Archerfish or basket fish (often wrongly called basket fish or archer fish), including 7 species distributed in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, some waters in India, the Philippines, Australia …
Adult baskets have the ability to accurately position and use their mouths to shoot extremely strong water that knocks prey into the water to a height of 3 meters.
This species can live in both fresh and salt water environments. They spend most of their time swimming near water. The fish with the basket has a pointed head, a wide mouth, a flat and elongated body, but the most special is a specially designed mouth. A fish’s mouth can create tremendous pressure inside to spray powerful jets of water such as “water guns” at its prey.
The basket fish is one of 7 species of the intelligent fish genus Toxotes, capable of spraying water from the mouth on its prey with incredible precision and speed. Thanks to this ability, the basket fish is also known as the archer fish.
According to scientists, baskets can locate prey on water even more precisely than underwater. It only takes about 1/10 of a second after hitting the water jet on the prey, the basket fish can determine the position where the prey will fall on the water to swallow quickly.
Surprisingly, this creature also has the ability to “calculate” the impact of gravity to warp waterways and fall on prey. For example, if the prey is located 10 cm above the water, the basket fish will shoot a stream of water 30 cm high so that the water can bend 2 to 15 cm. It is a way of spraying water that is no different from calculating a shooter’s error.
The flow of water sprayed by the basket fish is not a continuous flow but a beam with parallel water droplets to help force the water splash to be strong.
To shoot strong and high, the gushing water is faster and stronger than the upper part.
In this way, physicists at the University of Milan estimate that the flow of water spat out by a basketfish can produce a force five times as strong as the muscles of a vertebrate.
The image simulates the ability to “calculate” the error of the basket fish to reach the target of a prey. Basketfish can live in many waters around the world, including some waters in Southeast Asia. According to physicist Schuster from the University of Bayreuth (Germany), the basketfish may change long-held thinking about the intelligence of marine organisms.
Interestingly, this fish only shows the ability to “draw water” well in nature. When taken into labs, they don’t seem to exhibit the same precision and power as before.
