Albino Ratfish
Albino Ratfish
I would love to see one of these beauties during a deep night dive!
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/l ... sh24m.html
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/l ... sh24m.html
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- Aquaphile
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I had wondered about the fate of this fish ever since it was mentioned, since the original post didn't say if it was kept alive after being *trawled* in the name of science.
BTW, last time I was at Three Tree, right by the wolf eel den my buddy and I both noticed an unusual sight- a ratfish with pure white eyes, like it had cataracts or something. I noticed him do a double take, and waited for it to swing around, and the other eye was white as well. I had to find another ratfish to confirm what I thought, that it isn't normal. I don't know if it could see or not, or hunted by other senses, and why it hadn't been picked off by any predator (we noticed on another dive there a couple ratfish with blunt looking tails, and some wandering dogfish)
gomi_
BTW, last time I was at Three Tree, right by the wolf eel den my buddy and I both noticed an unusual sight- a ratfish with pure white eyes, like it had cataracts or something. I noticed him do a double take, and waited for it to swing around, and the other eye was white as well. I had to find another ratfish to confirm what I thought, that it isn't normal. I don't know if it could see or not, or hunted by other senses, and why it hadn't been picked off by any predator (we noticed on another dive there a couple ratfish with blunt looking tails, and some wandering dogfish)
gomi_
- Joshua Smith
- I've Got Gills
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I don't agree with this here scientific-type statement. I saw a ratfish on my very first open water dive at cove 1, and practically every dive since. I've seen them above 20 fsw plenty of times.....sure, I've seen them below 100' lots of times, too, but, heck, "people rarely see them?"Even though ratfish can grow up to three feet in length, people rarely see them because they prefer very deep water, says Greg Bargmann, research scientist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Ratfish will move into the shallows at night to feed but rarely strike a baited hook. Only net fishermen encounter them regularly.
Maritime Documentation Society
"To venture into the terrible loneliness, one must have something greater than greed. Love. One needs love for life, for intrigue, for mystery."
"To venture into the terrible loneliness, one must have something greater than greed. Love. One needs love for life, for intrigue, for mystery."
You appear to have us confused with "people" We are not "people" we are DIVERS !!Nailer99 wrote:I don't agree with this here scientific-type statement. I saw a ratfish on my very first open water dive at cove 1, and practically every dive since. I've seen them above 20 fsw plenty of times.....sure, I've seen them below 100' lots of times, too, but, heck, "people rarely see them?"Even though ratfish can grow up to three feet in length, people rarely see them because they prefer very deep water, says Greg Bargmann, research scientist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Ratfish will move into the shallows at night to feed but rarely strike a baited hook. Only net fishermen encounter them regularly.
I think that is what the guy ment by his quote... : )
I don't really agree with their little expedition, did you see all the ratfish on their boat floor?We brought up a deep tow, and I knew it was going to have hundreds, if not thousands, of ratfish," he recalls. "And then I saw it."
Gleaming like a pearl in the mass of brown was a pure white albino, a rare phenomenon in the aquatic world.
"This animal would just stand out like a beacon," says UW fisheries professor Ted Pietsch. "I don't know why it wasn't eaten long before."
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Yeah, we're just gonna pull up every fish that is in this area, so we can see how many there are, and how the populations are doing. Um...now that we have them all on the boat, I think we can safely say the population at the bottom is currently...um... *ZERO*. ](*,) That's on the same level as the dolphin killers in China
I saw a ratfish at shilshole marina in less than 5', my wife and I were walking past and I saw it circling around looking like it was hunting. We watched it for 5-10 minutes, it wasn't distressed.
So, I'm assuming to a non-diver, any water that you can't see below the surface is *DEEP WATER*
gomi_
I saw a ratfish at shilshole marina in less than 5', my wife and I were walking past and I saw it circling around looking like it was hunting. We watched it for 5-10 minutes, it wasn't distressed.
So, I'm assuming to a non-diver, any water that you can't see below the surface is *DEEP WATER*
gomi_
- Joshua Smith
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gomi_otaku wrote:Yeah, we're just gonna pull up every fish that is in this area, so we can see how many there are, and how the populations are doing. Um...now that we have them all on the boat, I think we can safely say the population at the bottom is currently...um... *ZERO*. ](*,) That's on the same level as the dolphin killers in China
I saw a ratfish at shilshole marina in less than 5', my wife and I were walking past and I saw it circling around looking like it was hunting. We watched it for 5-10 minutes, it wasn't distressed.
So, I'm assuming to a non-diver, any water that you can't see below the surface is *DEEP WATER*
gomi_
Yeah, pretty much.
Maritime Documentation Society
"To venture into the terrible loneliness, one must have something greater than greed. Love. One needs love for life, for intrigue, for mystery."
"To venture into the terrible loneliness, one must have something greater than greed. Love. One needs love for life, for intrigue, for mystery."
- Joshua Smith
- I've Got Gills
- Posts: 10250
- Joined: Mon Apr 03, 2006 9:32 pm
Cold_H2O wrote: You appear to have us confused with "people" We are not "people" we are DIVERS !!
I think that is what the guy ment by his quote... : )
Exactly.
Maritime Documentation Society
"To venture into the terrible loneliness, one must have something greater than greed. Love. One needs love for life, for intrigue, for mystery."
"To venture into the terrible loneliness, one must have something greater than greed. Love. One needs love for life, for intrigue, for mystery."
- Joshua Smith
- I've Got Gills
- Posts: 10250
- Joined: Mon Apr 03, 2006 9:32 pm
Calvin wrote:That's pretty cool!
Totally non-sequitur. Did you quit taking your ADD medication again? Damnit, I put all your pills in those little plastic boxes with the days of the week on them for you every Sunday...... ](*,)
Maritime Documentation Society
"To venture into the terrible loneliness, one must have something greater than greed. Love. One needs love for life, for intrigue, for mystery."
"To venture into the terrible loneliness, one must have something greater than greed. Love. One needs love for life, for intrigue, for mystery."
These trawls have been going on for a very long time and are there to monitor the health of Hood Canal. Despite all those ratfish on the deck that you saw in the picture, that trawl probably didn't even put a dent in the population - if ratfish populations were that dire, why have their populations been going up over the years? Believe me, those trawls do more good than harm and collect invaluable data. We don't *like* killing fish - our goal is to monitor and help them when it's needed and unfortunately the methods for collecting the knowledge of whether or not populations are in trouble often involving sampling (and hence killing) those fishes.gomi_otaku wrote:Yeah, we're just gonna pull up every fish that is in this area, so we can see how many there are, and how the populations are doing. Um...now that we have them all on the boat, I think we can safely say the population at the bottom is currently...um... *ZERO*. ](*,) That's on the same level as the dolphin killers in China
The people on board tried to save the albino ratfish for donation to the Seattle Aquarium but it didn't survive. Tissue samples for DNA studies were taken and it now lives in the UW Fish Collection for any to see (yes, the UW Fish Collection is a public venue that you can arrange to take a tour of if you would like to do so. ALSO, if you have a picture of a fish that you cannot identify, you are more than welcome to come down and have us check it out - we most likely can figure it out just from the picture, but if not, we have tons of identification guides as well as probably having the actual species of fish in the collection).
The person that wrote the story on the Albino Ratfish must have known that scuba divers often see them since I was there and said 'Yeah, we scuba divers see them quite a lot'. I don't know why that little tidbit was left out - not important enough? *shrugs* But yes, it is known that scuba divers encounter them quite often...they're probably my favorite fish to see in all actuality.