Trivia question for Oct-24-2011

Olivia found these fish to be interesting.  Lets see how you do with her trivia.  During mating season, the male develops bright breeding colors and becomes highly aggressive.  They perform an elaborate courtship dance to entice egg-laying females into their nest.

These fish have recently become a major research organism for evolutionary biologists trying to understand the genetic changes involved in adapting to new environments. The entire genome of a female fish from Bear Paw Lake in Alaska was recently sequenced by the Broad Institute and many other genetic resources are available. This population is under risk from the presence of introduced northern pike in a nearby lake.

So here are Olivia’s questions:  Tell us what this fish is called and what makes them so unique over most other fish species?  Also, these fish are so numerous that humans use them as fertilizer.  Tell us how many of these fish a single person could catch in a day when they were most abundant?

Good Luck 😉

Answer:

Olivia obviously found another trivia which was not that easy to answer.  We had 16-emails but none of them got this fish correct.  The spiky fish we featured is the Three-Spined Stickleback… (try saying that 3-times fast ;-).  The three-spined stickleback, is a fish native to much of northern Europe, northern Asia and North America. It has been introduced into parts of southern and central Europe as well.

One of the things that makes them so unique over most fish species is that they are one of the few fish that can live in saltwater and freshwater environments.  The stickleback was once so numerous that a person could land 500,000 a day.  They were so plentiful that catches were used as manure on farmlands.  The three-spined stickleback is also known as a tittle-bat, and was featured in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. Samuel Pickwick is said to have published a treatise on the subject of tittle-bats, specifically the ones living in the ponds of Hampstead. Here is more on these sharp fish: Three-Spined Stickleback

Thanks for playing along 😉