you see that little blue fin at the left? That's a "creepy buddy", so named by Asha. They are those fish that don't really hunt or scavenge, they just eat off old bits of other fish. When we first came across this one, he was going to town on Kissy The Old Man Fish's gills. As you can see, he's not being shy about it - he's half in poor Kissy's head. Asha thought this was pretty gross, but her real fear was that the creepy buddy would curl up all of the way inside Kissy's gill........
Which is exactly what happened. But Asha was wrong, it got worse. The second that creepy buddy disappeared into the side of Kissy's head, another creepy buddy (we hope) shot out of Kissy's mouth.
On a completly different subject, Erik discovered that Creepy buddies are sequntial hermaphrodites. They are all born female, and the toughest female in the group becomes male. Whenever the groups male dies, another female makes the change to take it's place. It sounds like it could be a great science fiction story (minus the diet of dead fish skin)
1 comment:
cooperation in nature is super cool!! Have you heard about parasistic males? Bone eating worms and angler fish have them. All of the worms and fish are females, while the male is simply a swimming packet of sperm. He has to either live inside of or on the outside of the female to get his food to survive. This way whenever the female wants to lay eggs it's rather convenient! If you watch finding nemo you can see the little parasistic male hanging on the side of the angler fish... sooo cool!
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