The Astonishing Variety of Fishes

🐟 Fish diversity is vast and difficult to define, with exceptions to typical characteristics.

🌍 There are over 33,000 described species of fishes, significantly more than tetrapods.

🧬 Genetic analysis is revealing a higher diversity of fish species than previously recognized.

🐟 The Scripps collection of fishes includes over 111,000 jars of specimens, representing almost 6,000 species from around the world.

🦈 The collection is particularly lacking in freshwater fishes, such as catfishes and tetras.

🔬 Two former curators, Karl Hubbs and Richard Rosenblatt, played a crucial role in building the collection and were highly knowledgeable about fish diversity.

🐟 There are various types of fish, including cartilaginous fishes, predatory sharks, and rays.

🦈 Cartilaginous fishes have diverse feeding behaviors and can be found in marine and freshwater environments.

🌊 Predatory sharks, such as tiger sharks and hammerhead sharks, have unique physical features and hunting strategies.

🔪 The cookie-cutter shark has a distinct mouth shape and feeds by taking bites out of larger fishes and marine mammals.

🎣 Rays, including skates and stingrays, have flattened bodies and venomous spines in some species.

🐟 Fish diversity is incredibly vast and includes various types of fishes such as stingrays, bat rays, manta rays, lobe-finned fishes, and lung fishes.

🦴 Bony fishes have a skeletal structure made of true bone, unlike cartilaginous fishes. The lobe-finned fishes, like coelacanths, have a unique bone structure in their fins.

🌊 Ray-finned fishes, the sister group to tetrapods, are extremely diverse with over 32,000 species. They inhabit both marine and freshwater habitats, with freshwater species accounting for 43% of the total.

🐠 About two-thirds of global freshwater fish species diversity is in a single lineage called the OTO Feist I, which represents a large majority of freshwater fish diversity worldwide.

🌎 The OTO Feist I lineage includes four orders of fishes: the the soprano forms Jim nota forms Caressa forms and Seidler reforms, and consists of over 4000 species found in North America, Eurasia, and Africa.

🐟 Other diverse groups of freshwater fishes include the cyprinidae, which is found in North America, Eurasia, and Africa, and the characins, which are restricted to South America and Africa.

🐠 The Sylar reform group, which includes catfishes, is an enormously diverse group with over 3,000 species and 35 families found worldwide, while the marine diversity of ray-finned fishes is concentrated in shallow tropical waters.

🌊 Shallow tropical waters have about 40% of the ray-finned fishes, while shallow temperate areas have only about 5%.

🐟 Anchovies and herrings are important planktivorous fishes found worldwide and support significant commercial fisheries.

There is a great diversity of fishes in the marine world, including parrotfishes, flatfishes, gobies, and eels.

Tropical coastal areas, especially the Coral Triangle in the Indo Pacific, have the highest diversity of reef fishes.

Other diverse groups of fishes include wrasses, damsel fishes, cardinal fishes, butterfly fishes, seahorses, and puffer fishes.

🐟 Fish diversity is vast and includes various species, such as tunas, bill fishes, jacks, and flying fishes, each with unique adaptations to survive and escape predation.

🌊 Deep-sea fishes, including lantern fishes, makyo feeds, barbel and dragon fishes, and deep-sea anglerfishes, exhibit extraordinary adaptations and behaviors to thrive in their environment.

📚 Existing fish guides lack comprehensive coverage of global fish diversity, but Nelson's fishes of the world and the book 'Fishes: A Guide to Their Diversity' provide valuable information on various fish families.