rekordy: Anglerfish

Evidence: 97 • authority: 72

The anglerfish are ray-finned fish in the order Lophiiformes (). Both the order's common and scientific name come from the characteristic mode of predation, in which a modified dorsal fin ray acts as a lure for prey (akin to a human angler, and this lure is also likened to a crest or "lophos"). The modified fin ray, with the very tip being the esca and the length of the structure the illicium, is adapted to attract specific prey items depending on the species, through the employment of different luring methods. Anglerfish occur in marine waters worldwide, from tropical seas to polar regions, and live in both shallow water habitats and the deep sea. Many species are benthic or demersal, incl…

Evidence: 80 • authority: 92

Histocompatibility and Reproduction: Lessons from the Anglerfish.. Reproduction in certain deep-sea anglerfishes involves the permanent attachment of dwarf males to much larger females and fusion of their tissues leading to the establishment of a shared circulatory system. This unusual phenomenon of sexual parasitism enables anglerfishes to maximize reproductive success in the vast and deep oceans, where females and males otherwise rarely meet. An even more surprising phenomenon relates to the observation that joining of genetically disparate male and female anglerfishes does not evoke a strong anti-graft immune rejection response, which occurs in vertebrates following allogeneic parabiosis…

Evidence: 63 • authority: 92

Reproductive assurance drives the evolution of parasitic males in anglerfishes.. Animals have evolved diverse mating strategies to cope with limitations on mate encounter and secure reproductive success. One of the most extreme examples is found in deep-sea anglerfishes, in which dwarf males permanently fuse with large females. While extreme sexual size dimorphism is common across anglerfishes, obligate parasitic males occur only in some lineages, and sexual size dimorphism theory alone cannot explain this variation. The transition from free-living to parasitic males involves trade-offs, including reduced female fecundity and restricted male mating opportunities. We hypothesize that parasit…

Evidence: 74 • authority: 72

Ceratioidei, the pelagic anglerfishes or deep-sea anglerfishes, is a suborder of marine ray-finned fishes, one of five suborders in the order Lophiiformes, the anglerfishes. These fishes are found in tropical and temperate seas throughout the world, living above the bottom of the deep sea, in the pelagic zone. The esca, the anglerfishes' lure and a defining feature of all anglerfish groups, is bioluminescent in the deep-sea anglerfishes, attracting prey in the vast darkness of the bathypelagic zone which they inhabit. The deep-sea anglerfishes have extreme sexual dimorphism; the males are many times smaller than the females. To reproduce, a male seeks out a female, using his sharp teeth-lik…

Evidence: 51 • authority: 92

Synergistic innovations enabled the radiation of anglerfishes in the deep open ocean.. Major ecological transitions are thought to fuel diversification, but whether they are contingent on the evolution of certain traits called key innovations 1 is unclear. Key innovations are routinely invoked to explain how lineages rapidly exploit new ecological opportunities. 1 , 2 , 3 However, investigations of key innovations often focus on single traits rather than considering trait combinations that collectively produce effects of interest. 4 Here, we investigate the evolution of synergistic trait interactions in anglerfishes, which include one of the most species-rich vertebrate clades in the bathyp…

Evidence: 51 • authority: 72

Animal sexual behaviour takes many different forms, including within the same species. Common mating or reproductively motivated systems include monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, polygamy and promiscuity. Other sexual behaviour may be reproductively motivated (e.g. sex apparently due to duress or coercion and situational sexual behaviour) or non-reproductively motivated (e.g. homosexual sexual behaviour, bisexual sexual behaviour, cross-species sex, sexual arousal from objects or places, sex with dead animals, etc.). When animal sexual behaviour is reproductively motivated, it is often termed mating or copulation; for most non-human mammals, mating and copulation occur at oestrus (the most fer…

Evidence: 40 • authority: 80

Sexual Parasitism in the Deep-sea Ceratioid Anglerfish Centrophryne spinulosa Regan and Trewavas (Lophiiformes: Centrophrynidae)

Evidence: 35 • authority: 92

A survey of the adaptive immune genes of the polka-dot batfish Ogcocephalus cubifrons.. Background The anglerfish, belonging to the teleost order Lophiiformes, are a diverse and species-rich group of fish that are known to exhibit a number of unique morphological, reproductive and immunological adaptations. Work to date has identified the loss of specific adaptive immune components in two of the five Lophiiformes sub-orders (Lophioidei and Ceratioidei), while no anomalies have been identified to date in two other sub-orders, Antennaroidei and Chaunacoidei. The immunogenome of the fifth sub-order, Ogcocephaloidei has not yet been investigated, and we have therefore used whole genome shotgun…

Evidence: 35 • authority: 80

Precocious sexual parasitism in the deep sea ceratioid anglerfish, Cryptopsaras couesi Gill

Evidence: — • authority: 88

Parasites and sexual selection. Abstract In numerous species, such as the peacock and the red deer, males differ morphologically and behaviourally from females. They are often bigger, more brightly coloured, and have more complex songs. Charles Darwin was the first to address the paradox of sexual dimorphism: why do males acquire traits that render them more detectable and appear to reduce their survival? These observations seemed to contradict his theory of evolution by natural selection (Darwin 1859). To address this contradiction he invented the concept of sexual selection, defined as ‘the advantage which certain individuals have over other individuals of the same sex and species, in exc…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Linophryne arborifera, one of the species referred to as the bearded seadevil, or alternatively the illuminated netdevil, is a deep-sea anglerfish of the family Linophrynidae, found in the bathypelagic zone of tropical and subtropical oceans. Like all ceratioids, the female is significantly larger than parasitic male.