Hot shot.How does a water-dwelling fish nab prey that's on land? Archerfish archerfish, laterally compressed fish, genus Toxotes, which catches insects by spitting at and disabling them. The archerfish has a groove in the roof of its mouth that forms a long narrow tube when the tongue is placed against it; the fish propels drops of spew carefully aimed streams of water at prey perched on branches or leaves, knocking the prey into the water. Scientists have recently discovered that the fish precisely control how much they spray (networking) spray - A Unix command that sends packets to a host and reports performance statistics. The number of packets, delay between packets and packet length can all be specified. , depending on the target's size. Biologist Stefan Schuster and colleagues at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg in Germany Germany (jûr`mənē), Ger. Deutschland, officially Federal Republic of Germany, republic (2005 est. pop. 82,431,000), 137,699 sq mi (356,733 sq km). designed a target that measures the size of the fish's shot. They found that archerfish spray larger amounts of water at heavy prey like lizards than they do for smaller prey such as flies. The extra mass of the spray creates enough force to blast the lizard lizard, a reptile of the order Squamata, which also includes the snake. Lizards form the suborder Sauria, and there are over 3,000 lizard species distributed throughout the world (except for the polar regions), with the greatest number found in warm climates. off its perch and into the water. |
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