A yellowtail rockfish at the Vancouver Aquarium was being bullied by other fish because he has only one eye. What to do? You can't exactly sit the other fish down and castigate them over their behavior.
So head veterinarian, Martin Haulena, with the help of Lesanna Lahner, staff veterinarian of Seattle Aquarium, sewed a lovely bright yellow prosthetic eye into its eyeless hole. “You probably don’t want one in the nose,” Haulena notes in the video above as they figure out where to position it. Classic Haulena.
“The reason we do this is because we do find that when fish are blind from one eye, and there’s no visible eye, other fish will recognise that and will actually attack them from that side,” Haulena says. “Cosmetic, for sure, but there’s definitely an animal welfare component to putting in the prosthetics.
The details of the procedure are at Scientific American, where you can also read about a penguin’s cancer treatment. -via Ed Yong
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True fact: A fish with no eyes is called a fsh.
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All the one-eyed fish need is a cool pirate eye patch. Then he'll be the talk of the, ahem, school of fish.
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