Rosanne Els, age l2, of Dover, Okla., for her question:
Are there fish that really fly?
Californians love to watch their flying fishes leave the sea and zoom above the waves experts claim this is not true flight. But far south of the border there are fishes that really fly. They beat or vibrate their fins as a bird flaps his wings.
Various flying fishes frolic off our Atlantic and Pacific shores. They are dainty little creatures with oversized fins that fan out to form gauzy wings. some have two and some have four of these flying fins. A normal fish has a pair of pectoral fins where you would expect to find his shoulders and a pair of pelvic fins on his chest. In most flying fish, only the two pectoral fins are enlarged. In the four winged types, both the pectoral and the pelvic fins are enlarged.
The fairy like creatures leave the water to escape their eIement, and a friendly breeze may lift them 20 feet above the waves. They can zoom through the air at 35 miles an hour and stay aloft for l2 seconds or more. As We watch them, they certainly seem to vibrate and even flap their fins but most fish experts claim that they merely fool our eyes. The true flyers are the birds and they must beat the air to lift themselves and stay aloft. Most high speed cameras show that the flying fishes keep their wings rigid and glide or plane through the air.
However, not everybody is convinced and someday We may prove that our own flying fishes vibrate their wings and really fly. In the meantime, we can point to about nine little fishes that really do fly like the birds. They are fresh water fishes that live in many warm rivers of Central and South America. These true fliers are called hatchet fish. The largest is four inches long and the smallest only one inch, and each has one pair of flying fins.
The shoulders of a flying hatchet fish bulge with mighty muscles and his little body tapers from an oversized chest to a slender tail. These mighty muscles are attached to his pectoral fins, and when he zooms through the air he moves them to make his flying wings beat and vibrate.
Most of his time is spent near the surface feeding on water bugs, but he shares his murky rivers with fierce and hungry relatives. When scared, he launches himself into the air and flies off in a straight line. He cannot swerve or change course in the air, but he always flies toward deeper and safer water and never lands with a flop on the shore.
The nine or so flying hatchets are called characin fishes and they are distantly related to our dainty minnows. They also are cousins of the catfish and the electric eel and one of their cousins is the deadly piranha. This fierce little monster shares the world of the flying hatchet fishes and they try to escape him by taking to the air.