Do Not Mess With Fish 247,

and you thought fish were fun!

well this deep sea fish certainly looks funny, a few nights ago we were watching a program about deep sea fish that have eyesight so sensitive that they can see the bioluminescence that other creatures make when they move, and then capture them as food, so liking to know things about fish I found this article interesting, about the silver spinyfin (Diretmus argenteus), above, photograph by Pavel Riha/ University of South Bohemia, the fish has the amazing ability to 'see' at a depth of some 2,000 meters! To learn how fish can see the bioluminescence, a team led by evolutionary biologist Walter Salzburger from the University of Basel in Switzerland studied deep-sea fishes' opsin proteins, variation in the opsins' amino acid sequences changes the wavelength of light detected, so multiple opsins make color vision possible, researchers had observed that the deeper a fish lives, the simpler its visual system is, a trend they assumed would continue to the bottom, but it did not! they have had “an extraordinary increase in the number of genes for rod opsins, retinal proteins that detect dim light.” the finding "really shakes up the dogma of deep-sea vision," says Megan Porter, an evolutionary biologist studying vision at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu who was not involved in the work, "That [the deepest dwellers] have all these opsins means there's a lot more complexity in the interplay between light and evolution in the deep sea than we realized," Porter says, how little we really know about the deep sea.