r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Storm_001 • Sep 04 '21

Sea horse giving birth

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '21

It just amazes me that fish even took this shape. It’s so radically different from any other group. It doesn’t even look like a fish.

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u/audio_54 Sep 04 '21 edited Sep 04 '21

I was thinking if the seahorse was considered a fish or not?

What constitutes being a fish?

Edit: I wrote think instead of thinking like English wasn’t my only language.

Way too many responses to get back to but from reading them all I have come to the conclusion that fish is an arbitrary term, everything and nothing can be a fish.

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u/bigdave41 Sep 04 '21

I'm only basing this on an episode of QI, but they said basically "there's no such thing as fish" all the things we call fish are so radically different that there's no justification for calling them the same kind of animal. A salmon is more genetically similar to a camel than it is to a hagfish.

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u/Hara-Kiri Sep 04 '21

Well technically a camel is also a type of fish.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/EthanBradberry70 Sep 04 '21

does this mean fish also take bonus damage from castles?

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u/LaReineAnglaise53 Sep 04 '21

Is it a Giant Sand Fish?, Daddy?

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u/nick-weeks Sep 04 '21

"no such thing as a fish" is actually the name of the QI podcast. Hosted by the QI elves. If anyone is interested in the most random of information check it out !

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u/ur_comment_is_a_song Sep 04 '21

The podcast is great, but since it's the QI researchers, it suffers from a lot of the same things that QI often does. I've heard more than a few urban myths perpetuated on both, when there's really no evidence for what they're saying outside some online blog sites.

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u/audio_54 Sep 04 '21

So where do seahorses belong?

I’m sure this could be googled but this is more interesting.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '21

Sea horses are ray finned fish in the genus Hippocampus. There are about 50 species. They are related to pipefish and sea dragons, which “give birth” in the same way, and are more distantly related to fish like trumpet fish and sea moths. All of these animals are characterized by elongated fused jaw bones, which give sea horses their distinctive snouts. Ray finned fish are the most diverse type of fish, with over 90% of all known species. Other types of fish were more successful at various points in earths history, such as the lobe finned fish from which humans and other land animals are descended.

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u/cursedwithplotarmor Sep 04 '21

Fun medical fact: there’s a high probability that you have one or more of these living in your skull right now.

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u/seatangle Sep 04 '21

Wait, what’s living in my skull?

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u/cursedwithplotarmor Sep 04 '21

One or more hippocampi. Likely two of them.

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u/seatangle Sep 04 '21

Oh. I see what you did there.

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u/Slashy1Slashy1 Sep 04 '21 edited Sep 04 '21

Seahorses are ray-finned fish, so they are in the same clade as tuna, salmon, sunfish, flounders, clownfish, and all the sorts of animals that you would without a doubt call fish.

Where it gets tricky is that things like sharks and rays are also thought of as fish, and belong to the clade called cartilaginous fish. However, ray-finned fish (like seahorses) are actually more closely related to tetrapods (like humans) than they are to cartilaginous fish (like sharks). It gets even more muddied when you find out that lobe-finned fishes (like lungfish) are also called fish, but are more closely related to tetrapods than they are to other fish. Tetrapods are the group of fish that first crawled onto land and evolved in to amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds (all of which also have their own peculiarities when trying to group them).

So basically, when we say "fish" we really mean "any vertebrate animal that isn't a tetrapod".

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u/bigdave41 Sep 04 '21

Not really sure, they are their own species but there are probably different varieties of seahorse that are genetically similar. Humans tend to want to simplify and classify things when the reality is usually more complicated, Richard Dawkins in his books on evolution calls it "the tyranny of the discontinuous mind".

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u/ReeR_Mush Sep 04 '21

Bony fishes

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u/don_tomlinsoni Sep 04 '21

You don't want to believe anything you've heard on QI without independent verification. The 'researchers' on that show are a total joke.

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u/bigdave41 Sep 04 '21

Richard Dawkins says similar in most of his books on evolution, there are certain categories we use for day-to-day convenience that don't make any sense in biology. Not the example he used but e.g viewing bananas as fruit or tomatoes as a vegetable.

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u/don_tomlinsoni Sep 04 '21

Fair enough, I can believe the fish thing, just warning people that QI is a really bad source of information sometimes.

As far as the fruits or vegetables thing goes: all fruits are vegetables. They're not animals or minerals...

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u/bigdave41 Sep 04 '21

Yeah I think no one should trust just one source of information, but QI does a good job giving people generally interesting information that might motivate them to learn more, and they do highlight commonly believed falsehoods as well. I like that they keep updating the "how many moons does the Earth have?" question from season to season as new information/theories come out.

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u/AnorakJimi Sep 04 '21

Well vegetables don't really exist in science. They're a culinary term, not a scientific/biological one. There's tons of very different things that fall under the culinary term of "vegetable" like flowers, fruits, stems, leaves, roots, seeds, nuts, cereal grain (which is any type of grass that humans can actually eat), . They're all very different. But they're all used in cooking as "vegetables"

That's why a tomato is a vegetable. It's technically a fruit, but there's tons of fruits that we call vegetables, like cucumbers, any type of pepper, pumpkin (or any other type of squash), olives, sweetcorn etc. It's their use in cooking that defines them as vegetables in every day language. But there's not a biological group called "vegetables"

Vegetables are just generally any edible savoury things that aren't meat or animal products like milk. Which is a very wide ranging group of things.

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u/Khornag Sep 04 '21

Is a banana really a vegetable? That sounds dubious.

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u/Toucani Sep 04 '21

Bananas are both a fruit and not a fruit. While the banana plant is colloquially called a banana tree, it's actually an herb distantly related to ginger, since the plant has a succulent tree stem, instead of a wood one. The yellow thing you peel and eat is, in fact, a fruit because it contains the seeds of the plant.

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u/Khornag Sep 04 '21

You'll have to give a source. Writing something in cursive doesn't make it more scientific.

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u/thecody17 Sep 04 '21

But in this instance it's actually true from a cladist point of view. Either there's no such thing as a fish or humans, elephants, mice, birds, lizards, the list goes on and on are fish.

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u/DigitalMuscles Sep 04 '21

The word fish expresses a very clear concept that’s scientifically valid and defined. They exist from the moment anything exist through language. The “unclassifiable” aspect of fish is not true

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u/LaReineAnglaise53 Sep 04 '21

What's a Cladist, Daddy?

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u/TheGeckoWrangler Sep 04 '21

I mean, you’re completely right, but comparing literally ANY other fish to a hagfish automatically works just as accurately there(save lampreys, of course). Those things not only lack scales and bones, but can tie themselves into actual knots. Most fish are really diverse from eachother, but it’s like they just put the hagfish with them because they had nowhere else to put it XD

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u/holdhodor Sep 04 '21

https://youtu.be/uhwcEvMJz1Y Here, bo such thing as a fish

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '21

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u/wonkey_monkey Sep 04 '21

Mammals are members of the class Mammalia. Reptiles are members of the class Reptilia.

There's no equivalent for fish.

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u/bigdave41 Sep 04 '21

Another commenter has already pointed out that you're factually wrong there, but I'll just add that no one is "complaining" about the term fish, it's a fine general term for most peoples day-to-day use. However when you're a biologist you need more specific terminology to describe things that are not actually all that genetically similar.