This is a photograph of Macropinna microstoma, also called barreleyes. It has a very peculiar optical arrangement. When you first look at this photo, you may think the two small ovals above and behind its mouth are the eyes, and that it looks rather sad…wrong. Those are its nostrils. The eyes are actually the two strange fluorescent green objects that look like they are imbedded in its transparent, dome-like head.
(Click for larger image)
Video frame-grab of Macropinna microstoma at a depth of 744 m, showing the intact, transparent shield that covers the top of the head. The green spheres are the eye lenses, each sitting atop a silvery tube. Visible on the right eye, just below the lens on the forward part of the tube, is the external expression of a retinal diverticulum. The pigmented patches above and behind the mouth are olfactory capsules. High-definition video frame grabs of Macropinna microstoma in situ are posted on the web at: http://www.mbari.org/midwater/macropinna.
It gets the name “barreleyes” because it’s are cylindrical, rather than spherical; this is an adaptation for better light collection in the dim depths where it lives, using very large lenses but not building a giant spherical eye to compensate. It’s ore like a telescope than a wide-angle camera. Here’s what a single eye in a side view looks like — the lens (L) is what is glowing so greenly in the photos.
Chapman’s (1942) mesial view of the left eye of Macropinna microstoma. Abbreviations: RS = rectus superior, L =lens, OS = obliquus superior, OI = obliquus inferior, RIN = rectus internus, RI = rectus inferior, RE = rectus externus, OP = optic nerve.
As if that weren’t weird enough, the animal has a completely transparent skull cap, and the eyes swivel about within the skull to look out through that translucent cranium. In the two pictures below, the animal is first looking straight up through its head (the eyes are in the same orientation as in the diagram above), and in the right frame it has rotated the binocular-shaped eyes forward to look ahead.
Lateral views of the head of a living specimen of Macropinna microstoma, in a shipboard laboratory aquarium: (A) with the tubular eyes directed dorsally; (B) with the eyes directed rostrally. The apparent differences in lip pigmentation between (A) and (B) are because they were photographed at slightly different angles. (A) was shot from a more dorsal perspective and it shows the lenses of both eyes; the mouth is not sharply in focus. (B) shows only the right eye, with the lips in sharper focus.
Nature is always coming up with something stranger than we would imagine, and Macropinna is a perfect example. Apparently, the function of this arrangement is to give the animal a sensitive light detector for tracking its prey, bioluminescent jellyfish, and at the same time to shield the eyes from the stinging tentacles of the jelly while it’s eating it.
Robison BH, Reisenbichler KR (2008) Macropinna microstoma and the Paradox of Its Tubular Eyes. Copeia 2008(4):780-784.
…having seen this guy, I will not be surprised when we meet a lobster with rotating turrets. It’s scary weird.
Also, how come we humans don’t get to have a well-protected swivelling optical system inside a protective transparent cranium? Why do fish get all the cool stuff?
Wow, evolution goes every which way. Interesting fish, and the eyes appear to be adapted quite nicely to its environmental niche.
Now this is one way cool fish !!
And look creationists,we have similar eye muscles that this critter !Guess god’s work evolved over time hey….practised a lil on deep sea fish to get it right later,or something…LOL
Wow. Never knew that an animal with a transparent skull existed.
Wait, I got a good one…
[vader] I find your lack of face… disturbing. [/vader]
That is a very cool fish. I want to see one up close and personal. I think this is even cooler than sharks with laser beams attached to their heads. Err, “fricking” laser beams, that is.
Stephen Wells, nice.
Wow. That is seriously fascinating – in a creepy sort of way.
I don’t really know how to feel about this. I mean, on the one hand: OMG COOL! …. on the other hand: *shudder*
…but I have to say I’m not with the “Transparent skull would be awesome!” group. I mean, how on earth would I get my contacts in without painful and invasive trepanation?
Can sharks with lasers be far behind?
Transparent head?! Neeeeeat!
The info doesn’t say if the eyes can swivel independently of each other. If so, the creature could “keep an eye out” for predators with the other on its own prey. Would it have depth perception through the cranium?
Macropinna microstoma – doesn’t that mean big ears, small mouth?
Sounds like anime gone horribly wrong.
