Friday, August 12, 2011

Friday Fish: Pegasus volitans

Slender sea moth or sea robin (Pegasus volitans)

A seamoth, family Pegasidae, order Pegasiformes. This is a very small and very strange family; my Fishes of the World, 2nd Edition (Nelson, 1984) describes a single genus, with five species, and only this family in the order. It also describes the family as
"Body oddly shaped (broad and depressed), encased in bony plates; mouth small and toothless, beneath a long flattened rostrum (formed by fused nasals), with an unusual mechanism for protrusion of the jaws...
Image from WildSingapore's flickr page, here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Martin!

Struggling to get through to you concerning the Gasmet FTIR, sorry to use the fish as a contact point!

Regards,

Henry Meller
Buttonwood Marketing

Kitty Hannah said...

Oh. Seamoth? No idea such a creature existed. It looks as if it has been kept between the pages of a book for far too long...