Spookfish Uses Mirrors For Eyes

Kligat writes "The brownsnout spookfish in the Pacific is the first known vertebrate to use mirrors to focus light into its eyes. Despite being a species known for 120 years, this was not known until a live specimen was caught between New Zealand and Samoa last year. The fish lives over 1,000 meters below the ocean's surface, so the light focused by the mirrors' perfectly curved surfaces provides a major advantage over other fish."

Comments

That's Spooky!

[Arancaytar]

(Sorry.)

Re:That's Spooky!

[artson]

According to the article, "The mirror uses tiny plates, probably of guanine crystals, arranged into a multi-layer stack. "

Not sure why there should be any doubt what the mirrors are made of. Maybe they can't determine the makeup of the mirror from dead specimens.

Re:That's Spooky!

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the article, "The mirror uses tiny plates, probably of guanine crystals, arranged into a multi-layer stack."

I know the British spell things differently than us, but there wasn't an 'a' in 'genuine' last time I checked.

Re:That's Spooky!

[randyest]

Why would that be, unless the mirrors are made of some radioactive material that somehow doesn't decay until the fish is dead? Since, of course, they are almost certainly not made of such a fanciful material, I can only assume that the researchers have not yet managed to get a mirror sample into a gas chromatographer / mass spectrometer yet. Which is a shame.

Re:That's Spooky!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope.

Re:That's Spooky!

[mr_mischief]

There's an old saying that fish rot from the head first. Perhaps no dead specimens have been found with the eyes intact, and they've not yet cut the live specimen up to test the eyes.

Re:That's Spooky!

[Qzukk]

There's an old saying that fish rot from the head first

This is probably the real reason. Lots of organic stuff decays on contact with air, probably by the time anyone takes a good look at the fish's eyes, they've already turned black.

Re:That's Spooky!

[telchine]

Nope.

whooosh!

Re:That's Spooky!

[samurphy21]

I suspect that any fish meant to live 1000m deep would undergo explosive decompression on being brought to the surface, eyeballs first.

Re:That's Spooky!

[Adriax]

The North Atlantic Flying Cluefish, a cousin of the more common flying fish.

Re:That's Spooky!

[ComaVN]

bring it to the 1 atm in a typical spectrometer and it will explode

I call bullshit. Deep sea fish don't have any air/gasses in them, and water doesn't compress.

Re:That's Spooky!

[sykes1024]

Maybe they have nothing that is in its gaseous form at the bottom of the ocean, but bring it up to the surface and it may turn into gas without all that pressure. And lets not forget, just because something is made of mostly water doesn't mean water is the ONLY thing it's made of. And the entire fish doesn't have to explode to make studying the eye difficult, just enough cellular damage in the eyes has to occur.

Re:That's Spooky!

[khellendros1984]

I think they probably have dissolved gasses in their bloodstreams, just like anything else. That's what gills are for: capturing dissolved oxygen from the water.

Re:That's Spooky!

[clone53421]

Dissolved oxygen...

Re:That's Spooky!

[sumdumass]

Dissolved gasses from life as well as decay in death.

However, I'm not sure that the buoyancy of the fish will change faster then the gases can normally and naturally escape. Perhaps it will, I know downing victims are bloated when surfacing but I think they are under water too. It will eventually float but at a slow pace and wouldn't likely explode or anything. Dead organic material don't usually just rise to the surface if it held a neutral buoyancy excepts when decay adds buoyancy whit gases but it is a gradual process.

Just in case I'm wrong, here are some fun numbers you can play around with from my SCUBA days. It might seem borring but the meat of it is how pressure is calculated and an idea of how much expansion you would see.

The atmospheric pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inch. Sea water weight about 64 pounds pr cubic foot so if you divide that by 144 (inches in a cubic foot) you get .445 pounds per square inch (.4.3 in freshwater because it doesn't have the weight of the salts). So for ever foot down, you can multiply it by .445 and determine the pressure exerted by the water in the sea. Of course you have the 14.7 PSI above the waer so you have to add that if your wanting to calulate real world pressure. Lets say you go 33 feet. It would be something like .445*33+14.7 =29.38PSI. That is equal to about 2 atmospheres, the one in the water and the one on top of the water. So for every 33 feet deeper, you will see an atmosphere (atm) increase.

