Body
Fish have a variety of different body plans. Their body is divided into head, trunk, and tail, although the divisions are not always externally visible. The body is often fusiform, a streamlined body plan often found in fast-moving fish. They may also be filiform (eel-shaped) or vermiform (worm-shaped). Also, fish are often either compressed (laterally thin) or depressed (dorso-ventrally flat).
The caudal peduncle is the narrow part of the fish's body to which the caudal or tail fin is attached. The hypural joint is the joint between the caudal fin and the last of the vertebrae. The hypural is often fan-shaped.
Photophores are light-emitting organs which appears as luminous spots on some fishes. The light can be produced from compounds during the digestion of prey, from specialized mitochondrial cells in the organism called photocytes, or associated with symbiotic bacteria, and are used for attracting food or confusing predators.
The lateral line is a sense organ used to detect movement and vibration in the surrounding water. In most species, it consists of a line of receptors running along each side of the fish.
The ampullae of Lorenzini allow sharks to sense electrical discharges.
The genital papilla is a small, fleshy tube behind the anus in some fishes, from which the sperm or eggs are released; the sex of a fish often can be determined by the shape of its papilla.
Read more about this topic: Fish Anatomy
Famous quotes containing the word body:
“Each body has its art, its precious prescribed
Pose, that even in passion’s droll contortions, waltzes,
Or push of pain or when a grief has stabbed,
Or hatred hacked is its, and nothing else’s.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“Just getting in the pool for seven straight hours is unbearable to me.... It’s grueling. There’s nothing physically pleasurable about it. If you’re doing a hard workout, you’re throwing up in the gutter. At night you cling to your pillow and just hope that your body revives before you have to go back and do it again.”
—Diana Nyad (b. 1949)
“They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her for ever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)