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They are commonly found attached to sharks, manta rays, whales, turtles, and dugongs, hence the common names "sharksucker" and "whalesucker". Smaller remoras also fasten onto fish such as tuna and swordfish, and some of the smallest remoras travel in the mouths or gills of large manta rays, ocean sunfish, swordfish and sailfish.
The pilot fish's relationship with sharks is a mutualist one; the pilot fish gains protection from predators, while the shark gains freedom from parasites. [22] It was often said by sailors that sharks and pilot fish share something like a "close companionship"; [ 23 ] there were even tales of this fish following ships which had captured "their ...
As a juvenile, it sometimes acts as a cleaner fish on a reef station; its diet consists of small parasitic crustaceans such as copepods, isopods, and ostracods. [ 10 ] When attached to a host, the remora eats parasitic crustaceans, food scraps from its host's feeding activity, and even some small food captured by filtering water through its ...
Fish that have barbels include the catfish, the carp, the goatfish, the hagfish, the sturgeon, the zebrafish, the black dragonfish and some species of shark such as the sawshark. Barbels house the taste buds of such fish and are used to search for food in murky water. The word barbel comes from Latin barbula 'little beard'. [1]
Batoid gill slits lie under the pectoral fins on the underside, whereas a shark's are on the sides of the head. Most batoids have a flat, disk-like body, with the exception of the guitarfishes and sawfishes, while most sharks have a spindle-shaped body. Many species of batoid have developed their pectoral fins into broad flat wing-like appendages.
The average length of maturity for sharks averages in the greater equatorial and southwestern Atlantic is 170 cm (67 in) for females and 170–190 cm (67–75 in) for males. [19] In the Pacific, sharks appear to mature at four to five years. [17] One oceanic whitetip shark was estimated to have lived 22 years. [5] [20]
Deep-sea chimaera photographed by the NOAAS Okeanos Explorer.Visible on its snout are tiny pores which lead to electroreceptor cells.. Chimaeras are soft-bodied, shark-like fish with bulky heads and long, tapered tails; measured from the tail, they can grow up to 150 cm (4.9 ft) in length.
Guitarfish have a body form intermediate between those of sharks and rays. The tail has a typical shark-like form, but in many species, the head has a triangular, or guitar-like shape, rather than the disc-shape formed by fusion with the pectoral fins found in other rays.