About the Icefish

About the Ice fish

Found in the antarctica and southern south America.They feed on krill, copepods, and other fishes.

Hyunkeun O period : 3

What is special about them?

Their blood is colorless. It's because it contains no hemoglobin. Red blood cells are usually absent and if present are rare and defunct. Oxygen is dissolved in the plasma and transported throughout the body without the hemoglobin protein. To compensate for the loss of hemoglobin, they have larger blood vessels (including capillaries), greater blood volumes (four times that of other fish), bigger hearts, and greater cardiac outputs (fivefold greater) compared to other fish.

Ice fish (Channichthyidae) doesn't have hemoglobin. Then how can they survive?

How they survive

The fish can live without hemoglobin because of their low metabolic rates and the high solubility of oxygen in water at the low temperatures of their environment (the solubility of a gas tends to increase as temperature decreases). Also, Their hearts lack coronary arteries and the ventricle muscles are very spongy, enabling them to absorb oxygen directly from the blood they pump. Their hearts, large blood vessels and low-viscosity (RBC free) blood are specialized to carry out very high flow rates at low pressures. This helps to reduce the problems caused by the lack of hemoglobin.

Krill

copepods

Important biological principals

Icefishes provide a natural genetic knockout for studying the effects of the loss of expression of hemoglobin and myoglobin. There are many advantages to using a naturally occurring knockout mutant over a lab-generated one to study disease. Also, icefishes provide a natural model for studying anemia and for studying bone development. Finally, icefishes can teach us about interrelationships between iron and oxidative stress. It can teach and help us a lot.

Blood color differencebetween ice fish andnormal fish

Scientific name :Chaenocephalus aceratus(family Channichthyidae)