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Flying fish actually do fly, seriously.

Skeptic Ginger

Nasty Woman
Skeptic Ginger
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Feb 14, 2005
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I always assumed flying fish just jumped out of the water in big leaps. Well these fish are flying, literally, they are not jumping. They were timed over 45 seconds out of the water in a single event.



Maybe they are technically still gliding since one cannot see them bat their fins, but it seems like it is only a few nucleic acid substitutions away. It's like the bats are flying mammals and these are, well, flying fish. Who knew?
 
skeptigirl said:
Maybe they are technically still gliding since one cannot see them bat their fins, but it seems like it is only a few nucleic acid substitutions away. It's like the bats are flying mammals and these are, well, flying fish. Who knew?
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Surely more than a few substitutions. They would have to change their method of respiration for sustained flight.
 
Acleron said:
Surely more than a few substitutions. They would have to change their method of respiration for sustained flight.
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Well mammals can dive for quite a while and they still breathe air. So maybe a couple substitutions to stay out longer than 45 seconds. But it is not hard to imagine a fish that dives up into the air the way a seal dives down into the water.

But you're right that I hadn't thought of all the other things that need to change such as skin and breathing. OTOH, that fish is doing a lot more than just leaping.
 
Thanks, that is fascinating. The image was too small for me to tell if it was flapping its fins; however, there is another consideration. It might have been riding a favorable breeze. I am reminded of the way shore birds ride a breeze.
 
In Malaysia my wife and I watched transfixed as schools of these guys "flew" out of the way of our ferry for the better part of an hour.

I wonder if they could ever evolve to true flight as opposed to gliding.
 
Angus McPresley said:
I wonder if they could ever evolve to true flight as opposed to gliding.
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You would have to find the selection pressure for that change. Apparently, the flight is to escape predators, so would more predators favor those who could fly further?
 
Hi

For sustained wing-flappy flight, you need wing-flapping muscles and something to which the muscles can be anchored. Birds have a keel bone and large breast muscles.

Fish don't even have a sternum and the muscles aren't pointed in the right direction.

Furthermore, rigid glider wings don't flap successfully for flight in larger animals. Insects only get away with it because of their insane power-to-weight ratio and small mass. A larger animal has to generate lift. Insects get to generate eddy currents that push them around (can't find citation - a vague memory of an article I read back in the day).

Lots and, OH, lots of substitutions.
 
Gagglegnash said:
Hi

For sustained wing-flappy flight, you need wing-flapping muscles and something to which the muscles can be anchored. Birds have a keel bone and large breast muscles.

Fish don't even have a sternum and the muscles aren't pointed in the right direction.
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And bees have have what's essentially a spring. The mechanisms for flight don't all have to be the same.


Furthermore, rigid glider wings don't flap successfully for flight in larger animals. Insects only get away with it because of their insane power-to-weight ratio and small mass. A larger animal has to generate lift. Insects get to generate eddy currents that push them around (can't find citation - a vague memory of an article I read back in the day).

Lots and, OH, lots of substitutions.
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Rigid glider wings work just fine for soaring, and stable soaring, a technique that involves whipping around in circles through air currents traveling at different speeds in order to reach even higher speeds than either airflow.

Just because birds and bats fly a certain way, it dos not follow that all flight must be that way.
 
Yes, fish fly. Their 'wings' even hit each other inf light, like Quail. The noise can surprise you. It did me:

There I was, in the Sea of Cortez, floating along in a 14' aluminum boat. Thinking about an escarpment that formed the coast, about 300 yards away. It went up, about 2,000 feet, and from an earlier look at a chart, I knew it went to the bottom, 3,000 feet deep. So there was this escarpment, 5,000 feet high, that nobody had ever set foot on, not even since the days of dinosaurs. But, I'm thinking, Pterdactyls flew around it, up, down, all around... when this noisydam flying fish leaps out of the water with a rattle, right behind me! MOMMY! The Flying Dinosaurs are going to EAT ME!!!

If they were merely gliders, they would not need to flap.
 
JJM said:
Thanks, that is fascinating. The image was too small for me to tell if it was flapping its fins; however, there is another consideration. It might have been riding a favorable breeze. I am reminded of the way shore birds ride a breeze.
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There are several versions of the same video. None was particularly better quality so I didn't post them. But a couple showed a closer view of one part showing the fish putting its tail into the water and boosting its forward momentum. It starts at about 15 seconds into the video and the rest of the video is the same as in the OP.
I agree there is gliding going on here so air currents must be involved. But that is true for many birds as well, especially large raptors. There are faint hints of the fish vibrating those fins but you cannot tell if it is just camera noise.


