The Sharp-Shooting Skills of Archerfish

The Sharp-Shooting Skills of Archerfish

The ability to club shoot or spear living target means the difference between faced of famine many athletic field events arose from ancient forms and hunting while humans developed weapons such as spears, bow and arrow for shooting on animals, it need lots of skills to operate this hunting tool.

Likewise animals have also developed the same techniques of hunting. ‘What if I tell you, that it is a fish that can able to shoots on prey’. The name of fish is “Archerfish”. An ability to squirt water jets at prey has made the fish popular in aquariums, which is how researcher Stefan Schuster was first introduced to them.

The archerfish (spinner fish) are a family (Toxotidae) of fish known for their habit of preying. Scientists say the jets of water that archer fish use to shoot down prey are precisely tuned, to make maximum impact at just the right distance. 

Generally archerfish use this technique of preying on land-based insects and other small animals. The family is small, consisting of seven species in the genus Toxotes; which typically inhabit brackish waters of estuaries and mangroves, but can also be found in the open ocean, as well as far upstream in fresh water. They can be found from India to the Philippines, Australia, and Polynesia.

Archerfish are remarkably accurate in their shooting; an adult fish almost always hit the target on the first shot. They can bring down insects and other prey up to 3 m above the water's surface. This is partially due to their good eyesight, but also their ability to compensate for the refraction of light as it passes through the air-water interface when aiming for their prey. They typically spit at prey at a mean angle of about 74° from the horizontal, but can still aim accurately when spitting at angles between 45 and 110°.

When an archerfish selects its prey, it rotates its eye so that the image of the prey falls on a particular portion of the eye in the ventral temporal periphery of the retina, and its lips just break the surface, squirting a jet of water at its victim. The archerfish does this by forming a small groove in the roof of its mouth and its tongue into narrow channel. It then fires by contracting its gill covers and forcing water through the channel, shooting a stream that shaped by its mouthparts, travels faster at the rear than at the front. This speed differential causes the stream to become a blob directly before impact as the slower leading water is overtaken by the faster trailing water, and it is varied by the fish to account for differences in range. It also makes one of the few animals who both make and use tools, as they both utilize the water and shape it to make it more useful to them. Archerfish have been known to send a stream up to 5 meters (16 ft) but can only shoot insect up to 1–2 meters (3 ft 3 in–6 ft 7 in) away due to their limited accuracy. They are also persistent and will make multiple shots if their first one fails. Young archerfish start shooting when they are about 2.5 centimeters (0.98 in) long, but are inaccurate at first and must learn from experience.