Oh my gosh, that’s so weird its wonderful. The transparent cranium and huge eyes just give you a warm, fuzzy feeling, don’t they?
Ugh, my bad – pinna is feather, not ear. That’s my blind learning of anatomical terms as an undergrad coming back to bite me. :D
That picture is….just a bit disturbing. Like something out of an alien-monster movie.
And right on cue, my Inner Creationist is composing a narrative about the impossibility of transitional forms between normal fish and this critter….
If something like that showed up in a science fiction movie, most people would say “No way, that could never happen…”
#14 Confused: Thats what is said on wikipedias entry on these fish, regarding the small toothless mouth.
I could have never imagined a fish like this existed. Freaky! Imagine, a transparent skull cap! How is this done? (I want one, too :) )
That is sooo cool!
you could apply your contact lens to your head like a hat
“Ugh, my bad – pinna is feather, not ear. That’s my blind learning of anatomical terms as an undergrad coming back to bite me”
Pinna also means the external ear, whether a flap like those on a dog or the odd-looking things on the sides of human heads.
What’s the skull made of? Is it fossilizable? Would it occur to your average paleontologist to look for something like this? I mean, what with the demands of the Global Darwinist Conspiracy, and all…
You could apply your contact lens to your head like a hat…
And just think how much easier they’d be to find if you dropped one.
That beastie is just so beautifully strange.
“You could apply your contact lens to your head like a hat…”
SeeOn. Apply directly to the forehead.
SeeOn. Apply directly to the forehead.
I can hear my brother now: Random evolution could never have created a fish like that! If you blew a wind through a junkyard of fish parts, it would never create a fish with a see-through skull!
Eamon:
Oh, I’m sure it’s just indigestion. Take an antacid and you’ll be fine!
I know what you’re thinking
You got a mind and it’s stinking
You know why?
You got a transparent cranium, a see through head
-The Hives, “See Through Head”
Scientist: Isn’t evolution wondrous and amazing
Creationist: There’s no way that something so complex could have evolved by random chance – what’s the use of a partially transparent skullcap?
Peanut Gallery: If god is such a great designer, why didn’t he give *me* a cephalopod eye in a transparent head (not to mention a properly functioning thyroid and a uterus that didn’t try to kill me)
In other news: Atheist bus ads are currently disallowed in Ottawa – there’s a poll at cfra.com for Pharynguloids to have fun with
It’s amazing what some vertebrates have managed to do with their eyes.The caecilians (legless amphibians) have co-opted eye muscles and other adjacent structures to produce a pair of extendable sensory tentacles. Like the fish above, members of the family Scolecomorphidae have the eye sockets protectively roofed over in bone. Their eyes are connected to the tentacles and can be extended entirely outside of the skull through the tentacular openings at will.
Wow, 24 comments and no one commented on the typo: “It’s ore like” should be “It’s more like”.
Cool fish, cool photos, cool blog.
That is one of the top 5 craziest fish I have ever seen. I need to find more images on this one because the ones above don’t seem to give me the total round-the-fish view to give me the arrangement and spacial relationship of the eyes and nostrils.
This is proof not of an intelligent designer, but of a designer who was stoned out of his fucking gourd when he made this fish.
I see a Sci-Fi Channel flick in the making.
Seriously though, utterly fascinating.
I wonder if this fish is closely related to pufferfishes. Similar mouth, fin placement and body shape. Must be of the same “kind”. (No, don’t shoot me, I am kidding)
This kind of thing makes a science-fiction writer’s job really difficult. Now they have to come up with something stranger than that…
There a video of this beastie on this page.
It’s cool as hell, but I’m gonna have nightmares….
What can i say? So cool…so creepy
I see the pictures and in my imagination I hear a Jacques Cousteau saying “…and here we have the rare WTFish!”
Dude! Cool! (It kinda looks like a mini-spy-submarine, with glowing torpedoes.)
Brilliant designer, make an eye that is set up to extract the most possible light, then stick it in a dome that refracts and attenuates the light. That makes so much sense. Of course it does make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
I’m now scared beyond belief. I’m barricading my flat and sharpening my knives. If this thing suddenly grows legs we’re all doomed…
OK,that is fuckin’ weird! And I mean that in the best possible way.
