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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."
...to put in your ear.
Have they tested the translation capabilities of these little critters?
Stop the world; I need to get off.
25.4mm/4 = 6.35mm
I would say just over a 1/4 of an inch
dumb ass reporter!
We need to destroy these creatures before they evolve into something that can take over the human race! With only a 2 month lifespan, they could easily out-evolve us within our children's lifetimes!
Sentience is theorized to exist in the thalamus, which is a feature that evolved with vertabrates. You are in the cerebral spinal fluid in the third ventricle between the lobes of the thalamus.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Doesn't being the tiniest fish imply being the tiniest invertebrate?
Given that fish are vertebrates I'm gonna go with NO!
SteveM
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.
In tons of biology and genetics classes, people selectively breed fruit flies because of their short lifespan (among other reasons.) These guys could be useful in a similar reguard, but now we'll all have vertebrates to play with. I can't wait.
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I see.
So I could make a post saying that "the Eiffel Tower is big", and then when somebody modded me off-topic, I could complain, saying that I made a joke, because the Eiffel Tower is big, but the stout infantfish is small, and there is a connection between them because fish is served in the Eiffel Tower restaurant, and that they "abused their power" by modding down a post whose on-topicality should have been obvious to everyone.
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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.
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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.)
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The Pygmy Leaf Chameleon.