YPM ICH 5971 & 22495: Sea devils at the Peabody

Happy Halloween! In Halloween spirit, here are some ghouls and goblins:



Sailors dating at least to the 16th century would find these horrors at sea and often brought them back to shore as evidence for their stories of sea monsters, sea devils, and the like. What are they exactly? Called "Jenny Hanivers," they're actually just dried-out specimens of skates, rays, and guitarfishes!

Skates, rays, and guitarfishes make up the superorder Batoidea, and what you see in the pictures are the undersides of the animals. The nostrils and mouths of these creatures are positioned perfectly, as you can see, such that they look like a demonic face. (The eyes are actually on the top sides of the animals.)

Here is YPM ICH 5971, a guitarfish of species Aptychotrema vincentiana, collected in 1968 off the coast of Adelaide, Australia. Here's the underside of the animal, where you can see the "Jenny Haniver" face:


Here is the top side of the animal, where you can see the true eyes:


Of course, this specimen isn't properly a Jenny Haniver in the full sense of the term. But it's halfway there! To make a Jenny Haniver, once you've caught a skate, or a ray, or a guitarfish, you should dry it out, not fix it with formalin and preserve it with ethanol as we did with this one. It's when they're dried out that they really take their ghoulish shape.

You should then carve it and shape it to make it look even more grotesque. Sailors in Antwerp, Belgium, were famous for the Jenny Hanivers that they carved on their docks and then sold to superstitious tourists. In fact, it's thought that the term "Jenny Haniver" might come from these sailors. The French phrase jeune d'Anvers means ('young [person] of Antwerp'). The thinking is that British sailors then turned this phrase into the personal name "Jenny Haniver."

Here is YPM ICH 22495, one more almost-Jenny Haniver from our collection. It's a skate of species Bathyraja maccaini that was collected on a 2009 Yale research voyage to Antarctica. Here's its underside:


And here's its top side:

YPM ICH 7720 & 12449: Lizardfishes!

I'm afraid the title of this post gives it all away: these fish look exactly like lizards! Here is YPM ICH 7720, a lizardfish of species Synodus variegatus, collected in the Indian Ocean's Seychelles Islands in 1957:


As you can see, the head of a lizardfish looks, well, like a lizard, but they were actually named for their posture, which is also eerily lizard-like. They like to sit at the bottom of shallow seas in sandy areas, with their head raised like a lizard, propped up by their fins. Here's a picture that shows this:


The above shot was taken this summer by Alex Dornburg, a Yale Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Phd candidate, who was in Curacao collecting specimens for his research on marine fish macroevolution.

Many of our museum specimens are actually still preserved in the lizard posture! Here's one, YPM ICH 12449, species Synodus foetens:


Man, I wish I had posture like that. Mom would be proud....

Here's a final picture, a headshot of YPM ICH 12449:



Source:

Paxton, John R., and W.N. Eschmeyer. 1994. Encyclopedia of Fishes. Academic Press, San Diego.

Poll: Is our star-nosed mole hotter than the NYT's star-nosed mole?

My last two posts have touched on aesthetics-- namely two specimens that paralleled things in our human world that most of us would find aesthetically pleasing. Here I'm going to touch on aesthetics again, but in the opposite direction-- namely a specimen that is ugly! Well, ugly according to the New York Times, at least.

About a month ago, the NYT ran an article about the science of ugliness that examined why we find some animals to be attractive and cute, and others repulsive and ugly. In it, the star-nosed mole, Condylura cristata, was the posterchild for ugly animals. Here's the image of it that they featured in the article:


The scientists who were interviewed explained that we tend to be repelled by the star-nosed mole because the pink nose causes us to identify with it-- that is, flesh color reminds us of a human face-- but at the same time it is not what a human face should look like, which makes us recoil. Here are some tidbits from the article that explain this more fully:

The more readily we can analogize between a particular animal body part and our own, the more likely we are to cry ugly. “We may not find an elephant’s trunk ugly because it’s so remote,” Dr. Dutton said. “But the proboscis on a proboscis monkey is close enough to our own that we apply human standards to it.”

As scientists see it, a comparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.

Later in the article Dutton noted that “No one would find the star-nosed mole ugly if its star were iridescent blue". I don't know of any blue star-nosed moles, but here at Peabody VZ, we do have a star-nosed mole that is completely brown! YPM MAM 5852 was collected in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1940, and it's brown now because it has been preserved in ethanol, which has caused it to lose its pigmentation. Here are two pics:



So what do you think? Is this brown star-nosed mole as ugly as a live one with all of its pink and fleshy pigment? Or, without the flesh color, is it a bit easier on the eyes as the scientists from the article would predict? Please chime in! I think our museum specimen offers a fun test of their hypothesis.

YPM ICH 7062: More eel-imitating art

This eel, YPM 7062, is a reef dwelling species, Gymnothorax favagineus, and it was collected in the Indian Ocean's Seychelles Islands during the Yale Seychelles Expedition of 1957-58. It reminds me a ring that my best friend wears every once in a while. Here are two pics of the eel:




And here are two pics of the ring:



Certainly the artist who fashioned this ring wasn't directly inspired by this eel (well, maybe he or she was! I'm guessing not, though). But the precision of this convergent aesthetic, I think, is quite extraordinary.