There’s a common design, if you see what I mean,
That fish uses parts from a B-17!
I want to be that fish.
Darn, why couldn’t WE have gotten that!? Never again would a kid have to hear those fun-killing words “Don’t play with that stick! You could put your brother’s eye out!”
“Nature is always coming up with something stranger than we would imagine”
You mean, “Intelligent designer is always …” ;)
(I mean, come on, seriously, people think some being could have just thought up this fish without some serious acid trips in his/her history?)
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
How big is that thing? How scared should I be?
I remember reading about the creatures from the Burgess Shale, and the discussions about body plans and how there was such a great variety then, as compared to now (granted, this is a long time ago, before rethinking about the classification of Cambrian organisms). What this fish shows is that even with a basic, common plan, there is a huge variety of possibilities within that basic plan. If we are lucky enough to discover life on a distant world, won’t it be fascinating to see the forms that evolution has crafted for those organisms? Will they be similar to life here, or will they be mind-bogglingly different?
BTW, what does a fish want with nostrils?
For a fish living in deep waters without much light, being able to smell is probably very important.
Yep, what comment 5 says. Reality is way, way, way stranger than fiction.
Bigfin smallmouth.
Just wait till the sea cucumbers evolve carnivory. I’ll try to find the photo later.
Noses are for smelling. That they got involved with breathing in sarcopterygians — twice independently, BTW — is a freaky, freaky accident.
@#19:
Not really… I’ve got two different prescriptions. Unless, of course, I could find a bi-focal lens-hat. Hmmmm….. No more gunk in the eyes….
David Marjanović, OM@51,
Thanks.
That is just freaking weird.
I’m a bit ashamed to admit this, but the first thing that came to my mind when I was marveling this creature was the Alien. Not so much the movie but titular creature, which also had a transparent cranium. I used to wonder if the Alien was supposed to have some sort of light-sensing apparatus under the see-through shell. Could it be the designers of the beast, H.R. Giger in particular, were aware of these weird fish?
Any reason why these lenses are green?
Does green light filter deeper through the ocean than any other light source? I always thought the higher wavelengths filtered better. Wouldn’t it be better adaptationist strategy to have indigo eyes? Or is the Green in the lenses from some kind of bioluminescence?
Very, very cool.
Come on Creationists, this is too fucking weird. Nobody comes up with this kind of stuff! If I was to design a fish like this, no one would believe me!
This is the coolest fish ever.
I thought the first picture was a painted illustration at first, especially the transparent part of the head.
I guess that humans don’t have a transparant skull because we have hair on top of it… Imagine staring at your hair all day and seeing whenever a hair falls out! Not that I have too much chance of that anymore, most of it is gone anyway :(
Also, baseball caps are simply too cool to not be able to wear anymore. We’d be blind with one of them things in front of our eyes. Maybe we could come up with some kind of baseball-sunglass-cap or summink, dunnow…
Yet an other marker for existence being so much more strange and interesting then I could imagine. Hell, it is so much more strange and interesting then what any religion dictates.
Now back to my regularly scheduled attempts at humor. I cannot help but to think of Brain a.k.a. Brain Child. Also, I want to make a remake of The Incredible Mr Limpet.
Odd that only the head is transparent. Or it the skin is transparent and the skull and the rest of the internal organs normal?
Someone already picked at “It’s ore like a telescope”
But I think Miers needs to go find that eye he lost… “because it’s are cylindrical”
Bioluminescent jellyfish glow greenish; perhaps the lens color fine-tunes the visual system to be most sensitive for the light they’re looking for.
@ #54:
combine this fish with the Moray eel to get a creature with the Moray’s inner set of jaws and this fish’s transparent cranium. Coooollll….
“That fish couldn’t never evoluted. It’s got no evolutioning, errrrrrrr, controversery. Drrrooooooooooooooool. Hyuk hyuk hyuk.” — Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina
They should develop this kind of technology for professional boxers, imagine the possibility.
proof positive that their was an inteligent design in this scientific fishmobile
How wonderful! Not so much ID as LSD.
I totally did think that, too. It appeared like a slightly morose but contemplative fish, perhaps pondering the function of its two weird blue-green brain lobes floating inside its clear skull. So much for armchair biology.