Now 1000 meters is around 3,280 ft. so if it was at the bottom of 1000 meters, it would have approximate 99 times the atmospheric pressure as at the surface of the ocean. In contrast, it would decompress 99 atmospheres at the surface of the ocean. Imagine a balloon increasing to 99 times it's diameter, it will pop somewhere before that happens.

When diving, a rule of thumb is to not ascend faster then the slowest bubbles from your regulator (mouth piece). but if you run out of air (bad diver) for whatever reason, your supposed to exhale when ascending free because the air in your lung will expand on the way up constantly replacing the air released. You should be able to do a slight exhale and breath air out all the way to the surface without discomfort if you were below 33 feet in the water. This can be figured according to Boyle's law

I never really dived much more then 100 feet (on purpose) due to the lack of places around me and special needs for the air supply and nitrogen concerns and technical limitations. Anyways, at about 100 feet your looking at 3 atmospheres below surface, according to Boyle's law, the air in your lungs is decreased to 25% of the space it should occupies at the surface. The regulator increases pressure so you have a full lung of air so when ascending from 100 feet, you would have roughly 4 times the amount of air needed for a full breath at surface pressure (1 ATM). That actual equation in reverse goes something like multiplying the ATM times the volume. So at 100 feet, (4 atms, 3 below surface one at the surface), it would be 4 time the volume of air (in lungs this is around 5 liters) so one 5 liter air space at 100 feet would be 4*5 20 liters of air at the surface. Now the 1000 meters (3,280 ft) is around 99 ATMs below the surface pressure. A 5 liter container at 100 atms (99 plus the one at surface) 100*5 would hold 500 liters of air at the surface. So imagine the gas molecule in the blood not being able to escape, it would literally be 100 times the size at surface pressure or still under considerable pressure.

Re:That's Spooky!

[samurphy21]

The fluidic pressure inside the fish would have to equal the water pressure outside the fish. The eyeballs would burst.

Also, as stated above, the gasses dissolved in the bodily fluids of the fish would precipitate out, if brought to the surface, causing bubbles in the eyes, which would eventually burst.

Divers who come back up too fast don't have decompression sickness from their lungs, its the extra gas dissolved in their blood at depth that does it.

Re:That's Spooky!

[clone53421]

Fluids are nearly incompressible. The expansion would be very slight, and probably not enough to burst anything. Dissolved gases, however, would be a different story.

More importantly

[Anonymous Coward]

How does it taste?

Re:More importantly

[Philip K Dickhead]

Probably...

like chicken.

Re:More importantly

[Yvan256]

No! No chickens in the sea! Chickens on the land, fishes in the sea! /Seinfeld

Re:More importantly

[Philip K Dickhead]

Sorry, Charlie!

StarKist wants tuna that tastes good, not tunas with good taste.

Re:More importantly

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

How does it taste?

Come on! We're mostly Anglophone's here. What we really want to know is:

How does it taste deep fried?

Re:More importantly

[NightRain]

You say Anglophone but you really mean American...

Re:More importantly

[Chuck Chunder]

Jessica Simpson was funnier.
Not to mention better in shorty shorts.

Re:More importantly

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I thought American at first, then I remembered what fish and chips was and where the dish came from.

Re:More importantly

[NightRain]

Alright, you've got a point, I'll grant you that :)

Lenses?

[tsa]

If it uses mirrors to focus light in its eyes it doesn't need lenses. And the use of mirrors means no chromatic abberation, which means a sharper image! What a smart 'design.' The things Nature comes up with never cease to amaze me.

Re:Lenses?

[tsa]

Yeah, Nature is smart isn't she? ;)

Re:Lenses?

[SQLGuru]

And the use of mirrors means no chromatic abberation, which means a sharper image!

