The icefish photo below is a family of perciform fish found in the cold waters around Antartica and southern South America. It’s also called white-blooded fish due to its transparent appearence.
Interestingly, the blood is transparent because they have no hemoglobin and only defunct erythrocytes. The cold water carries enough oxygen that support the fish to live and as water can dissolve more oxygen when it’s colder. Their gills have grown large and the skin is filled with capillaries that absorb oxygen directly from the water as does a frog’s.
Over million years, others change have adapted these fish to living in extra-cold water but if water warms up again as the result of global warming, for sure they’ll extinct. It’s not often that we have the chance to see this thing, especially when “transparent fish” species is very rare nowadays.
via: Spluch source: Science Notes
July 20th, 2007 at 1:40 am
wow this is truley amasing stay in touch
August 1st, 2007 at 6:00 am
WOW! I didn’t know of a truly transparent fish before. There are jelly fish and other squids and shrimps which are a bit transparent, but never seen anything like this one before.