I love how fast Wiki gets updated on stuff like this. They posted a link to the BBC version of the story with a better image of the tail action as well. The articles seem to say gliding is the main means of staying in the air. Those fins sure look like insect wings in these pictures.

As for the evolution thing, I see their eyes have already adapted to air. From the last link:
Most fishes have curved corneas. Flyingfishes have flattened corneas that enable them to focus in and out of the water. This didn't seem to help the fish in the image. It was caught after its flight was abruptly terminated by District Fisheries Officer M. Proctor's head.
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Of course just because you can see something doesn't mean you can avoid hitting it. :)

(Edited to add: I see fuelair beat me to the Wiki link. That will teach me to read the whole thread before looking more stuff up.)
 
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I have seen them fairly often, and they will "skip" off the tops of waves to extend the flights and they can also steer by changing the angle of their pectoral fins. I have never seen abrupt changes in direction, but I have heard other people mentioning seeing the fish come out of the water heading in one direction, and apparently deliberately use a crosswind to end up 90 degrees off their original course.

ETA: Just watched the second video all the way through, and it does look like it makes a 90 degree turn at one point in that video. Cool!
 
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Wow - it's difficult to come to grips with this sort of idea.

Birds and bats (and perhaps the flying dinosaurs) were not cold blooded as a fish necessarily is (Fish would require much more insulation than they have to prevent loss of heat to their environment, like whales and other marine mammals have). They have gills - so, the fish's oxygen supply is severely limited as soon as it comes out of the water. They don't have the fuel supply or the metabolism for rather strenuous activity. Birds have hollow bones and are very lightly structured, unlike fish. Others have noted the lack of the necessary bone structure to support the power of the all-important downbeat that true flight requires. Birds are immensely helped by asymmetric feather structure, because they react differently to air flows up and down. It appears, however, that the fins are beautifully adapted for gliding.

In all, gliding is all it can do without serious modifications, but it can certainly do gliding.

From National Geographic:

The process of taking flight, or gliding, begins by gaining great velocity underwater, about 37 miles (60 kilometers) per hour. Angling upward, the four-winged flying fish breaks the surface and begins to taxi by rapidly beating its tail while it is still beneath the surface. It then takes to the air, sometimes reaching heights over 4 feet (1.2 meters) and gliding long distances, up to 655 feet (200 meters). Once it nears the surface again, it can flap its tail and taxi without fully returning to the water. Capable of continuing its flight in such a manner, flying fish have been recorded stretching out their flights with consecutive glides spanning distances up to 1,312 feet (400 meters).
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http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish/flying-fish.html

A 45 second flight at 37mph is 744 meters, almost twice as far as NG cites.
 
So... There just has to be an "arms race" going on here. I wonder which predators actually are pursuing them for such long distances.

Surely Attenborough must've covered this at some point...
 
Angus McPresley said:
So... There just has to be an "arms race" going on here. I wonder which predators actually are pursuing them for such long distances.

Surely Attenborough must've covered this at some point...
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It may be that they fly farther than they "need" to; the things that allow them to fly a large distance on occassion may be the same things that assure that they will almost always fly a sufficient distance in the usual case.

What they are likely avoiding (IMO) are schools of fast-swimming predatory fish such as tuna. By getting out of the water and gliding a considerable distance, their subsequent re-entry would be less likely to be observed by the tuna.
 
As with most questions, this one resolves to semantics. What does "fly" mean. If an animal rises into the air through their own power and stays there for a length of time that is much longer than a simple parabolic jump would be, is it flying? It would be hard to say no. In contrast, gliding, the way I understand it, involves being elevated by non-flying means, such as being lifted by another airplane or, in the case of "flying squirrels" climbing a tree.

So if you have a airfoil which has a motor on it, but that motor only turns the wheels on the ground, yet they can move the airfoil so fast on the ground that it can actually flip the angle of the foil, take off and soar long distances, then that is, as far as I am concerned, flying, even though it does not use anything motorized once airborne. In the same way, these fish, which can use their power-generators only in water, are also flying.
 
Tricky, Indeed there was a class of flying machines early in the history of flight where they DID achieve the velocity to fly with wheels on the ground, and then flew a short distance before touching down again. These were built by enthusiasts in the early days who did not have the technical ability to create a true aircraft.
 
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