I'm sorry. Sharper Image is bankrupt. Your gift card is worthless.

Irreducible complexity

[im_thatoneguy]

Maybe *this* eye will be irreducibly complex...

Re:Irreducible complexity

[jbezorg]

Off topic.. jeeze.

Did anybody notice the emphasis on "this"? On yet another version of a biological system that is suppose to be irreducibly complex?

Site is down

[Yvan256]

Any Spookfish got a mirror?

Re:Site is down

[BobSixtyFour]

It's down because it's having a BROWNsnOUT.

Dopefish

[mfh]

The Dopefish uses complex pot-philosophy for inner-vision.

nice basis

[gEvil (beta)]

Sounds like the basis for a scary story.
"As he looked into the spookfish's eye, he saw...himself."

Of course...

[SirLurksAlot]

This evolutionary development is in response to the Spookfish's natural enemy, the Medusa!

So, what's the current count of times eyes evolved

[jafiwam]

I just stumbled around trying to find a catalog of the number of types and design details of the number of times eyes have evolved.

Wiki has it at 6. Is this 7?

In other news Texas Instruments sues Nature

[erroneus]

Texas Instruments, the holder of several patents related to DLP technolgy has filed suit in a Texas court with a complaint related to the use of their tiny mirror imaging technology.

I hear Case is looking for a new girlfriend.

[Papatoast]

//first thing I think of when I hear mirror eyes/shades

Re:I hear Case is looking for a new girlfriend.

[Rene S. Hollan]

... and a great "Whoosh!" was heard above all the non-Gibson fans.

Re:So, what's the current count of times eyes evol

[Skadet]

And the corresponding link to what you were talking about... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye#Types_of_eye

Re:So, what's the current count of times eyes evol

[Anonymous Coward]

Missing option: zero.

Objects In Eye Are Closer Than They Appear

[jbezorg]

There, now it's been done.

Irreducible Complexity is Easy

[Petersko]

In order to determine something to be irreducibly complex, all one has to do is find an evaluator with absolutely no analytical ability or imagination.

Thankfully, those people are everywhere.

Re:Irreducible Complexity is Easy

[Artifakt]

As somebody with coke bottle lens glasses, I've always wondered why anyone would think eyes make a good example of irreducible complexity in the first place. Obviously, not all eyes are perfect, and even an imperfect eye is better than none (although I'm sure I'd be in a leopard's belly by now if I was a proto-human).
Still, even a very basic eye-spot is of some use and might help an organism survive. Unless the argument is that the critter has to have at least a single eye-spot, a very basic optic nerve, and some pretty small amounts of brain tissue dedicated to interpreting the signal, what's the minimum complexity that's supposed to be irreducible?
Now gender, there's an irreducible. One of Darwin's basic arguments was that unlimited amounts of blending in the genetic code would make natural selection grind to a halt (That's a testable prediction of Darwin's by the way. One reason Crick and Watson got the Nobel prize is the code they discovered didn't allow for unlimited blending. Anyone who claims Evolution isn't science because it makes no testable predictions might note that point.).
        If most offspring in a sexual species weren't clearly expressing some gender specific trait,gender itself would swiftly vanish. So how does sexual reproduction evolve in the first place? If it isn't all or nothing 99.something % of the time, blending makes it fall back into asexual reproduction within a few generations. You have to have a situation much like human genetics with a lot of sexually related genes are all on the X/Y pair. That is, in some ancestor species, a whole bunch of gender related mutations have to occur at very close to the same time (same generation, or a most a very, very few), AND get themselves segregated onto one pair of chromosomes and moved off of the other chromosomes (again, within a very, very few generations), before a blending-like effect in the non-sex related chromosomes wipes them out.

How does it taste?

[Petersko]

If I eat two pieces in a single bite it gives me a headache. I feel like I taste it over and over and over and over...

Re:So, what's the current count of times eyes evol

[Anonymous Coward]

None of them have ever evolved Fresnel eyes?
That seems a little strange, i'd have expected something similar to have evolved by now, even if it used several separate lenses with holes to create it.
In fact, a zoom based eye as well.
Come evolution, stop being lazy!

