good morning John one of the main thing
about fish is the swimming being on land
can suck because of how stuck you are to
it like the top-performing human in the
world right now can get like eight feet
off the ground unassisted and then after
all that work they just come right back
down this doesn't actually sound that
bad until you look at it but like lots
of animals have like literally evolved
their arms off to be able to swim up
into the air
bugs bats birds flying is extremely
useful it adds a third dimension to the
two-dimensional world I inhabit it's
easy to forget that air is a fluid until
you stick your face under one of those
high-performance hand dryers water is
also a fluid it's just much more dense
animals who live there all of them fly
through water well okay not all John
this is the red hand fish they can swim
but they almost never do instead when
they move which they rarely do they walk
across the bottom of the ocean on their
modified fins that look almost
upsettingly hand like canned fish are
kind of angler fish and they live in
only one place in the world southeastern
Australia and they're not doing great
the red hand fish is arguably the rarest
fish on earth there are only two
populations each with less than 50 adult
individual though it's not for lack of
trying hand fish mom's vigilantly
protect their eggs from potential
nerado's for weeks on end
never leaving them until they hatch and
every time a clutch of red hand fish
eggs hatches the world population of red
hand fish literally doubles so most fish
used these hatching events for what's
called dispersal the little fish are
larval forms and they become like
planktonic they just let the ocean carry
them around most of them end up in
places that aren't gonna be great but
some of them end up in places where they
can thrive but no and this is very weird
hand fish babies are just hand fish that
are smaller they have no swim bladders
just like adult hand fish they just sink
to the ground because they are very
dense just like adult hand fish so there
are these two isolated pockets where red
hand fish are and all the babies just
fall to the ground in the two places
where they're left this is not great for
the survival of the speed
c--'s indeed and this kind of blew my
mind the iucn which is the organization
responsible for this stuff has
classified only one marine fish as
officially extinct that was not meant to
be a pond and this is not to say that
there haven't been other marine fish
that have gone extinct this is more a
function of not knowing very much about
the ocean the smooth hand fish is known
from a single museum specimen that was
collected 203 years ago and after a lot
of science and a lot of surveys it has
not been seen since
will the red hand fish share its fate
possibly but the good news is that the
hand fish conservation project is right
now raising recently hatched hand fish
in captivity allowing them to introduce
new genetic diversity into these two
isolated populations and potentially to
reintroduce them to new habitats and as
for why these little angler fish choose
to walk instead of fly through their
world this is really important there is
a reason but we do not know it we do not
know
almost everything we feel like we do
because we have a tremendous bias toward
knowing things that are known because of
how we cannot know the things that are
unknown making these bizarre beasts
videos reminds me that the things we
hear about these amazing astounding
facts from the natural world every one
of those isn't something that somebody
like picked out of a book it was
something that was discovered or figured
out by a person by people the most
bizarre of beasts John I'll see you on
Tuesday
thank you to the wonderful people at the
hand fish conservation project for
helping me out with this video and also
for all the lovely footage I love your
fish thank you for trying to save them
check out their work at hand fish orj
you