It’s lucky creationists heads aren’t transparent or we’d see how little gray matter they have.
A fish with an observation deck. Nifty!
Is it luminous, or is the glow in the vid grabs reflected camera flash?
Also, ditto, how big is it? And how tasty? I’m sensing a fly-rod record opportunity.
ice
That is totally cool!
So, is there any speculation (sorry, no pun intended) on the evolutionary development of this visual arrangement? Did this fish once have a more “normal” complex type of eye that was once external but has since retracted into it’s head? Or, is this a completely different evolutionary path from a primitive eyespot that was always internal?
yeah…. but what does it taste like?
I think this reinforces my belief that there is either no god, or that there is one, but he’s tripping balls all of the time.
Beaaaaautiful creature!
“-The Hives, “See Through Head””
I got an even better one.
“Weird fishes!” -Radiohead
Seeing something as strange and unlikely as this, living here on our own planet, tells me that life on other planets can’t be any weirder or less likely to occur.
Whoa, very, very nifty fish!
Hey, evolutionists, why do you think that God has so little imagination that he couldn’t come up with a weird fish without psychedelic drugs? The fish is weird from our point of view, yeah, but we’re pretty weird, too. I’m thinking that from God’s point of view, one is no weirder than the other, and each is perfectly suited for its environment.
God? What god. God doesn’t exist, so he/she/it can’t think anything up.
That is really freaking cool.
My darling wife insists that that fish can do no less than plot to take over the world. She claims great disappointment in the fact that we haven’t, in fact, had to welcome our new see-through-skull-fish overlords.
Aaaaarrrgh, PZ! “It gets the name ‘barreleyes’ because IT’S are cylindrical…”???!!
Aaaaarrrgh, PZ! “It gets the name ‘barreleyes’ because IT’S are cylindrical…”???!!
If that’s your argument for your god’s existence you’d better find some better psychedelic drugs. That such things exist is yet another nail in the already well-studded coffin that is the concept of creation.
The fish is weird from our point of view, yeah, but we’re pretty weird, too. I’m thinking that from God’s point of view, one is no weirder than the other, and each is perfectly suited for its environment.
Huh? What environment are we suited to?
“Cursed is the ground”! Seems to me that God intentionally made an environment to which we are not suited, as opposed to the Garden, where everything was free for the taking (no “sweat of the brow” 3:19), and Adam and Eve didn’t even need to wear clothes (“The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them” 3:21).
HughesNet caused the double post–sorry. Can’t wait until my contract runs out and I can find another carrier…
Its so marvelous an adaptation… i would never
have dreamed of seeing something like that.
Nature is so wonderful, who creationists cant see
the beauty of evolution ?
Im speachless, thanks PZ for showing us this.
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we *can* imagine.
I seem to have a slight case of SIWOTI, but that is clearly (if you’ll pardon the pun) not the fish’s cranium. I can’t think of any possible mechanism that would allow bone tissue to be so clear. More likely it’s a specialized epithelial layer, rather like the cornea of the eye. The actual skull would lie beneath and behind the eyes.
It’s still the weirdest thing I’ve seen in quite some time.
So Mad-Eye Moody was based on a real character? And lots of cephalopods have a pretty good imitation of a cloak of invisibility.
I didn’t know the Harry Potter series were biology textbooks.
Oh come on, someone just made this shit up with PhotoShop and you fell for it, right? It’s a reject from SpecWorld, and some stoned students wrote a Wiki entry. And what’s this Copeia rag anyway? Failure of peer-review, that’s what it is!
[/outraged]
Fish suck. It’s not fair they get so much cool weird stuff that us tetrapods miss out on.
Stever [11], This was on Discovery Channel (“Daily Planet”) tonight and they said that scientists have just realized it can move? roll? redirect? its eyes.
I don’t imagine they’ve observed it enough to know f the eyes can move independently. Deep-sea fish tend to die when they are brought up to the surface. My guess is that they have to find a fish with one of those deep-sea robo-cams and then follow it around without scaring it away, to observe it “in real life”. So we’ll probably have to wait for another lucky moment.
The good news is, it uses that little, toothless mouth to suck up jellyfish, so it’s going to have lots to eat as our depleted fish stocks let the jellies take over.
