Friday, November 10, 2006

Friday Fish: Belonoperca chabanaudi

Another fine picture in the series from Lucy Harrison's fieldwork this summer. This is the arrowhead soapfish, although I have no idea why anyone would name a fish "soap"; this summary of research describes the taxonomic Tribe Diploprionini as producing powerful neurotoxins in epidermal cells. Yes, lethal doses of paralysing contact poison always make me think of gettin' clean.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

These are always some sweet fish pictures! I don't think I can start doing a 'Friday Fly' post or anything (actually one annoying thing about Drosophila is that many of the species are near morphologically identical)... other than that, I've never been interested in animals. Well, keep up the good work!

TheBrummell said...

Thanks! Photo quality credit goes to Lucy, of course. I just cropped the pics to fit better and put in the copyright notice - she was the one actually holding a camera underwater. There are usually no comments for my Friday Fishes, so it's nice to see that somebody is actually reading them (or at least looking at the pictures).

I just did a quickie search for Blogger blogs using the words "Friday Fly". Lots of pages talking about "Friday: fly to..." and a couple about fly fishing, but nothing analagous to this or Pharyngula's "Friday Cephalopod". Adding the word "Drosophila" to the above search string resulted in zero hits.

So, while Drosophila sp. pics might be mildly boring, you'd be original (as far as I can tell) and with ~500 species to choose from, you could keep the feature going for a long, long time.

The Hawaiian Drosophila are actually really beautiful - they have painted wings.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, Hawaiian Drosophila are kinda, sorta cool. But aside from a few speciation-obsessed nuts, no one cares about them. It's much more fun to collect old melanogaster from brewery vats in Europe... if only because you collect them in a brewery. Don't ask my why it's more fun than going to Hawaii, it just is...