Oh well, by the time it happens, humans would have already replicated both with technology.
I can't wait till i have a 10x zoom eye. Now i don't need those binoculars to spy on my hot neighbor.

Better link showing how the eye is arranged.

[Myrv]

I was having trouble visualizing how this works but then I found this link with a diagram of the eye's anatomy

Re:So, what's the current count of times eyes evol

[AaxelB]

I don't think so; it looks like the fish has relatively normal eyes, but has mirrors on either side which allow it to see straight down. That could be a huge advantage, analogous to being the only car on the road with rear-view/side mirrors.

Deep-fried Mars bars, anyone?

[pjt33]

I didn't think anyone deep-fried more food than Scots.

Re:Deep-fried Mars bars, anyone?

[linzeal]

American Indian reservations.

Brownsnout Spookfish?

[kwabbles]

Is that anything like the Corneyed Lumpfish that frequent my septic pool?

All determined from a single fish

[jschen]

The actual scientific publication is currently an advanced article (i.e. available online, but not yet in print) in Current Biology. I found the beginning of the experimental procedures interesting (emphasis mine): "A single specimen of Dolichopteryx longipes..." They deduced an awful lot of information from one fish. There's pictures of the fish and the eyes in the article. I don't understand much of the articles, but the pictures and diagrams are fascinating.

Re:So, what's the current count of times eyes evol

[mikael]

There is also a type of fish that have telescopic eyes:

The telescope fish

Telescopefish

I wonder if human bred species should get a mention:

Celestial Eye Goldfish

Bubble Eye Goldfish

"Perfectly Curved Surfaces"

[Apple Acolyte]

"the light focused by the mirrors' perfectly curved surfaces provides a major advantage over other fish."

I guess that's evolution for you, with all of its perfectly curved surfaces. One hell of a design for having no designer other than selection and millions of years of trial and error, right? That's how one perfects complex genetic encoding, right? Really makes a lot of sense to so many of you, doesn't it? :-D

Re:"Perfectly Curved Surfaces"

[mikael]

Animals such as cats and dogs (and even albinohumans) have reflective surfaces in their eyes, the tapetum lucidum.

For any creature that hunts at night, any modification that increase the amount of photons that reaches the rods and cones of the retina are going to be of benefit. Having this reflective in front of the retina would also be to an advantage. For a creature living underwater, having a reflective surface that concentrates light from above into the retina would also be an advantage, but it would not be an advantage to reflect light from below.

Also, when fish reproduce they are going to have hundreds of offspring, where the odds of survival are very low for the first year, so anything that improves the chances of survival, even if by a small amount is going to be of benfit. Consequently, the eyeball is one of the first organs to be fully formed. Since there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of couples breeding every year, that is a vast number of random combinations of genetr to be tried out each year.

So, humans aren't vertebrates?

[trolltalk.com]

"The brownsnout spookfish in the Pacific is the first known vertebrate to use mirrors to focus light into its eyes"

We've been using mirrors for telescopes for a lot longer than we've known about the spookfish.

Sexual repdroduction is easily reduceable

[brunes69]

Sexuality is not irreducible at all. You have this small couple-cell organism that reproduces asexually by division and cloning its minute DNA. This goes on for millenia, so that in any given hospitable location these organisms are incredibly densely packed, as in, in constant contact.

Then sometime, there is a mutation during the cloning process of two of the microbes whereby instead of an exact copy of each being made, potions of their DNA is instead swapped, because they are trying to reproduce adjacently in so close quarters. Boom, you have the first sexual reproduction. Extrapolate over billions of microbes over thousands of years, with this sexual reproduction happening all over the place. Evolution takes hold, microbes with better DNA out-compete the others, and you are off to the races.

Should Rename the Hubblefish

[BigAssRat]

They should rename it he Hubblefish.

Because Spookfish Sounds Like a Southpark Episode

[BigAssRat]

for some reason that was deleted from my original comment...