Friday, August 25, 2006

Friday Fish: Catostomus catostomus

The longnose sucker. These are somewhat popular with anglers in North America, and have a very broad geographic range, extending from the Arctic coastline south as far as the Delaware river drainage. The entire family Catostomidae are semi-ancient tetraploids; they all share a common ancestor that was tetraploid around 100 million years ago. Now, they're probably functionally diploid, but retain twice the number of chromosomes as most other fish.

No comments: