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encyclopika · 4 years

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Animal Crossing Fish - Explained #10

Brought to you by a marine biologist who really can’t believe she’s done 10 of these...

Fish I’ve Covered: Click Here

To celebrate doing ten of these, we will be covering the killifish, the tenth fish in the fish list. Yeah, I’m grasping at straws, guys. Please feel free to request which fish you want to see me cover! X,D Otherwise, my husband is gonna keep determining what we do next lmao.

At first, I thought this would be the most boring fish to cover. I’m familiar with killifish around where I live and I often use them to teach children about saltmarsh fish. The variety I deal with, the Striped Killifish, is hardy enough to withstand children seining the marsh for them, getting caught in a net, and being accidentally man-handled by excited kids who are interacting with wild animals probably for the first time. The way children handle animals gives me anxiety. Having only one job? Not in this economy! Although the fish used in AC:NH certainly looks like a killifish, it’s not really. Instead, it’s a kind of ricefish, and I’m not entirely sure if this is a localization error or what.

Although it’s hard to really recognize the AC:NH “killifish” as anything in particular, I’m fairly certain this is the Japanese Rice Fish, Oryzias latipes, also called Medaka in Japan.

Thank you Animal Crossing wiki...otherwise I would have been hard pressed to figure out this one. Although the wiki isn’t sure about the species, I think it makes a lot of sense that this is the species included in AC, and I’m here to tell you why.

For starters, these guys just became available in AC:NH and you can only catch them in the pond. This really goes along with this animal’s preferred habitat of ponds, rice paddies, tide pools, and other still/slow-moving water habitats. The Japanese Rice Fish (gonna just say JRF cuz I’m tired lol) is a euryhaline fish, meaning it can live in environments with some salt, like tide pools and saltmarshes. Although these guys are just as hardy as my American actual-killi, they are of special concern in Japan.

Where once the species was widespread throughout Southeast Asia, its range has been corrected to being endemic to Japan, as genetic and morphological research has determined that the species was actually a number of species all along! Who woulda thought... This tends to be happening more and more as we get better at sequencing DNA, and it really throws a wrench in conservation efforts. Where an animal is considered “Least Concern” can suddenly become “Endangered” after a study like this, for no other reason than we just didn’t know this guy was actually three guys hiding in a trenchcoat. Although, for the JRF, it’s status worldwide is still “Least Concern”. To Japan, though, it is listed as “Endangered” due to some pretty legit reasons I think the IUCN Redlist should consider.

Habitat degradation is a biggie, as it is for lots of freshwater fish, as their habitats are ridiculously close to human habitation (and therefore get trashed). Modernization of rice agriculture practices has severely limited spaces this animal can live. Competition with invasive Mosquitofish, an actual killifish from the good ol’ USA, is also driving the species down, as Mosquitofish are more aggressive, and lots of JRF were found to be directly injured by them. On top of that, “Medaka” has been kept as a pet fish for centuries in Japan, and the intentional release of domesticated Medaka have begun to breed and genetically pollute the wild populations for the worse. Why do we keep coming back to this? Stop releasing ya damn pets, people!

Medaka is a socially important animal in Japan. Not only were they domesticated in Japan and are kept as pets, but school children are often tasked with caring of Medaka in the classroom to teach them responsibility and foster an appreciation for animal life cycles. So that explains why Japan is doing a lot to preserve this fish. So, to me, the AC:NH “killifish” can’t be anything but the JRF/Medaka.

And there you have it. Fascinating stuff, no?

#animal crossing #ac: new horizons #killifish #Japanese rice fish #fish #science in video games #animal crossing fish explained

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