sciencetech-blog

comments

It may look like something from the film Alien, with a strange snout and rows of terrifying teeth.

However, in fact this is a catfish believed to only exist in a small part of India.

The rare creature has baffled scientists, as it appears to be unrelated to every other catfish.

Scroll down for video

Alien or fish? Kryptoglanis shajii, a small subterranean catfish sees the light of day and human observers only rarely, when it turns up in springs, wells and flooded rice paddies in the Western Ghats mountain region of Kerala, India

Called Kryptoglanis shajii, the small subterranean catfish has only occasionally been found in springs, wells and flooded rice paddies in the Western Ghats mountain region of Kerala, India.

It was first described as a new species in 2011.

Soon after that, John Lundberg, PhD, one of the world's leading authorities on catfishes, started taking a closer look at several specimens.

'The more we looked at the skeleton, the stranger it got,' said Lundberg of Drexel University, who's paper was published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

'The characteristics of this animal are just so different that we have a hard time fitting it into the family tree of catfishes,' said Lundberg.

From the outside, Kryptoglanis does not look particularly unusual for a catfish.

But when Lundberg and his colleagues looked at its bones using digital radiography and high-definition CAT scans, they found it was missing several bony elements – a characteristic fairly common for subterranean fish.

 

Bizarre looking 'alien' catfish defies classification

Researchers likened the fish to the monster from the film Alien

But there were also changes in the shapes of certain bones, changes so strange that Lundberg described them as 'completely unique among catfishes and all fishes as far as I know.'

Numerous individual bones were modified in the face, giving the fish a compressed front end with a jutting lower jaw – like a bulldog's snout, if a bulldog also had four rows of conical, sharp-tipped teeth.

Multiple changes piled up in one part of the body could mean there is a functional purpose for those changes.

'In dogs that was the result of selective breeding. In Kryptoglanis, we don't know yet what in their natural evolution would have led to this modified shape,' Lundberg said.

The small subterranean catfish sees the light of day and human observers only rarely, when it turns up in springs, wells and flooded rice paddies in the Western Ghats mountain region of Kerala, India.

Kryptoglanis most likely eats meat, in the form of small invertebrates and insect larvae ¿ whatever might be found in the groundwater and could be captured by the fish, which at less than ten centimeters is smaller than an adult human¿s pinkie finger.

Based on its teeth and subterranean home, Lundberg said that Kryptoglanis most likely eats meat, in the form of small invertebrates and insect larvae – whatever might be found in the groundwater and could be captured by the fish, which at less than ten centimeters is smaller than an adult human's pinkie finger.

The fish can move swiftly in its environment, as evidenced by video footage of collected fish darting through water to grab food.

When Lundberg and his colleagues looked at its bones using digital radiography and high-definition CAT scans, they found it was missing several bony elements ¿ a characteristic fairly common for subterranean fish.

But why Kryptoglanis is so different, and what its closest relatives are, remains a mystery.

At the same time, a separate team led by Ralf Britz at the Natural History Museum of London independently examined the bone structure of Kryptoglanis using a technique of visualizing the skeleton called clearing and staining – a chemical method in which the fish's soft tissues are rendered as clear as glass and bones and cartilage are stained in contrasting colors.

This team's description of the structures was published in the March 2014 issue of the journal Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters.

'There was an amazing congruence between the results,' Lundberg said.

'Neither of us was way out.'

However, Neither could figure out which other catfishes Kryptoglanis was most closely related to, although Britz's team chose to assign it to its own new taxonomic family within the order of catfishes.

'It continues to be a puzzle,' Lundberg said.