Post #14247

Mandarin Duck: The most psychedelic fish on the planet Hello, would you like to eat a tangerine? If you wish, reconsider; I strongly advise you not to do this. After all, you are on the pages of the Book of Animals, and citrus fruits are not found here. But we have tons of toxic fish with psychedelic colors! The mandarin duck that we are telling you about today lives in coral reefs off the coast of Japan, South Asia, Indonesia and Australia and its numbers are quite high - this is a common species, the presence of which on the reef does not surprise anyone. And yet, local predators are in no hurry to eat it. The mandarin duck has no scales and is absolutely defenseless, but its skin is abundantly studded with unusual glands of two types. Some produce thick and sticky mucus, others mix a foul-smelling toxin into it, causing severe itching on the mucous membranes of other animals. Therefore, a predator who tries to feast on a tangerine will suffer for many hours from the desire to scratch his mouth, throat, esophagus and stomach - and you wouldn’t wish that on your enemy. Their poisonous defense works so flawlessly that the tangerines have become very lazy. They have become slow and spend their days leisurely swimming around the reef in search of small invertebrate creatures that they can kill. And if the fish gets tired, then it will not hide in a secluded corner, but will simply sit on the bottom and walk along it with the help of its pelvic fins. Even slower and lazier. The only thing the mandarin duck is fussed over is its coloring. The fish painted itself with the now fashionable postmodernist patterns and did not do it out of love for art. Simply a bright and memorable color is the only reliable way to stand out from the crowd of non-poisonous small fish, so that you are not eaten purely for the company of this harmless little thing. And the tactic worked for most of the mandarin duck's evolutionary journey. But then a man came, saw something bright and cool, and how about putting it in aquariums and selling it to other people! And since the mandarin duck is poorly adapted to life in an aquarium, which is why it regularly dies and almost never reproduces, its population has to be regularly renewed. Moreover, the demand for tangerines is only growing every year. So far, this has not threatened the populations of the cute fish, and they are living peacefully. But will it always be like this? Author: Yaroslav Ilyin 🏀 Hit the hoop and get an NFT gift — https://t.me/BasketbolX_bot