Meet the denizens of the deep, now in plastic form. The plastination process first became famous after its inventor, anatomist Gunther von Hagens, controversially began to apply it to human cadavers in the early 1990s: now the same method has been applied to deep-sea creatures.
On show since yesterday at the Vancouver Aquarium in Canada, the plastinated marine giants include a goliath grouper, a Humboldt (or jumbo) squid, a 5-metre-long mako shark and this sunfish, which measures a metre from front to back. These four are some of the largest of the 100 aquatic specimens on view at the Sea Monsters Revealed exhibition, which is open until September. Sui Hongjin, a former colleague of von Hagens, heads the company that did the plastination work.
Sunfish are undisputed freaks of the piscine world. They typically grow to 1.8 metres long and 2.5 metres high from fin tip to fin tip, and at 1000 kilograms they weigh more than polar bears, making them the heaviest of all bony fish. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to inspect the innards of the fish and attempt to figure out where on Earth they might keep the 300 million eggs they have been known to lay at a time – a record for vertebrates.
Over evolutionary time, sunfish have gradually replaced much of their bony skeleton with cartilage, which is much lighter. Most obviously, they've lost their tail; instead, the two hindmost fins have merged into a kind of rudder. And don't bother looking for the sunfish's swim bladder: it doesn't have one!
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