Question #26 Who is longest fish in the whole Universe?

Submitted by nasimul via email

There are two ways of looking at this question. First what is the longest fish that has ever lived and the second being what is the longest extant, i.e. currently living, fish. I will answer both of these questions. The interesting thing about most of these giant fish is that they feed on the smallest of ocean dwellers, plankton.

Longest Extant Bony Fish. - Regalecus glesne

The longest extant bony fish is my favorite fish, the Oarfish. The oarfish is a deep sea fish that lives at the depths of 600 feet (200m) in the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.(Though there have been seen in the Pacific Ocean) These fish are so long and strange looking that they are the sources of quite a few of the world's sea serpent myths. These long, slender, and serpentine fish can grow to 50 feet long (15 m) ad weigh over 600 lbs (272 kg).

Largest Extant Cartilaginous Fish  - Rhincodon typus

Not to be alone, currently the record of largest extant fish bounces back and forth between the Oarfish and the Whale Shark. As larger and larger specimens of both of these species are recorded it seems that they may have a tie for the largest fish in the sea.  The largest whale shark to date has been 41.5 feet long and 2.35 tons. These giants live in tropical waters where they filter feed on plankton.

 

Largest fish to ever live - Leedsichthys

This extinct fish may have grown larger than the oarfish. Their length was at least 54 feet and may have grown to be even larger. The largest specimen to date has been 72 feet. These bony fish ate plankton that they filtered from the water much like modern day baleen whales, such as the humpback and right whale.  Leedsichthys lived about 150 million years ago, in the early Jurassic Period when dinosaurs were just showing up on the planet.

 From Chased by Sea Monsters:




More information:
More about the Oarfish
Giants of the Sea

Question #3: Why can you hear the ocean-like sounds in hollow things like seashells and pots?

From Zach on Facebook.

This question deals with the way sound waves move or more precisely bounce. Since the most common idea for this is a seashell we will work with this model.  We are going to imagine we are in a normal room. There are other noises around.. maybe people talking in the other room or cars driving by outside.

Sound moves in waves. Let's imagine the sound of the car. Sound waves come toward us from that car. Some bounce off of our body, some enter our ear, some pass us by and some, a small few, enter the shell we are holding near our head. The sound waves then resonate within the shell. Resonance means that the air and the shell itself are now vibrating at the same frequency as the sound of the car. Those vibrations of the shell then make it to our ear and we hear sound coming from it.

The interesting thing is that different shells sizes, shapes and shell thicknesses will change the frequency of the sound waves and therefore change the sound we hear. The same experiment can be done with cups of different sizes and materials. The one trick is to find an area with a constant sound to ensure that the frequency of the item vibration is different and not the frequency of the incoming sound. You can also produce a similar effect by cupping your hands over your ear at different distances from your ear. Angle of the object (particularly cup shaped objects.. cups, glasses, coconuts, etc) to your ear can also alter the sound you hear.

There are apparently even relaxing earplugs you can purchase? that replicate this phenomenon.