BANGKOK, Thailand - Scientists say they have discovered the world's smallest known fish in threatened swampland in Indonesia.

The fish, a member of the carp family, has a translucent body and a head unprotected by a skeleton.

Mature females grow to less than a third of an inch long. The males have enlarged pelvic fins and muscles that may be used in reproduction, researchers wrote in a report published Wednesday by the Royal Society in London.

"This is one of the strangest fish that I've seen in my whole career,' said Ralf Britz, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum in London. "It's tiny, it lives in acid and it has these bizarre grasping fins. I hope we'll have time to find out more about them before their habitat disappears completely."

The fish are found in an acidic peat swamp on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Indonesian peat swamps are under threat from fires lit by plantation owners and farmers as well as unchecked development and farming. Researchers say several populations of the tiny fish, Paedocypris progenetica, have already been lost, according to the Natural History Museum.

The previous record for world's smallest fish, according to the Natural History Museum, was held by a species of Indo-Pacific goby one-tenth of a millimeter longer.

"You don't wake up in the morning and think, 'Today we will find the smallest fish in the world,'" Swiss fish expert Maurice Kottelat, who helped discover the fish, said in a telephone interview from his home in Switzerland.

According to researchers, the little fish live in dark, tea-colored water at least 100 times more acidic than rainwater. Such acidic swamps was once thought to harbor few animals, but recent research has revealed that they are highly diverse and home to many unique species.
Source
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wow... small little bugger.

Well isn't that just the cutest little ol thing......

How on earth do they find these things? Are there really guys out dipping nets into acidic peat bogs (or whatever it was) and staring at all the fish they bring up?

I guess so.

And now a bunch of scientists will study them and probably kill half of them at the same time.

... & I was planning to live off of these during the next ice age.

TeraLink Was Here!

Well considering we have barely scratched the surface in identifying all marine life on Earth I`m sure within the next few years we will find an even smaller fish.

That's my guess. I've done it before for school... best way to observe life up close and with little risk of harming the little guys.

Won't be the first time that has happened. Sometimes a good heart is not all that is needed.

aw, it's cute!

Now we can have the worlds smallest sushi!!!!!

lol you'd have to kill off the whole population just to get full.

Hello Friends:

It looks like a guppy to me!!!

Photo in the News: Big Flap Over World's Smallest Fish



January 30, 2006—It may be tiny, but this fish has sparked a debate that's big—though nowhere near as ugly.

A U.S. scientist says this male anglerfish found in the Philippines is the smallest fish in the world.

Ted Pietsch, a fisheries professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, discovered the fish in the collection of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. He first announced his find last May.

A mere 0.24 inch (6.2 millimeters) long, the fish known as Photocorynus spiniceps may take the prize as the world's smallest catch. But it has some wee competition.

Last week an international team of researchers announced that they, too, had discovered Earth's littlest fish. Their find, a member of the carp family found in the peat swamps of Indonesia, is 0.31 inch (7.9 millimeters) long and so slim that it's transparent.

What's more, scientists at the Australian Museum in Sydney in 2004 unveiled a tiny fish found in the Great Barrier Reef that measures from 0.28 to 0.31 inch (7 to 8 millimeters) in length.

In the end, the real winner in this fish tale depends on how you size things up, Pietsch says.

"The debate centers on how you define 'smallest,'" Pietsch writes by email. "The [Australian Museum] folks want to use volume as the measure, but [other scientists] use length.

"If length is an acceptable criterion, then surely my Photocorynus is the smallest known sexually mature vertebrate by a full 1.7 millimeters [0.06 inch]."

Pietsch re-released his study late last week as a kindly reminder to his colleagues, who have been taking part in this "friendly rivalry" for years, he says.

"The other researchers … know my work and I theirs," he says. "But somehow in the latest story that broke early last week, my publication on Photocorynus was left out. So I thought I'd jump into the fray."
Source
----------------------------------------------------

not funny