World's Tiniest Vertebrate Found

foidulus writes "The BBC reports that American scientists have identified the world's tiniest fish living around Australia's Great Barrier Reef. It is also the tiniest animal with a backbone. The male of the stout infantfish is only about 7 mm(or less than 1/4 of an inch) long. It has a life span of only around 2 months which scientists say may be an advantage because it can evolve rapidly."

Comments

less than 1/4 of an inch ?

[Anonymous Coward]

25.4mm/4 = 6.35mm
I would say just over a 1/4 of an inch

dumb ass reporter!

Um, No ...

[SteveM]

Doesn't being the tiniest fish imply being the tiniest invertebrate?

Given that fish are vertebrates I'm gonna go with NO!

SteveM

Re:What's that in the picture?

[NaturePhotog]

It's a picture of the stout infant fish, alright. Check out the Australian Museum Online site for more information and pictures. I believe the picture shown is of a pregnant female, which as other posters have noted is larger than the male at a whopping 8.4mm.

Also, the length is likely the standard length, which is to say, it doesn't include the fleshy bit of the tail, but only up to the end of the spine.

One noteable difference from the dwarf goby fish is that stout infant fish apparently lack pigmentation except in the eyes. The dwarf goby is a nice shade of orange.

Re: Jumbo shrimp _not_ an oxymoron!

[DaoudaW]

I'm tired of clueless moderators....

You clearly didn't get it so I'll try to explain it to you. "Shrimp" has entered the English language as a word meaning something that is exceptionally small, "jumbo" of course indicates the opposite extreme, thereby causing jumbo shrimp to be an oxymoron.

The stout infantfish however is much smaller than a shrimp (the species). In fact, a quick estimate indicates that a typical shrimp weighs 100 - 200 times more than the stout infantfish, making it "Jumbo" in comparison.

I think thats a humorous connection to a well known oxymoron. You don't have to agree, but to mod it down as off-topic is simply an abuse of power.

P.S. In my original I put an html tag flash, as in newsflash, in front of the post, but slash stripped it out as invalid code.

Re:Living long evolutionary disadvantage

[BerntB]

*may* be an advantage? That's awfully certain. Not to mention that by this logic bacteria have a greater advantage over pretty much all other life, since they can "evolve" so rapidly.

The way I've seen evolutionary biologists write about this, is that built in length of life is optimized differently for different situations/evol. niches.

For instance, it's quite expensive in energy to build bodies that can age (good cell repair, etc) so if the average time before an animal is eaten by a predator is short, it's probably not a large evolutionary pressure to be able to get old. The energy is put into growing up fast and get to reproductive age early, instead.

Addendum: The point :-)

[BerntB]

I posted to early and missed the last part:

the biologists probably don't know enough about the living situation for the fish to have more than hypotheses about why their generations are optimized like that.

So the researchers probably don't know yet.

(And yes, bacteria do evolve fast. That's why our immune system isn't based on DNA -- we have too long generations.)

My favorite tiny thing

[fm6]

The Pygmy Leaf Chameleon.