Evolution Article and Reflection

Blobfish?

                 

                 The blobfish is a facinating creature and one that I always have a lot of questions about. What is even more perplexing about them is that everyone has many unanswered questions about the blobfish , making room for questions and hypotheses. 

                 I didn't pick an article really, but I picked a cool presentation about the evolution of blobfish, and I went back to verify with other sources to make sure this one was credible. (it is) The blobfish is a sea creature that evolved from a larger sized fish that used to live closer to shore than they do now. The fish is now only about 30 cm long at average and live between 2,000 and 4,000 feet deep in the ocean. They came to be this way because over time, the family "realized" that they had to compete too much for food closer to the surface, so they gradually made their way down deeper and deeper until now, where they have virtually no competition for food. Because where they live has so much pressure due to how deep they are, they replaced their average fish skin and replaced it with a kind of gelatin. They also got rid of their gas filled swim bladder, for they would burst under the pressure and became a gelatinous blob. The pressure now cannot bother their innards or skin. They have easy access to food AND because of their gel bodies, they don't even have to swim because they just go where the ocean takes them as they suck up anything edible along the way. This works because their gel bodies have a perfect buoyancy level that allows them to float just below the ocean floor without having to use a speck of energy to swim. This results in them barely having any muscles at all. This also means that if they are taken out from the water, they will loose any form of shape, shrivel up, and die. 

               Overall, the blobfish is a remarkable creature, not only because of its' uniqueness, but because of all the questions left to answer such as how they reproduce or how their eggs are fertilized or IF their eggs even need to be fertilized or if they have genders or sexual organs or how they behave. I am so glad I read about this animal because I has so many of my questions answered, but I still get to hypothesize the unanswered questions. 

Work Cited:
The Blobfish. (n.d.). Retrieved from Prezi website: http://prezi.com/ddeb0r_zlpga/the-evolution-of-the-blobfish/

Picture Source:
http://www.fishwallpapers.com/wallpapers/blobfish-pic.jpg