Meet the amazing mummichog, the little East Coast fish that scientists adore
CBC
You likely don't know this, but a species swimming around New Brunswick waters is the only fish that has been to space.
Granted, they didn't travel there on their own, but the tiny mummichog managed to meet NASA's tough criteria for a trip to Skylab.
Found in salty estuaries along the East Coast from the Maritimes to Georgia, researchers marvel at the mummichog's toughness and adaptability.
"They are cool," Noah Bressman, an assistant professor at Salisbury University in Maryland, said in a phone interview.
"They can move on land. They can breathe air. They are extremely tolerant of a wide range of conditions. They live in the most extreme habitats of fish."
Bressman has been studying the mummichog since his undergraduate days.
"Also they have these adorable little smiles when you look at them," Bressman said. "You can't not think, 'Oh, that's a cute little fish' when you see one."
His interest in them piqued one day working at a sea table — essentially a large, low aquarium with about 10 centimetres of water in it used for studying fish in the lab.
He noticed a mummichog on the floor, about three metres from the tank. The fish are known to jump and flop over land to get to nearby tidal pools.
Bressman thought nothing of it, just a fish that had accidentally jumped the wrong way.
"So I put it back in the tank, and the next day, a different 'mummi' within the exact same spot, 10 feet away on the shiny floor. Like, this can't be a coincidence."
Bressman decided to film the fish moving over dry land, using a high-speed camera.
That's when he noticed that mummichogs stood upright on their tails for a few tenths of a second between jumps.
"And, so, that upright behaviour, it seemed functionally unnecessary to do two consecutive jumps. So, I was like, 'What could they be doing?' Perhaps maybe it's reorienting them because they have their eyes on the side of their head."
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