Worlds smallest fish discovered

Scientists have discovered the world's smallest fish on record in an acidic peat swamp in Indonesia, with a see-through body and a head that is unprotected by a skeleton, researchers said Wednesday.

Mature females of the Paedocypris progenetica, a member of the carp family, only grow to 7.9 millimeters (0.31 inches) and the males have enlarged pelvic fins and exceptionally large muscles that may be used to grasp the females during copulation, researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, published Wednesday by the Royal Society in London.

The new fish was discovered on Sumatra Island by fish experts Maurice Kottelat from Switzerland and Tan Heok Hui from the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research in Singapore. They were working with colleagues from Indonesia and with Kai-Erik Witte from the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

SOURCE: LiveScience

I thought this was an interesting story.
Just shows theres lots of species we don't know about.

Comments, Opinions?

For some reason I find this sentence vastly amusing:

and the males have enlarged pelvic fins and exceptionally large muscles that may be used to grasp the females during copulation

That is actually one interesting fish. Its body is transparent and its head has no bones. It lives in water with pH=3 (that's roughly 250 times more acidic than acid rain, which is pH 5.6 or lower)

Unfortunately, at the end of the article, it mentions that several similar species from the Paedocypris have already been lost

Interesting find makes sense that they found it in a peat swamp too. Swamps tend to have really low oxygen levels in the water and one way fish cope is to not grow as big. Okefenokee Swamp has alot of dwarf fish.

Wow, that is small.
Quite the amazing creature.