Deep sea fish take ugliness to new level, says Niwa
Shame…shame…shame to ever thought that calling deep-sea fish ugly was a compelling way spin the narrative about the great fish biodiversity of the depths. You know what? I don’t think they are ugly at all. In fact, deep-sea fish are bad ass. You know what else…deep-sea fish think your f’n ugly too!
via Deep sea fish take ugliness to new level, says Niwa – Science – NZ Herald News.
Craig McClain is the Executive Director of the Lousiana University Marine Consortium. He has conducted deep-sea research for 20 years and published over 50 papers in the area. He has participated in and led dozens of oceanographic expeditions taken him to the Antarctic and the most remote regions of the Pacific and Atlantic. Craig’s research focuses on how energy drives the biology of marine invertebrates from individuals to ecosystems, specifically, seeking to uncover how organisms are adapted to different levels of carbon availability, i.e. food, and how this determines the kinds and number of species in different parts of the oceans. Additionally, Craig is obsessed with the size of things. Sometimes this translated into actually scientific research. Craig’s research has been featured on National Public Radio, Discovery Channel, Fox News, National Geographic and ABC News. In addition to his scientific research, Craig also advocates the need for scientists to connect with the public and is the founder and chief editor of the acclaimed Deep-Sea News (http://deepseanews.com/), a popular ocean-themed blog that has won numerous awards. His writing has been featured in Cosmos, Science Illustrated, American Scientist, Wired, Mental Floss, and the Open Lab: The Best Science Writing on the Web.
I’m with you. Did the NIWA person even say that they were ugly? And on a scale of fugliness, the hatchetfish pictured scores pretty low.
New Zealand Herald takes lazy journalism to new lows, says DSN
And to illustrate it, they’ve chosen this cutie fish, which looks instead ‘miffed’ and subject to a grave insult, maybe the one from Niwa?
Grow some scales, cap’n. You’re too thin-skinned.
Aww, the hatchetfish has puppy dog eyes. How could anyone call that thing ugly?
Wait a minute. The headline is a red herring. The real problem is that NIWA (the we-would-be-government-but-got-privatized) Water-Ocean-Atmosphere research group was deep sea trawling under contract from the fishing industry looking for ever deeper populations
of orange roughy … or ya know, anything they can bread, fry, and sell for $2/pc.
I’m sure that won’t be disruptive to the deep sea ecosystem at all…