259 — Global Catfish Biodiversity

fish are super underrated. I'm all trying to concentrate in an administrative meeting about quarterly budgets but in my head i'm screaming

BUT DID YOU EVEN KNOW THAT ONE IN EVERY 20 SPECIES OF VERTEBRATE IS SOME KIND OF CAT FISH

— Emily Graslie 🌸🐝 (@Ehmee) May 2, 2018

…wh…what..?

Catfishes, or Siluriformes, are found on every continent on the planet (and fossil catfishes exist in Antartica). There are more than 3000 recognized species of catfishes, which means that more ethan 10% of all fishes, and more than 5% of all vertebrates(!!) are some type of a catfish.

There are electric catfish. There are armored catfish. Some catfish can ingest wood; some feed parasitically on blood.

This means that if you pick a vertebrate species at random, you are most likely to not be wrong if you assume it’s a catfish. (But you’re still most likely going to be wrong.)

(In order to document and better understand the variance and extents of the catfish species world, the author cofounded the All Catfish Species Inventory, a program designed to catalog all catfish species.)

Armbruster explains that ACSI helped enable the development of today’s catfish taxonomy, which can teach us about biodiversity (we continue to discover and delimit new catfish species every year) and improve our understanding of phylogeny and evolution.

ACSI is available online here.