Page 180 - The Secret Museum
P. 180
Interestingly, some females get lumbered with more than one tiny male. The record
number of males on a single female is eight, found on a specimen collected in 2000
off Japan.
This female has tentacles on her underside called barbels, but it’s not clear what
they are for. They do light up, so perhaps they could be used for attracting prey, or
maybe they are landing lights for the laziest male in nature. The fish curators at the
museum, Ollie Crimmen and James Maclaine, who showed me the star-crossed
lovers in their glass jar, still don’t know.
They held the jar up to the light so that I could peer in and have a good look at the
tiny male. They pointed out the esca (from the Latin for ‘food’), the fleshy growth on
the female’s head. This is where the anglerfish gets its name. The esca is attached to
the end of a finray, which is used like a fishing rod and, in deep-sea species of
anglerfish, it lights up, as a lure to attract prey. When this female was alive, if
something edible approached her esca, then she would suck it in by opening her huge
mouth, which is lined with needle-like teeth, and swallow it.
A lot of deep-sea anglerfish prey is bioluminescent, so the anglerfish have black-
lined stomachs to stop their insides from glowing after lunch and distracting their
next victim. Often the stomach is elasticated, so they can ingest animals bigger than
themselves.
This particular anglerfish pair is one of 22 million specimens looked after by the
Natural History Museum. What about the two other pairs of anglerfish in amongst all
those? One couple are a species called Ceratias holboelli; they sound horrible, and
they look it. They live in the tank room beside another, smaller female specimen
which was found inside the stomach of a sperm whale. The second couple are of a
species called Malanocetus johnsonii, otherwise known as the black sea devil. The
female is a little monster, the size of a baked potato, with super-sharp teeth; her male
is clamped on to her underside.
As well as the anglerfish James and Ollie care for are around 800,000 other fish.
The collection is used like a reference library, so scientists can keep tabs on what we
already know, and use that as a basis for new discoveries. Some fish are being
wiped out before they’ve been scientifically described. Most of the specimens are in
Victorian glass jars filled with alcohol for preservation (the spirit collection),
stuffed, or skeletons (the dry collection). They’re kept on miles of shelves heaving
with specimens, from microbes to the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni).
The largest ones are in tanks in the tank room, in the basement. James and Ollie took
me down there in the lift and pushed open the heavy grey doors that seal the room off
from the rest of the museum.
Archie, the giant squid (short for the scientific name Architeuthis dux), caught off
the coast of the Falkland Islands, dominates the tank room. She arrived at the museum
as a folded, frozen, pink blob, and was kept in a freezer while Jon Ablett and his co-
mollusc curators decided how to proceed. Since this species is so rare in museum