triggerfish Archives

Fish Communication Methods — Yellow-spotted Triggerfish

A fascinating question that marine scientists have explored is fish communication. Finding a mate, locating food sources, and defending territory are challenges all animals face. Terrestrial animals solve this problem by pushing air through their lungs, with different land animals having various designs to do this. Birds and lions produce sounds for communication differently, but both systems involve air in some form. So, the question is, how do fish communicate?

Researchers from Cornell University placed equipment in the ocean off Hawaii and Curacao to study this question and found that each fish species has its own method for communicating with others. Triggerfish slap their pectoral fins on specialized scales. Glasseye snappers rattle their swim bladders. Blackbar soldierfish use sonic muscles to vibrate their ribs. Aaron Rice, who was the project manager for Cornell, states that the “sounds lack the elegance of birdsong, but they are significantly more diverse.”

The more scientists learn about life on our planet, the more varieties of specialized designs they observe everywhere on Earth. Explaining the origin of things like fish communication as a chance occurrence in the distant past pushes credibility too far. Seeing these as outcomes of design is an example of intelligent purpose, allowing a vast diversity of life forms to exist.

References: Cornell Chronicle, sciencedirect.com, and fisheyecollaborative.org

Hawaii’s state fish is the humuhumunukunukuapua’a. The scientific name is Rhinecanthus rectangulus, but people call them humuhumu for short. This is a species of triggerfish, and the design complexity of these fish defies any chance formation.

The name Humuhumunukunukuapua’a means “a triggerfish with a pig’s snout.” These fish eat lobsters, sea urchins, and snails. They can blow water jets from their mouths to find these foods under sand. The triggerfish name comes from having a “trigger” that locks their dorsal fin in the up position to prevent a predator from extracting them when they hide in a small crevice.

A four-bar linkage mechanism links the humuhumu’s skeleton to its jaws. That gives it a powerful mechanical bite needed to capture its hard-shelled prey. Engineers study the humuhumu to see how humans can assemble and use such structures. This bone-cartilage mechanical linkage defies any step-by-step evolutionary assembly process, and there is no evolutionary precursor to triggerfish.
Like all the examples of design in the natural world, the humuhumunukunukuapua’a strongly supports the biblical statement that we can know there is a God through the things He has made (Romans 1:20).

— John N. Clayton © 2024
References: Waikiki Aquarium, YouTube Deep Marine Scenes, Wikipedia, and “Evolution of Levers and Linkages in the Feeding Mechanisms of Fishes” in Integrative and Comparative Biology.