Spectember #06: Aquatic Afrosoricidans

(The submitted prompt here was “some kind of fully aquatic non cetacean or dugong mammal with a different bodyplan”.)

Transcript for the text on the image under the cut:

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Spectember #01: Land Dolphins

Welcome to SPECTEMBER!

This month we’ll be taking a break from real creatures to instead explore some “what if” scenarios for the evolution of life.

If you’re unfamiliar with speculative evolution, it’s basically a biology-focused type of science fiction exploring hypothetical evolutionary paths, whether as alternate histories for the ancient past, possible far future descendants of modern species, or even completely alien life on other worlds. The concept has been around for well over a century at this point, but Dougal Dixon’s 1981 book After Man was probably the biggest influence.

All this month, on weekdays I’ll be posting my own work based on the suggestions from earlier in the year, and on weekends I’ll highlight some of the history of the spec evo genre.

So let’s have some fun – and if you want to join in, #spectember is an open concept and anyone is welcome to take part!

Transcript for the text on the image under the cut:

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Weird Heads Month #31: What Even Is This Fish

For the final entry in this series, let’s take a look at a modern weird-headed species – and where better to find some of the strangest and most unique-looking animals alive today than the deep sea?

Malacosteus, also known as the stoplight loosejaw, is a 25cm long (10″) genus of dragonfish found at depths of over 500m (1640′) in oceans all around the world, with the exception of the Mediterranean and polar waters. Two different species are currently recognized, with Malacosteus niger here known from just below the Arctic Circle down to the southern reaches of the subtropics, and Malacosteus australis ranging from there to around 45°S, and up towards the equator in the Indian Ocean.

And there’s a lot to unpack here with the anatomy of this one.

First of all, there’s the fact that its entire head can hinge away from its body, gaping enormous jaws with long fang-like teeth.

The bottom of its lower jaw has no skin membrane connecting the two sides, attached to the rest of its bizarre head only by the hinges and a single exposed muscle, reducing water resistance so it can shoot its trap-jaws out extra fast to snare prey.

Diagram showing how the stoplight loosejaw's jaw parts articulate.
From Kenaley, C. P. (2012). Exploring feeding behaviour in deep-sea dragonfishes (Teleostei: Stomiidae): jaw biomechanics and functional significance of a loosejaw. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 106(1), 224-240. doi.org/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2012.01854.x

Once it catches something it retracts its head, and several sets of pharyngeal teeth further back grab hold of its prey and direct it down its throat.

(Let me remind you that this isn’t an early April Fools joke. This thing is completely real.)

In addition to all that anatomical weirdness, it’s also one of the only deep-sea fish that can both see and produce red-colored light. Most creatures living at that depth have lost the ability to see red since that frequency doesn’t penetrate so far down through water, but the stoplight loosejaw has evolved to take advantage of that by using bioluminescent red light as its own personal night vision goggles.

Using large red photophores under each eye, it can shine a spotlight out ahead of itself and see other deep-sea animals all clearly lit up, while remaining completely invisible to both them and any nearby larger predators. It’s able to perceive the color red thanks to a pigment in its eyes modified from chlorophyll, a visual setup unique to this fish and not known from any other vertebrate.

It also has a smaller green photophore further down on its head – inspiring its common name thanks to the resemblance to traffic lights – and many smaller blue and white ones over its head and body.

So, with its highly specialized jaws and ability to see things other deep-sea animals can’t, the stoplight loosejaw must be hunting something pretty impressive, right?

And as it turns out, it eats… plankton.

The vast majority of its diet appears to be copepods, small zooplanktoic crustaceans that are incredibly common in the waters the loosejaw inhabits. It may simply be “snacking” on such a convenient food source in-between rare encounters with larger prey – but it may also be getting the chlorophyll-based pigment needed for its night vision from eating them.

Almost-Living Fossils Month #26 – Angry Land-Flamingo-Ducks

The presbyornithids were an early group of waterfowl birds – relatives of modern ducks, geese, swans, and screamers – that first appeared in the Late Cretaceous, about 71 million years ago. With their long necks, long legs, and duck-like bills adapted for filter-feeding, they seem to have essentially been primitive ducks converging on the body shape and lifestyle of flamingos – and as a result they’re sometimes even nicknamed “flamingo ducks”.

They lived in shallow freshwater environments all around the world, and after surviving through the end-Cretaceous extinction they even became some of the most common waterbirds in the early Cenozoic. Some species have been found in large bonebeds containing fossils from thousands of individuals all in one place, suggesting they were very social and lived in huge flocks.

Around the mid-to-late Eocene (~40-37 mya) they seemed to disappear completely, until some fossils from Australia that were originally thought to be from a species of ancient stone-curlew were reassessed in 2016 and found to actually represent the latest-surviving members of the presbyornithids.

Named Wilaru, this bird lived in South Australia during the Late Oligocene and Early Miocene (~28-20 mya). Two different species have been identified: Wilaru tedfordi and its slightly larger and stockier descendant Wilaru prideauxi. With only partial pieces of their skeletons known it’s difficult to estimate their full life size, but based on similar presbyornithids they were probably both somewhere around 1m tall (3′3″).

As well as outliving the rest of their kind, the two Wilaru species were also rather weird compared to the other known flamingo-ducks, with adaptations that indicate they were spending much more time walking around on land than wading in water. Their feet resembled those of modern screamers (which are also more terrestrial) and may have partially or fully lost their webbing, and since they lived alongside various other species of waterfowl and early flamingos they clearly weren’t competing for the same ecological niches. It’s possible they might have also shifted away from their ancestral filter-feeding diet, perhaps becoming more herbivorous, but without any preserved skulls we can’t tell for certain.

Unlike other presbyornithids they also had large spurs on their wings – and based on the behavior of modern spurred waterfowl this suggests they were much less social. They were probably rather aggressive animals, living solitary or in pairs and fighting each other over mates and territory.

This major departure from the lifestyle of their ancestors may have been what allowed Wilaru to survive for so much longer than all the other presbyornithids. They might potentially have lasted a few more million years into the mid-Miocene, but a cooling and drying climate – especially a sudden temperature drop about 14 million years ago – may ultimately have altered their habitat and food sources too quickly for them cope with.