Speaking convergent aesthetics, I think my husband wins the convergent aesthetic contest from my last post. We just found this picture of a steel floor. Pretty much an exact match to the scales of the Synaphobranchus kaupii specimen:

YPM ICH 13045: Art imitating eel scales

I am no artist, but I do remember a technique I learned in a middle school drawing class called cross hatching. This eel, YPM ICH 13045, is a cutthroat eel of species Synaphobranchus kaupii, and was collected on July 29 2002 by Jon Moore at a depth of 1388 meters at Bear Seamount, an underwater volcanic mountain in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New England. Its scales remind me of cross hatching:


Cross hatching is used in drawings to create dimension, depth, and texture. Here are two examples of it that I found using Google image search at this site and this site, respectively:



In a previous post I talked about convergent evolution, which is the phenomenon where similar biological traits and forms evolve in unrelated lineages. A great example of convergent evolution is the wings of birds and bats-- although they both have wings, their wings evolved independently. It is not a trait that they both have through common ancestry.

Cutthroat eels tend to dwell on the slopes of continental shelves, where it might be useful to have scales that create texture to blend in with habitat there (I couldn't find any studies discussing the function of the scales, but this is my hypothesis. If you're wondering if light penetrates at these depths, see the discussion in the comments below). As I mentioned above, artists use cross hatching to create texture in their drawings. These eels have perhaps evolved criss-crossed scales to create texture; humans have developed cross-hatching to create texture. I am going to dub this convergent texture creation! (Presumptuously assuming, of course, that my hypothesis is correct...).

Here are more pictures of the scales, along with a full body shot for scale (although these eels can get much bigger than this).




My husband actually thinks the scales look more like the texture of a common type of steel flooring (pictured below), rather than cross hatching. What do you think?

YPM ICH 23585: A baby porcupinefish!

Last week Twan Leenders, a conservation biologist for the CT Audubon Society and a Peabody curatorial affiliate, deposited a baby porcupinefish for the collection! Here are pics, taken by Twan. The little guy is about the size of a quarter:



Pretty cute, huh? A little boy found it (dead) on the beach of the CT Audubon Coastal Center and brought it to Twan. Twan brought it here, and Greg Watkins-Colwell of our division along with Karsten Hartel of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology identified it.

It's a porcupinefish of the species Chilomycterus schoepfi (common name striped burrfish). Here's what these guys look like as adults (photo from here):


If you think it looks like a pufferfish, you're right. It acts like a pufferfish too-- it can inflate its body to ward off predators, and it's toxic just like a pufferfish. But it turns out it's not actually a pufferfish. It belongs to a very closely related family known as the porcupinefishes (family Diodontidae), as I alluded to earlier in the post.

For more on our new little specimen, the CT Audubon Society has blogged about it in more detail here.

YPM ICH 8403: Electric elephantfish with big brains

So apparently when you've got a long schnoz, intelligence is something that comes along with the territory. Or so it would seem if elephants and elephantfishes were your only two data points. Elephantfishes comprise the family Mormyridae, and they parallel elephants not only in nasal appearance, but in high intelligence as well, with a brain size to body mass ratio equaled only by our own!

Here are two Mormyrids, species Gnathonemus longibarbis, from YPM ICH 8403, collected in 1956 in Uganda's Lake Kyoga:


Why the long proboscis? Mormyrids live in Africa and tend to inhabit murky lakes and swamps; the proboscis is thought to be a touch organ that helps them locate the mud-dwelling invertebrates that they like to feed on. As far as I can tell though, it's not like an elephant's trunk-- elephantfishes can't suck anything into their proboscis since, as I found on our specimens, as there are no openings at the end. All it does is help find food. In fact, the mouth is actually above the proboscis, not below it! Here is a shot where you can see this:


Why such a big brain? To meet the demands of being electric. That's right, they are electric, and their cerebellum is so specialized and large that it even has its own special name, the "mormyrocerebellum". This mormyrocerebellum is the neural center for coordinating their electricity.

You might be thinking about electric eels right now, which use their electricity to stun prey, but Mormyrids actually use their electricity quite differently, in a dizzying number of ways! Because they live in murky lakes and have poor eyesight, they use it for orientation and navigation. The electric field is continuous and envelops them, so when they swim near an object, the field is interrupted and they are alerted to the object's proximity. They also use their electricity for various means of communication, including territorial interactions, species recognition, individual recognition, courtship, and communicating social status. This is possible because the elephantfish can both output and receive very specific electrical signals--signals that vary by only fractions of a millisecond. Most fish rely on visual and other types of signals for communication, but given their turbid habitat, the Mormyrids' unique electrical system works better for them.


Sources:

Helfman, Gene S., B.B. Collette, D.E. Facey, and B.W. Bowen. 2009. The Diversity of Fishes, 2nd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken.

Paxton, John R., and W.N. Eschmeyer. 1994. Encyclopedia of Fishes. Academic Press, San Diego.