The Book of Animal Ignorance Read Free

they called them alcatraz , their name for any large seabird. The word originally came from the Arabic al- gatt ā s , the leather bucket on a waterwheel which resembled a pelican’s bill. So, in Portuguese, the Birdman of Alcatraz literally means the ‘Birdman of the Large Seabird’.

Anglerfish
    Worse things happen at sea
    S urely a life doesn’t get any bleaker than that of the deep-sea anglerfish? Two miles down in the endless darkness, a gloomy motionless lump of brittle bone, atrophied muscle and paper-thin black skin with only luminous bacteria for company. A life spent doing nothing except waiting, often for months at a time, turning your light on and off in the hope that it will attract some other creature out of the inky gloom long enough for them to stray too close to your cavernous mouth …
    The male Photo-corynus spiniceps is the smallest known vertebrate, a quarter of an inch long, about half a million times smaller than the female .
    The name ‘anglerfish’ is used for about 300 species – including sea toads, frogfish, batfish and monkfish – which attract their prey with a long, flexible appendage like a fishing rod, typically growing out of the middle of their heads. At the end of it, in place of a dangling maggot, there is the esca (Latin for food), which can be wiggled to mimic live bait. In the deep-sea anglers, the esca lights up, thanks to a chemical process controlled by the bacteria that live on it. In return for light, the anglerfish supplies them with food. Different anglerfish have differently shaped escas. It was once thought this was to attract different prey, but it’s now believed that they all have a similar diet. Perhaps having a big, bendy, glowing rod sticking out of your head is a form of sexual display.
    The deep-sea anglers are some of the most ugly and outlandish creatures on the planet. They have an elastic stomach that can swallow prey twice as large as themselves (it even has a light-proof lining in case they swallow luminous fish). To prevent their prey escaping they have backwards-facing teeth in their mouths and another set of teeth in their throats. The female Illuminated netdevil ( Linophryne arborifer ) looks like afluorescent root vegetable, with a black bulbous body and two shimmering lures streaming off like psychedelic foliage. Her Latin name means ‘tree-shaped toad that fishes with a net.’ The Hairy seadevil’s ( Caulophryne polynema ) huge spiny fins have a decayed look, its body is covered in unpleasant pale hairs and its lure looks like a frayed stick of liquorice. It has one of the most sensitive lateral lines of any fish – the tiniest movement triggers the opening and closing of its jaws. Elsman’s whipnose ( Gigantactis elsmani ) swims along upside down, trailing its lure along the seabed. The Wolftrap seadevil ( Lasiognathus saccostoma , or ‘hairy-jawed sack-mouth’) has a lure with three shining hooks on the end that it casts forwards like a fly-fisherman. Prince Axel’s wonderfish ( Thaumatichthys axeli ) has its lures hanging down from the roof of its mouth like a pair of fluorescent tonsils.
    The male deep-sea anglerfish is much smaller than the female and doesn’t have a lure. He’s interested in mating, not fishing. He uses his giant eyes to look for a suitable female, and his enormous nostrils to sniff out her pheromones. Having found her, he latches on to her with his teeth and then starts to disappear. Scales, bones, blood vessels all merge into those of the female. After a few weeks all that’s left of the male are the testes hanging off the female’s side, supplying her with sperm. Females have been found with eight testes attached to their sides.
    LOVE IN THE DARK
    In some species, if the male fails to find a female, then he will eventually turn into one himself and grow massively in size. As the anglerfish themselves are wont to remark: there’s only one