Do Not Mess With Fish 270,

and you thought fish were fun!

well this one certainly is not when it comes to teeth! photograph Magnus Kjaergaard/Wikimedia Commons, meet the Lingcod, (Ophiodon elongatus), it has18 canine like teeth and hundreds of others, in fact the Lingcod has 555 teeth razor-sharp, losing up to 20 of them every day and growing them right back! instead of the incisors, molars, and canines we’re used to seeing, it has hundreds of nearly microscopic teeth lining its jaws. Their hard palate is also covered in hundreds of tiny spikes, as are the pharyngeal jaws, a set of accessory jaws that the lingcod uses to chew its food the way we use our molars, research at the University of South Florida and the University of Washington set out to learn more about the lingcod’s tooth-shedding by placing about 20 of them in a tank filled with a diluted fluorescent dye called alizarin red for 12hours, which stained the fish’s teeth red. Then they were put in tanks spiked with another fluorescent dye, calcein fluorescein, which turned new teeth green. So teeth that were in place one day were red, while those that appeared later were green,

photograph Facebook Michael Packer, the teeth were then painstakingly counted and classified all the colored teeth of the 20 specimens, coming up with a grand total of 10,580 teeth. Study lead author Emily Carr also pointed out that the fish seemed to lose an average of roughly 20 teeth per day, but grew them back just as fast, "It blew our minds that fish were replacing their teeth this quickly,” doctoral student and co-author Karly Cohen said. “For you and I, that looks like waking up every morning and losing a single tooth.” the findings of this study challenge the general notion that teeth are hard to make and replace. Apparently, for some species, they are just as easily lost and replaced as hair is for us, now why is it that I do not have teeth like this?