Alex Maile

Happy Monday from these three amigos
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It blows my mind how many have managed to escape even with some sort of cover…

They are jumpers so I would suggest a lid of some sort.

The man did have food 😉

Just clown’in around
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New addition to the aquarium! A Longnose Hawkfish (Oxycirrhites typus). Loves the camera more than any other fish I’ve had.

New urchin, who dis?

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Hoplostethus mediterraneus – the Mediterranean slimehead (Trachichthyidae). Remarkably, slimeheads have been documented to live for over 230 years.

This specimen is KU 42748 from the KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum.

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Ah nuts

Monocentris japonica — the Japanese pineapplefish (or pinecone fish)

Anyone else walk into the fish store and suddenly feel like handing over their wallet for a new tank?

Went to Duluth to celebrate wedding anniversary prior to #JMIH. Pretty cool aquarium and sturgeon touch tank!

Did you get a tour of the ichthyology collection? We could’ve given you the tour!

Returned from visiting family to see new leaves on my mangroves!
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Forbidden cannoli

Always ask your doctor for a copy of your CT scan. You never know when it may come in handy, say for Halloween…

Such smol mouths 👄… Poor things don’t have typical tetrodontid beaks

Have you ever seen a sargassum frogfish (Histrio histrio) eat in slowmo? This is Freddy eating his favorite food: anchovies. #marinelife #anglerfish

Have you ever seen a juvenile Buffalo Trunkfish (Lactophrys trigonus)? I absolutely love their weird skeleton which forms this bony carapace making their body rigid.

New molecular + morphological anglerfish phylogeny! #marinelife

11/11 Natural history collections like @kunhm.bsky.social, #FieldMuseum, and @nhm.org where many anglerfishes in this study were examined are vital to advancing our understanding of biodiversity. Publicly funded research and collections like these make this work possible.

10/11 A huge thanks to my coauthors and to @stcloudstate.bsky.social , @kunhm.bsky.social , and @kubiology.bsky.social for their support. I’m also grateful to the museum staff and collections, as well as the reviewers and editors at @plosone.org for helping bring this work to fruition.

9/11 Finally, for some cool morphology, we identified new traits to help diagnose monkfishes (Lophiidae), including elongated dorsal and pelvic fin elements, and we show that hinged teeth are a shared derived trait of all anglerfishes!

8/11 We used geometric morphometrics to explore how depth transitions affect body form in anglerfishes. Frogfishes (Antennariidae) and deep-sea ceratioids (Ceratioidei) have the highest body shape disparity, despite living in vastly different environments.

7/11 Our character state reconstructions show independent deep-water transitions in monkfishes and batfishes, and a deep-sea invasion in coffinfishes and ceratioid anglerfishes, with ceratioids anglers also moving to pelagic environments.

6/11 We revise frogfish taxonomy by consolidating proposed frogfish families as subfamilies within Antennariidae and introduce a new subfamily, Fowlerichthyinae. This revision provides taxonomic stability while enhancing clarity for researchers, conservationists, and divers.

5/11 In our morphological analysis, we found several features that were once thought to distinguish these groups, like restricted gill openings, absence of ribs, anal spines, and certain cranial bones, are actually shared characteristics between these two groups!

4/11 We found strong support that anglerfishes are monophyletic and are sister group to the Tetraodontoidei (pufferfishes + triggerfishes), not the toadfishes as traditionally thought.

3/11 To study their evolutionary history, we combined newly sequenced UCEs, mitochondrial genomes, and 100 morphological characters across all major anglerfish lineages.