Friday, December 12, 2008

In the deep ocean there's a creature called the Pacific viperfish, one of the scary ones that is usually not so big but can be six feet long. And which have in any case evolved teeth so large that they no longer fit inside the fish's head, thin spiny teeth so long that if the viperfish lives for enough years it can stab its own eye out.

It has grown these fangs so that there's no chance of prey escaping once it's been caught, but the problem with searching out food in the dark and the cold is that if the viperfish miscalculates and latches on to something too big it is stuck just as surely as its catch, unable to either release it or eat it. Dying, therefore, just as surely as the prey latched in its jaws.

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