Tag Archives: Newport Aquarium – Newport

Largescale Foureyes

Largescale Foureyes_6

Foureye fish can survive on land, if they find themselves stranded at low tide.

Not weird enough for you?

Foureye fish only have two eyes, but each eye is split into two parts, with each part having its own pupil and retina. This allows them to see above and below the water at the same time.

Not weird enough for you?

Foureye fish are “one side maters”, meaning that right-“handed” males only mate with left-“handed” females and vice versa.

Electric White Lobster

Electric White Lobster_3

This is an electric white lobster. Why is it called that? Because it’s white, and it’s related to the electric blue crayfish. Neither have electric powers. Instead, the colour is named after lightning and, apparently, was popular in the 1890’s where they distinguished between deep electric blue (aka French electric blue), iridescent electric blue, medium electric blue, and dark electric blue.

Wikipedia takes care to note that iridescent electric blue is only metaphorically electric and metaphorically iridescent. However, odds are that you are looking at this on some sort of computer screen, so it is metaphorically iridescent, but all of these blues are actually electric.

That also means that, even though there is no such thing as electric white, the white you are seeing in the electric white lobster above is, actually, electric. It’s other name is the White Ghost Lobster. It, however, neither a lobster nor a ghost.

This is a crayfish.

Blind Cavefish

Blind Cavefish_3

According to Damian Moran, Rowan Softley and Eric J. Warrant, the blind cavefish lost its eyes because the visual part of the brain consumes 15% of all the energy used by the fish. So it’s less that they lost their eyes because they didn’t need them in the dark. It’s that, in the dark, there’s less total energy to go around so energy-expensive systems are selected against, as the most efficient fish win the energy game.

Read more at http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/8/e1500363.full

Achilles Tang

Achilles Tang

Things you may not know about digital cameras:

– If you over-expose and get too much white, it may not be possible to save the image
– If you under-expose and get too much black, it may not be possible to save the image
– They’re very sensitive to red, so it’s easy to get too much red, which makes it hard to save the image.

These fish are hard to shoot.