How does Ratfish catch during sex? With your forehead, of course

It is not easy to have sex when you are slippery in the ocean, with a couple of limbless fish.

But Ratfish has a workaround. The male forehead has a unique, club -shaped appendage, called Teenkulam, which is used to stick to the woman’s pectoral fin while having sexual intercourse.

Some scientists thought that these appendages were rolled with the same hard, bright scales that cover the bodies of the distant cousin, sharks and rays of Ratfish. According to new research, this is not the case.

“No, they are completely teeth,” Curly Cohen, Marine Biologist at the University of Washington, told that As it happens Host Nil Koksal. “Like teeth in your mouth or your cat’s mouth or in Ratfish’s mouth.”

conclusion, National Academy of Sciences Published last week in proceedingsShed new lights on the deep creatures, while increasing the prolonged perception in evolutionary biology that teeth especially grow in the mouth.

Cohen said, “It highlights the flexibility of something that we think is so original about vertebrae and animals.” “It is good to see something that is so important – teeth – pop up in this really interesting way.”

Ratfish is a deepC resident who can reach 60 centimeters in length. They belong to a category of cartilaginous fish called chimaras, which separated from sharks about two million years ago on a evolutionary tree.

They are sometimes called ghost sharks or spukfish because their flickering body and large bright eyes that show green glow in light.

“I think they are beautiful,” Cohen said.

For this study, Cohen and his colleagues worked with spotted ratfish, a species with a toxic dorsal spine that is abundant in paget sound water away from the coast of Washington State.

The team saw Ratfish in the wild, and then caught and analyzed 40 samples using a micro-CT scan.

Inside Teenkulam, they found rows on rows of teeth like shark. They were all embedded inside a band of tissue called dental lamina, which is before now, before the animal is documented in the jaw. The genes associated with the formation of teeth in the vertebra were detected in the tissue samples of Tenkulam.

Aaron Labc, a King’s College London Pelionctologist, who studies teeth development and formation, says he never saw anything like that.

“It’s just strange,” Labbank, who was not involved in research, told the CBC.

Labwank says he first doubted the findings of the study, as he thought that he was filled with Teenkulam denticals-a scales such as a scales that are present on sharks and rays. But he says that the researchers “did a really good job of painting them and showing them that they developed exactly the same way they had teeth.”

“It just goes to show that there are a lot of other unique things to discover – especially when it comes to teeth,” he said.

But why, however?

Cohen says that when it comes to the stunning forehead teeth of Ratfish, there is still a lot. How and why did they develop like this? Did they always be for sex, or did they start as a defensive mechanism that developed and changed over time?

They found some clues, but did not enough to paint a complete picture.

They examined fossil records SimpleA prehistoric chemera that lived more than 300 million years ago, and a rich tenkulam-like appendage was found, which was emerging from above if it was spread over its nose and its upper jaw.

What is more, researchers found that female spotted ratfish has small, pimples on their foreheads, like adolescent men. But unlike men, their small hump never sprouts in a full teenkulam.

“I am not sure why women maintain them, or have ability, or what they are using for it,” Cohen said. “It will be great to know more.”

Holy moli, nature is not fabuloso?– Milton Love, Marine Biologist

Milton Love, a marine biologist at the Marine Science Institute, California in Santa Barbara, says he is not surprised that ratfish uses teeth of his forehead during sex.

Many species of male sharks will cut the female’s thick neck skin during intercourse for the same purpose, says love, which was not involved in the study.

“It’s not very surprising, but it’s just attractive,” said Love. “With such stories, you are going, such as, ‘Holy Moli, Nature is not Fabuloso?” ,