I see I was wrong: they videotaped it in an aquarium on board their ship, so it lived for at least a little while.
I was assuming that the cranium was unossified cartilage. But of course it could be skin.
You can all relax: Britannica.com says
Form&Function, I think you’re right. An article in Deep-Sea News refers to M. microstoma as having a “transparent shield” on its head that did not survive the rigors of trawling and was not shown in drawings of the fish.
Here she is on the youtube!
You know, if you going to have a transparent skull, you really should have a glowing, pulsating brain.
Personally, I think it would be awesome to have a translucent skull and translucent skin on my head. That way everybody could see my massive, throbbing brain.
Its kids don’t get away with anything.
Wow! Cool! A little butter and lemon juice and I bet it would taste amazing!
Spookfish video: 107,000 views. Typical MBARI video: 1,000 – 2,000 views. They’re going to wonder what happened to their servers.
My blog page: a new LOLcat.
can anyone please explain the morphology/evolutionary purpose of the big, flared nares? It’s really puzzling me!
You reckon? I don’t often consider weirdness to be correlated with tastiness – at least not in fish, anyway. Fruit, on the other hand…
That is quite possibly
the most fucked upcoolest thing I’ve ever seen!Intelligent design, my ass! Jesus must’ve been high on shrooms and mucking about in Dad’s shop.
Cool! Reminds me very strongly of deep sea Hyperiid Amphipods that also have huge eyes that take up most of the transparent, dome-like cephalon. A good example of convergent evolution! But don’t tell Conway Morris or he will start babbling again on how convergence always will lead to humanoid life forms!
And I thought it was a CGI hoax! come on, it is a hoax, right? Since when do fish have nostrils? Nostrils? What does it need nostrils for? What the? does it swim around smelling things? deep sea floaty things? that truly is weird…
The first image in this post was on the cover of the referenced issue of Copeia. It certainly grabbed my attention. Very cool!
Wow. Fantastic. Nature’s diversity is truly stunning.
The coolset looking fish I’ve ever seen.
Since, like, the Ordovician or so…
e.g.
You didn’t mention an even better relative – the brownsnout spookfish, which has similar vertical eyes (don’t know if they’re rotatable) but also has a “mirror” to reflect light that comes from the front onto a second retina on each side, so it effectively has four eyes. An article just came out on it in Current Biology:
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(08)01621-7
Wow, Midnight, thanks for the link–great paper!
And what a great week for fish eyes! I’m totally geeking out over here.
Well, well, said fish was just featured in the Oddball segment of Keith Olbermann’s ‘Countdown’ show.
Ok, fish have nostrils. But why? Being a newbie here, I’m after learning about evolution.
Maybe PZ can write a tiny bit about why fish have nostrils (kind of like why do men have nipples question); so, what do fish need to smell? Or is it a part of their breathing mechanism? Does fish having nostrils mean they were once land animals? I’ve never come across this before and it’s entirely new for me–can email me at thefox12atgmail.com
thank you!
This is madness!
Do I detect a Hiberno-English phrasing there? Not that there is anything wrong with that, no indeed.
What don’t they need to smell? Eyesight is only reliable in the shallower levels where light penetrates (and during the day, of course); their lateral lines can sense pressure waves, but that only helps with things that are moving nearby.
If fish want to find food or mates that are not easily visible, or avoid predators in the general area, they must be able to smell things out.
No, no. Fish have gills for breathing. As David Marjanović notes at comment #51, noses connecting up to breathing was unusual. And of course, such a thing could not happen until after lungs (or lung-like modifications of the gas-bladder) themselves evolved. The sarcopterygians (the term is perhaps more easily expressed in English as “lobe-finned (fish)”) of which David M writes were the ancestors of the lungfish, although of course, they were also the ancestors of all land vertebrates, which have the nose-to-breathing-system connection.
I have found this page to be helpful in explaining the fish-to-amphibian evolutionary transition, although I am afraid that it does not focus on noses as such:
http://www.csicop.org/intelligentdesignwatch/fishibian.html
Has anyone seen the video in which the specimen escapes from the collection tube near then end? If you look closely, it seems as if there’s some sort of string that pulls the specimen up and out of the tube. I’m still not convinced that these photos and videos are of a real organism…