlight, nothing comes back," Johnsen says. Many also scan their surroundings with photophores, bioluminescent organs that produce light. Animals such as anglerfish have evolved an arsenal of tools to search out prey, like whiskery spines that detect movement. Since food is scarce in the deep sea, everyone's on the menu. "What we found was really organized-tuned to make them as black as possible."īut why is this optical trickery even necessary in perpetual darkness? Deep-Sea Pinball "We were just expecting copious amounts of pigment," says Osborn, an invertebrate zoologist at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. In January, the team presented their research at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting. In new research, Johnsen and colleague Karen Osborn discovered how complex nanostructures in the fishes' skin trap incoming photons, absorbing almost all the light that touches them. ( Read about a fish that lives a record-breaking five miles deep.) Scientists are learning how these "super black fish," a catch-all term for dark deep-sea creatures, make their bodies effectively disappear. "When you look at them, especially in the water, it’s just like a hole in the universe," says Sönke Johnsen, a marine biologist at Duke University who studies the denizens of the deep. Viperfish and creatures like it have evolved ever blacker-we're talking blacker than black-so they can hide in plain sight. In the vast, featureless darkness of the oceans, fish take camouflage to a new art form.
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