If there’s one place you don’t want to hide, it’s the mouth of the Pacific Cod Ling. This fearsome fish, which can reach five feet long and weigh 80 pounds, has about 500 needle-like teeth sticking out of its jaws that are strong enough to crush crustaceans.
Having plenty of sharp comber missiles allows these ambush predators to subdue everything from slippery squid to heavy armored crabs. How lingcods retain their frightening sharp teeth has always been a mystery. But study, published in October in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, claims Pacific lingwood keeps its teeth sharp and shiny by replacing about three percent of them each day. For lingcod, up to 20 teeth are replaced daily. If you change gears at the same rate, you can lose and gain new gear every day – oh!
Much of what scientists know about tooth replacement in fish comes from sharks, which have multiple rows of teeth inside their jaws that are constantly being replenished, and from other fish with unusual teeth. But shark teeth are very different from those of most fish, which is why the lingcod results could help scientists better understand the phenomenon of tooth replacement in fish.
About 20 percent of Pacific environmental fish have green or blue flesh, scientists Not sure why this happened. fish considered Smart seafood choiceAnd delicious when greased and fried. But other than that, it’s pretty average. Its teeth are similar to those of many other fish, which is one reason “it makes an excellent model for studying teeth in fish,” said Carly Cohen, a doctoral student at the University of Washington and co-author of the new study.
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