Photographer captures image of rare fish that walks on its ‘hands’

There's a really obvious analogue to "Boaty McBoatface", and "spotted handfish" is not it. Among other dissimilarities, note that the string "fish" only appears once.

nicbou2• 3 years ago

If you insist

hooverd• 3 years ago

You missed your chance, pal!

aklemm• 3 years ago

They taste a little like people too.

werdnapk• 3 years ago

These handfish are related to frogfish which look pretty similar overall.

quietthrow• 3 years ago

Bingo! Came here to post the same.

contingo• 3 years ago

Many different groups of fish have independently evolved locomotion by "walking" on modified pectoral fins. One of my favorite examples are the bamboo sharks, among which are some pretty recently described species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiscyllium_halmahera

andrewflnr2• 3 years ago

What's the selective pressure there? Is it enough that it's less energy intensive than swimming, and their environment lets them get away with it?

natch• 3 years ago

There’s the reward conferred by being able to get further into shallow areas and take advantage of the additional food options they might offer over and above what’s available in deeper water. Transition zones are abundant with life and thus food.

pvaldes3• 3 years ago

Is a benthic predator, so I would assume stealth.

amelius• 3 years ago

So you see a fish walking and you take a ... photo?

danparsonson• 3 years ago

What would you suggest?

ilyagr• 3 years ago

Shake hands!

omoikane• 3 years ago

Would be nice to get a video instead of a still photo, but maybe the equipment was not setup for it.

Maursault3• 3 years ago

All of the colors we see, whether accurate or not, are digital post-processing lies. It's just not possible to capture images with colors like that underwater. The image of the spotted handfish, however, does seem to be the most honest of the bunch, except for its saturated blue eye.

wholinator2• 3 years ago

Why not? I mean, in total darkness you're not capturing anything. But it looks like the human has a light for navigation, and the camera gear presumably has the ability to emit light. And that light interacts with the matter in the fish and some of it comes back to the camera. How is it any different that taking a picture with the flash on at night?

And if you're referring to the water, can't you just seal a heavy duty camera and use that? Is there something about Deep water that desaturates all light that passes through even less than a meter of it?

vouaobrasil• 3 years ago

Yes, deep water adds a bluish haze to photos, which is caused by the fact that only certain wavelengths penetrate that far down compared to others. Most people postprocess to make photos at that depth appear as if they were taken in air, which IMO is harmless.

gerdesj• 3 years ago

I agree with you. Let's face it, perception is largely subjective. We can measure and agree a wavelength, frequency and magnitude of something that we call light with an instrument with a given specification.

We perceive the world with a set of instruments which are not something you would design from scratch! However they are exquisitely refined for the job in hand. They are also bloody odd.

Your eyes constantly wizz around (a sort of directed scanning) to paint a picture of what is going on around you - generally in front. Your fovea is hi res (that's what you see in focus) and the rest is a bit peripheral, so "fuzzy". The periphery is highly tuned to look for broad signs of threats and will go ping for any sort of movement. If the periphery goes ping then the fovea will be deployed to look for more detail.

Now we get to rods and cones ...

You also have rather more sensors - sound, and touch and more. The whole thing is a right old complicated mess - some bits work well and some don't.

cetra3• 3 years ago

You don't rely on the natural light for these photos, you use a very powerful strobe/flash which allows reds etc.. to come through.

Maursault3• 3 years ago

You don't rely on the natural light for these photos

That's only because natural light isn't available. Modern diving lights use inaccurate color-rendering cool white LEDs heavy in the blue spectrum. To get the reds, a diver would actually need a second light source that has red LEDs. So much depends on the narrow color spectrum profile of these shitty LEDs. But incan light sources, no longer made and sold but for vintage collectables, burn tungsten, so the color spectrum is wide and very much like that of the sun, though warmer than the sun at noon, and they always produce a perfect color rendition. High CRI LEDs from Nichia and Cree are getting closer to natural light, with 93+ CRI and warmer color temperatures with pinker tints, but dive light manufacturers have not discovered these yet. So the best a diving photographer can do is to search for and find a bright halogen light source around 3200K. But instead, they shoot washed-out RAW digital images and use digital color post-processing resulting in something that can't ever be seen with human eyes in the real world because it doesn't exist. So, lies.

luxuryballs• 3 years ago

I’m guessing he didn’t try one breaded and fried? That would be an awesome culinary blog, guy follows researchers around and makes unique dishes with the various exotic creatures they find.

pvaldes3• 3 years ago

As any other fish that eats mainly other fishes, should be tasty, but is small and endangered also, so we shouldn't do it.

I'm all about breeding <endangered life thing> massively even if we the price is to fry and eat a small amount of them as a result. Each extra dollar to conservation of obscure animals counts in large amounts, but frogfish reproduction has some characteristics that made very complicated to breed them. They can't breed in normal aquariums.

pvaldes3• 3 years ago

It walks exactly like any other frogfish in the family Antennariidae.

Updated: In fact is in a related but different family Brachionichthyidae. An endemism, endangered and interesting but, apart of this, is a typical member of the order Lophiiformes.

gavmor• 3 years ago

Of the red handfish, only 100 adults are thought to remain, while the Ziebell’s hasn’t been spotted in the wild since 2007.

Well this is actually quite sad.

brunorsini• 3 years ago

Always fascinating to see evolution arrive at similar outcomes in vastly distanced species / environments. Not only the "hands" are so familiar to us, the whole animal resembles an axolotl.

tabtab• 3 years ago

Fundamentalists are probably down there now trying to squish them out. "Blasphemy, fish can't walk!"

pseudotrash• 3 years ago

This is what Stewart Lee talked about:

And before, 400 million years ago, when the first fish crawled up onto the land.

Our land.

You get back in the sea.

You finned c$nt.

Coming up here, onto our land with your barely developed lungs and your hopes and dreams of a better tomorrow for fish.

Get back in the sea.

My name's Paul Nuttall of UKIP and I say we need to ensure the brightest and best fish stay in the sea and concentrate on making it aquatically prosperous instead of coming up here onto the land and beginning the process of evolution that will eventually lead to all life on Earth as we know it.

Photographer captures image of rare fish that walks on its ‘hands’

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