Scanner : fish

Unemployed? How About Applying For the Best Job in the World?

Brian Fairbanks — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:16:00 GMT

If we told you that there was a job that involved feeding fish, looking hot on a beach, and shooting the breeze on a casual and entirely trivial blog, and that the job was available and pays a hundred grand for a mere six months of "work," and that job was on the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef, how many rival applicants would you personally bump off to have a better chance of landing it?

Seriously, though, this job is even more awesome than getting paid $10,000 a week to post nipple slips...

Between NPR coverage, Weird News stories, and the website's constantly-crashing home page, we were able to cull a top ten list of reasons to apply for the temporary position:

1) It pays $100,000 a year.

2-10) Holy Christ-- a $100,000 to lounge about in a bathing suit! That's better than having a sugar mama/daddy...

That's no exaggeration-- your job would be to show potential tourists how freakin' awesome the Great Barrier Reef is and to lure travelers from all over the world via your lavish and ridiculously enjoyable lifestyle. Of course, the fine print here isn't the fact that you are a 24/7 spokesperson/model for an island, it's the insanely fierce competition to even be noticed for an interview in the first place...

"I guess we expected there'd be a certain percentage of nutters and nudies,"

A woman in Greece promises - via a scroll of words across the screen - to wash all of Australia's laundry and even clean up up after the kangaroos.

Another video shows a woman standing on a street belting out an original song. Some applicants simply stare at the camera and beg.

On Thursday, a team of 10 people - whom, Hayes noted, were starting to look "pretty nervous" - were sifting through the 2,000 video applications the department had already received, with tens of thousands more expected before the Feb. 22 deadline. [Weird News]

Still want to wade into this (cess?)pool? Click here to read more about the position and to apply... assuming the site hasn't crashed again from all the desperate jobseekers...

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Anyone for a Wunder Boner?

Colleen Kane — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 22:27:00 GMT

We refuse to believe that in 1994, nine years after some joker named a character Boner on Growing Pains, nobody involved in the naming of the Wunder Boner—a gizmo for de-boning fish—knew what a boner was (as in the bow-chicka-wow-wow kind). Luckily, that didn't stop them from making the product... and a quality commercial for your amusement about 15 years later as you fritter away the last moments before the weekend.

via With Leather

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image: stripersonline.com

Penis Eating Fish Plague Australian Harbor

Brian Fairbanks — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:25:00 GMT

How's this for a lead: "An Australian immigrant with a penis fetish is terrorising the Waitemata Harbour."

Har har, since it's rather misleading...

The story is about a student named Jeremy Barker who is studying the barnacle as part of his master's program. He says that, in the course of his research in the harbor, he's discovered multiple oysters with barnacle penises in their stomachs.

AUT University student Jeremy Barker says the unusual looking fish targets the barnacle’s phallic appendages.

And he wants to know why.

"We have found a large number of penises inside their stomachs," he says.

"It’s not killing the barnacles but it will stop the next generation being produced."

We're 100% supportive of science but, Jeremy, we'd rather you didn't find out why the fish are targeting dicks. We already have enough nightmares about castration thanks to that one ex-girlfriend...

Read the full story here, via Stuff.co.nz

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Lady Fish Goes Without Sex For 70,000 Years (And You Thought You Were Going Through A Dry Spell)

Katie Halper — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:15:00 GMT

The female Amazon Molly fish has been using the "I have a head ache" excuse for 700 centuries*, baffling evolutionary scientists and frustrating blue-balled male Molly's. So why is this cold fish, which should have become extinct 70,000 years ago, still flapping around? Scientists think it's the "occasional sex with strangers," "tricks" and "something special going on."

The Telegraph has the story

A female fish which hasn't had full sex for at least 70,000 years is baffling scientists.

Amazon Molly fish defies evolution by reproducing without a male

The Amazon Molly fish defies evolutionary rules by reproducing without the help of a male Molly.

In fact there aren't any male Molly fish and the female relies on a dalliance with males of other species.

This triggers her reproductive cycle but she doesn't seem to use any of the sperm passed by her partner.

And when her young are born they inherit only her genes and nothing from the male.

Scientists at Edinburgh University have been studying the Molly in an effort to discover how the species has managed to survive.

Sex is usually crucial because it enriches the genetic complement, or genome. It mixes genes much more quickly than random DNA mutations and helps new species to evolve and change with their environment.

Normally a creature that reproduces asexually misses out on this opportunity, fails to adapt to changes and eventually succumbs to extinction.

The scientists used powerful computing systems to calculate complex genetic changes over many thousands of generations which should have brought the Molly's tenure on Earth to an end.

They were able to show for the first time that it should have died out 70,000 years ago but in fact it still thrives in rivers in south-east Texas and north-east Mexico.

The researchers suspect it may be using special genetic survival "tricks" which keeps the species going including taking some of the male's DNA to revitalise its gene pool.

Dr Laurence Loewe, of the university's School of Biological Sciences, said: "What we have shown now is that this fish really has something special going on and that some special tricks exist to help this fish survive.

"Maybe there is still occasional sex with strangers that keeps the species alive. Future research may give us some answers."

"I think one of the interesting things is that we are learning more about how other species might use these tricks as well and might have a more general importance."

The Edinburgh-led study was carried out in collaboration with the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the findings are published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

*CORRECTION (thanks to solstice2005): Scanner Katie originally wrote "Lady Fish Goes Without Sex For 7,000 Years" and for "7 centuries." The correct numbers are, of course, 70,000 and 700 centuries. Scanner Katie just couldn't fathom going without sex for 70,000 years so subconsciously replaced it with the more palatable 7,000-year-long dry spell.