It is found on the west coast of North America, from Alaska to Baja California, Mexico, and is economically important to fishermen. Its about long cod fish, which is 1.22 meters long as an adult. It is an omnivorous ambush predator that frequently indulges in cannibalism.
The most outstanding feature They are its more than 500 teeth prepared in two sets of jaws that have great mobility. The estimate of specialists who study the biomechanics of feeding is that if humans had the same dental pattern, we would replace a tooth daily.
“The tooth replacement rate of the Pacific lingcod was an surprise for researchers,” says study co-author Karly Cohen, who is doing doctoral studies at the University of Washington.
The study in question includes rare species like the monkfish, which inhabits the northeast of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, which has the particularity of having protruding fang-like teeth, or the piranha that can lose a quarter of its teeth at a time. “But most fish have teeth like the lingcod. So it could very well be that most fish are losing massive amounts of teeth on a daily basis and replacing them rapidly, like this species,” Cohen adds.
a voracious hunter, the lingcod eats “anything that can be put in its mouth,” according to the researcher. “Lingcods have a set of upper and lower jaws, just like ours, but they are more mobile: they can lunge forward and extend.”
“If you look at the inside of the mouth on the roof of the mouth, it’s also covered in teeth.” Then, down to the back of the throat, just before the esophagus, are the pharyngeal jaws, bony, tooth-studded platforms made of modified gill arches. When the lingcod attacks, its first set of jaws snaps forward and drags prey into its mouth, where the inner pharyngeal jaws go to work crushing and crushing. So that this strategy have successthe lingcod relies on needle-sharp teeth, which are prone to breaking.
the researchers we found no significant differences in the rate of tooth replacement between them. In the study, the researchers used a sequence of stains to create a visual timeline of tooth growth. First, 20 lingcod juveniles were submerged in tanks spiked with the fluorescent dye alizarin red for 12 hours.
Since the alizarin red is harnessed by the calcium in the teeth, the result was hundreds of bright red gleams. During the next 10 days, long cod lots they were exposed to a second green dye, fluorescein calcein. Teeth placed in place on the first day of the study stained red, while teeth that erupted later appeared green.
Emily Carr, an undergraduate student at the University of South Florida and lead author of the study, painstakingly counted and classified each Christmas-colored tooth, for a total of 10,580 teeth in the 20 fish examined. Carr and her team meet that lingcod’s teeth they are predestined, which means that each tooth erupts exactly where it is destined to spend the rest of its life. That’s contrary to other famously toothy fish like the great white shark, which start small at the back of the jaw and get larger as they grow.
The researchers also identified critical points for tooth replacement. “It’s not that the really big teeth stay there longer, or that the really small teeth are constantly being replaced,” Cohen explained. “We found that there is faster replacement in those areas where we expect there to be more force when the lingcod bites.”
The big question is, what caused the replacement of teeth in the lingcod? A second experimental condition in the study compared species that were fed periodically with another group of fish that were given nothing to eat.
The researchers, who published their work in the scientific magazine “Proceedings of the Royal Society B”, no significant differences were found in the rate of tooth replacement between them. That suggests that the lingcod does not erupt its teeth in response to breakage; it can be more like our own baby and adult teeth, which fall out and erupt according to a genetic timer. Carr says he found the replacement rate of lingcod surprising. “There is an idea that teeth are very expensive to make and replace, but our study challenges this concept,” he concluded.
