Record Breaking Tropical Fish
Everybody has a favourite tale to tell about the most unusual and
spectacular fish they've owned or heard about. Unfortunately, most of
these fish facts could just as easily be fishy fiction, as they're
difficult to verify - but there are some strange and unusual fish tales
out there that will amaze you.
Tales of record breaking tropical fish.
Big and Small
Although the biggest tropical fish kept by
hobbyists are naturally limited by the size of their tanks, some of them
get pretty huge - it's not unheard of for dedicated enthusiasts to keep
five foot sharks in tanks in their own homes! Still, even that doesn't
compare to one humble catfish.
This amazing specimen, a close
relative of species commonly kept in aquaria, was caught in the Mekong
Delta, where fish are hunted both for food and to supply the aquarium
trade. Nine feet in length, it weighed a massive forty six stone, making
it the biggest freshwater fish ever found. It was a catfish.
The
smallest fish, on the other hand, is also the world's smallest
vertebrate. It took a while for scientists to notice it in the wild
because, as well as being as little as 7mm in length even as an adult,
it's almost transparent. Some aquarists are getting very excited about
this fish, but you'd have to pay close attention to spot it in your
tank. Ironically, it's known as the stout infantfish.
Fast and Slow
The infantfish is as small as it is partly because
it forsakes other aspects of growth - including scales and pelvic fins -
in order to reach sexual maturity as fast as possible, increasing the
chance that it will breed successfully before predators find it. But
some other fish do this even faster. The Australian coral reef pygmy
goby, a past contender for the title of World's Smallest Fish, lives
fast and dies young at only eight weeks of age - just three weeks into
its adult life.
The record for the longest lived tropical fish is heavily disputed,
though the rule is that the warmer the water it lives in, the shorter a
fish's lifespan will be. Some cichlids live upwards of fifteen years,
but that's nothing to the common goldfish, which can live into its
forties. However, if taking life easy is the trick, there's one marine
fish that has it beat.
Seahorses are the world's slowest fish - so
slow that they have to rely on camouflage to avoid predators, and
they're incapable of swimming against a current. Instead they use their
curling tails to hook onto plants, effectively climbing rather than
swimming much of the time. But they're not the strangest climbing
fish...
That record goes to the climbing perch from India, which
can not only walk about out of the water but can actually climb trees,
using its bony gill plates to hook into the bark. Climbing perches have
been successfully kept in captivity, but you'd need a very special
set-up to enable them to perform this trick.
Biggest Aquarium
Speaking of special set-ups, there have been
many contenders for the title of World's Biggest Aquarium, but it's now
widely accepted that this belongs to Georgia Aquarium in the US city of
Atlanta, which contains 6.3 million gallons of water. To put that in
perspective, it provides enough space for four whale sharks, the biggest
fish of all, to swim around, alongside three beluga whales and a
gigantic manta ray.
The manta ray is the largest of all the
rays - this one has a twenty foot 'wingspan', but they have been known
to grow up to twice that size! Fortunately, most of the rays kept by
aquarium hobbyists stay smaller, but it just goes to show that you
always need to make sure you know what you're letting yourself in for.