Who isn’t a little weird? Here at the Center for Biological Diversity, we celebrate peculiarity in every one of its human and animal forms. After all, who’d want to live in a world without weirdness?
Unarmored Threespine Stickleback: Though He Be but Little, He Is Fierce
In this installment of Save the Weirdos: a tiny but pugnacious fish whose male is both a total ladies’ man and a caring, single, stay-at-home dad.
The 2-inch-long, pale-green-to-brown unarmored threespine stickleback lives in clear, flowing streams and pools in Southern California, eating a miscellany of stream-dwelling delicacies, from bottom-feeding insects — its fave — to nematodes, algae and snails. It lives about a year, usually only through one mating season.
“Unarmored threespine stickleback” —it’s a badass moniker for this unique, ferocious little fishie. What’s in a name?
Unarmored:
This adjective refers to the fact that the fish is scaleless — a fish with no scales. Total weirdo.
Threespine:
Captain Obvious reporting: This fish has three spines. (On its back, FYI.)
Stickleback:
“Stickle” means “to contend especially stubbornly.” In this case the word is illustrative of the male stickleback raising the spines on his back as a defensive behavior. For more on the male (the “weirder sex” when it comes to this subspecies, at least), read on.
The Male Stickleback: Dedicated Father, Enthusiastic Lover
For this fish, courtship begins when a male finds a homey spot in a stream, with slow-moving water and plenty of vegetation, and digs out a lovely nest in the sand, lining it with fine plant debris and strands of algae patched together with “spiggins” — mucus threads spun from his kidney — and burrowing through the sand to create an entrance and exit.
He then courts egg-carrying female passersby in all the flashy glory of his bright red “nuptial coloration.” (Females also change color during breeding season, but with just a prim blush of pink.) To court a female, the male eagerly leaps out of his nest structure and swims toward and away from her in a zig-zag pattern; if she’s impressed, she’ll finally follow him to his nest and deposit her eggs (40–300!), which the male immediately fertilizes.
When the egg-laying is done, the male ejects the female from his premises and lies in wait for more females to entice into his pad. During the breeding season, this stickleback pickup artist’s nest may contain the eggs of more than one baby mama. So yes, he’s a total player. But he’s also a dedicated parent, serving as the sole caretaker and protector of the eggs (even “fanning” them with his fins) — and, when the eggs hatch, the young.
Daddy Stickleback is extremely defensive of his nest, at any possible threat darting forward with a gaping mouth — and raising his spiny “hackles” — to scare off predators. Does this pinkie-finger-sized papa really seem frightening to would-be egg-eaters? His antics seem to work.
But his whole subspecies is extremely endangered, hurt by urban development, pollution, mining, water projects and more.
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