What is a chiasmodon?
We do not hear the word chiasmodon every day of the week. A strange, rare word is very tempting to the curiosity and this one leads us into the watery world of the fishes. To track down its meaning, we becme word detectives and along the way our strange word picks up even stranger company. We meet terms such as Osteichthynes, Percomorphi, Chiamnodontidae and ohiasmodontid.
There are more types of fish than all the different amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals in the world. All these creatures, however, are vertebrates and belong In the great phylum Chordata. The reptiles occupy one class in this phylum, the birds another, the mammals another. The more than 25,000 different fishes occupy several separate classes.
The most advanced of these classes is Osteichthynes the bony fishes which have bone rather than gristle in their skeletons. These fellows have scales, fins and gills. There are some 20,000 bony fish, including most of the fishy looking fish. This huge class is divided into subclasses and orders. The order Percomorphi includes the perches, sunfishes, mackerels and barracudas. It in subdivided again into families end one of these families is named Chiasmodontidae which is very like the word we are hunting.
The Chiasmodonidae family is divided into genera, and here we find cur word ahiasmodon. It is a genus of bony fishes of the perch family. A typical chiasmodontid is the black swallower who inhabits the dark waters almost two miles below the surface of the sea. This grim fellow can swallow a dinner several times larger than himself but this feat may lead to disaster.
The deep sea black swallower has special Jaws and a special stomach.
The jaws of his big mouth are hinged so that he can move them separately. He grabs a bigger fish by the tail and gobbles him down by moving first one jaw, thor. the other. The stomach of the black swallower extends like elastic to make room for this huge dinner,
The digestive process takes time, and in this the swallower may have over estimated his talents, The big dinner often decays before his insides can convert it into nourishment. The decaying food produces poisons and swelling gases inside the black swallower and his oversized meal may prove fatal. When this happens, the greedy chiasmodon bursts and floats to the surface.
The deep ocean is under the terrific pressure of the water above it. The bodies of surface dwelling fish would be crushed under this` pressure. The chiasmodon is built to survive in deep water, but he cannot live at the surface. We see him only during our rare and expensive probes into the ocean depths or when he bursts and floats to the surface which is why we do not meet the interesting word chiasmodon every day of the week.