Fishes: The Animal Answer Guide

Introduction

Bruce Collette and I have both been fascinated by animals, especially fishes, since we were young. I had my first aquarium before I was 10, and by high school in Van Nuys, California, my bedroom was a chaos of tanks, pumps, heaters, and bubbling noises. With encouragement from my biology teachers , a couple of other fellow fish nuts and I started a shark research group. We collected spiny dogfish for a professor at UCLA who was interested in blood chemistry, spending all-nighters on fishing barges off Redondo Beach, catching sharks for science. We were on top of the world. In college at UC Berkeley, I got more serious about fishes, learned to scuba dive, and managed the Zoology Department’s fish collection. I took ichthyology from the late Dr. George Barlow, an animal behaviorist, which got me started observing fish behavior. Upon graduating, I joined the Peace Corps in Palau, Western Caroline Islands, as a fisheries specialist. Palau has spectacular coral reefs and I spent most work hours and every weekend diving , catching, and watching fishes. After graduate school at the University of Hawaii and Cornell University (lots more fish watching for science), I was hired at the University of Georgia in Athens, as an ichthyologist, where I taught Ichthyology, Animal Behavior, and Conservation Biology for 30 years. I study marine and freshwater fishes, mostly by diving and observing predator-prey interactions. In recent years I’ve focused on conservation because many of the places I visited early in my career have deteriorated, as have their fishes. Bruce Collette’s interest in animals began during summers at a camp in the Adirondack Mountains. In high school on Long Island, he experimented with color change in frogs; during vacations from his undergraduate days at Cornell University, he studied lizard behavior and morphology while visiting his parents in Cuba. Bruce switched to fishes in graduate school at Cornell and received his Ph.D. for a taxonomic study of a large group of freshwater fishes called darters that live in streams and rivers from Maine to Florida. In 1960, Bruce accepted a position as an ichthyologist at the National Systematics Laboratory in what is now the National Marine Fisheries Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency, housed in the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Bruce’s research focuses on the anatomy, systematics, evolution, and biogeography of tunas and their relatives plus other fishes such as halfbeaks, Introduction xiii Gene Helfman learning about Colorado River fishes at the Sonoran Desert Museum, Tucson, Arizona. Photo by J. L. Meyer Bruce Collette shows an Atlantic Bluefin Tuna skull to a young visitor to the Sant Ocean Hall of the Smithsonian Institution. Photo by Mike Vecchione xv Introduction needlefishes, and toadfishes. His research entails visiting major fish collections around the world, collecting expeditions on various vessels, and using scuba to collect and observe fishes. Results of his research have been published in over 250 papers in many scientific journals plus two regional fish guides, The Fishes of Bermuda and Bigelow and Schroeder’s Fishes of the Gulf of Maine. Bruce has also taught ichthyology as a summer field course in Massachusetts , Bermuda, and Maine. Bruce and I have known each other for probably 25 years. Given our very different research specialties but our common passion for fishes, we cover much of the broad topic of ichthyology. In 1997 we published an ichthyology textbook, The Diversity of Fishes: Biology, Evolution, and Ecology, now in its second (2009) edition and the most widely used college-level ichthyology text in the world. But its approach is too technical for a general audience, so we were delighted when the Johns Hopkins University Press asked us to write a fish book for their Animal Answer Guide series. Fishes are just too interesting and important to be reserved for college students. We would have loved to find a book such as this one when our fascination in fishes was new. We hope this book answers questions and sparks the kind of excitement about these wonderful animals that we have felt for so long. Gene Helfman This page intentionally left blank Fishes: The Animal Answer Guide This page intentionally left blank ...