Author Tails break. So we, you know,
we don't necessarily. I mean,
this one's pristine, but we don't always take a full
all the way to the tip of the tails.
Total length right there is called the standard length.
So I take both those measurements,
and I usually take them once the fish is preserved.
But I I want to take this because
we want to know how big it is.
So
he's bad boy.
She's looking
somewhere on the order
385mm, which is total length,
which
is about 15 1/2 inches long.
And then
Oh yeah, he was
already
like, so
Anglerfish get their name as a group.
They have a modified fin spine.
So this is the spine coming off their dorsal fin,
which is all the way back here and it's modified
up near the front of their head and at the
tip is a little bulb and inside of this is
bacteria that produces bioluminescence or that glows.
And so the anglerfish can kind of move this around
in front of its head with all these attachments that
also have a little glowing tips and use this to
kind of attract prey to its mouth.
Folks may have seen Finding Nemo,
this is portrayed and Finding Nemo or Dory sees a
very beautiful light swims to it.
It's a giant anglerfish, very scary.
They almost get eaten. And so that's what happens,
Probably just small fish and invertebrates on a daily basis
when they encounter these things.
Last Friday morning, the lifeguard got a report that a
weird fish
was rolling around in the surf and at Swami's up
in Sanitas.
They collected the fish and let some folks know and
it ended up here in the collection.
So what we have is one of a very large
female specimen of a Pacific football fish.
This is a fairly rare angler fish that's only known
from now 31 specimens that have been collected across the
Pacific Ocean from Papua New Guinea and Japan all the
way over to here in Ecuador.
And this is the third specimen that we have in
the collection here at Scripps,
including a slightly larger one that washed up on Dog
beach in Del Mar in
2001. Kind
of have to go around these little dermal spines,
which also makes it kind of
tough. But as you can see this,
the skin is actually very rubbery
and even this sharp scalpel is kind of having trouble
getting through
through that.
So that probably helps protect them as well from parasites
or something that
contrast here. So you can see the retrieval column coming
down here and then almost all of the other bones
in their body are just head related.
This is the lower jaw.
This is the support for the gill covering.
This is the support supports
for the pectoral fin which is right here.
This is more support for the lower jaw.
So we can see from here,
the fish doesn't really seem to have much by way
of at least another fish in its stomach.
If there's usually if there's another fish,
we'd see like a little vertebral column of that fish
in here.
But what it does have is these two
huge masses. I'm not quite sure
if these are just
like very dense or.