Ichthyologist | Collection Manager of Fishes at Scripps Institution of Oceanography | Beer and bike lover | Horror fan
San Diego, CA
Joined March 2008
- Tweets1.6K
- Following344
- Followers2K
- Likes1.6K
Ben Frable 🐟 retweeted
💢 Headed to #ComicCon this week? Check out "More Science in Your Fiction with The League of Extraordinary Scientists and Engineers," featuring Scripps Oceanography scientists Ben @Frable & Lisa Zeigler!
📆 July 24
🕐 1 PM
📍 Omni Grand Ballroom DE
🔗 bit.ly/3Tc5cFu
ALT Lisa Zeigler and Ben Frable
Ben Frable 🐟 retweeted
1/9 Interesting study. As noted in the IFLScience piece, macroevolution is not amenable to experimental manipulation, and hypotheses about events tens of millions of years ago necessarily rely on inference. That applies equally to our hypothesis and to Brownstein et al.'s.
Tuna are truly odd fish, growing to massive size and featuring warm blood. But what made them this way? iflscience.com/did-the-dinos…
Ben Frable 🐟 retweeted
Congrats to @aintzane11, @R_BetancurR and our co-authors on our new @NatureComms paper: Ecological and genomic signatures of the convergent evolution of planktivory in fossil and living reef fishes over deep time nature.com/articles/s41467-0… 1/4
ALT https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-73110-3
Specimen SIO 23-94 is now part of the Scripps Marine Vertebrate Collection and available to science! Consider helping us continue our work on documenting the deep-sea fish diversity! See the link below to support us giveto.ucsd.edu/giving/home/…
And read the publication here! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
We collected tissue samples and @arciladk was able to generate a mitogenome for this species and compare it with related eels, such as gulper eels, bobtail eels and snipe eels.
These eels lack an upper jaw and instead have a venomous fang in the roof of their mouth that you can see on this CT scan. They presumably use this to immobilize large red crustaceans, their favorite prey.
It matches Monognathus jesse, previously known from only ONE specimen collected near the Line Islands in 1960 (catalog number SIO 60-245). And we figured this extraordinary specimen warranted a publication
From 1,750–2,000 m deep, we collected one of the rarest deepsea fishes out there: a one-jaw eel (family Monognathidae). Only ~100 specimens are known worldwide and we hold the largest collection (~46), most just a few inches long… The one we collected though, 6 inches or 154 mm!
Back in October 2023, @Scripps_Ocean Professor @anelachoy invited me on a research cruise hundreds of miles off California to study open ocean Goodwin’s. I helped ID deep-sea fishes collected via a MOCNESS net system (opening–closing trawl with known capture depths)
Ben Frable 🐟 retweeted
These fishes, many collected from Caribbean reefs and coastal ecosystems, are now protected, digitized, and available to scientists, educators, and the public. 3/5
Ben Frable 🐟 retweeted
We made a short video to share how this rescue effort is helping keep biodiversity alive for future research and discovery: youtube.com/watch?v=tjjqdKJr… 4/5
Ben Frable 🐟 retweeted
Behind every specimen there’s a story, and sometimes a rescue mission.
youtube.com/watch?v=tjjqdKJr…
When the fish collection in Puerto Rico was at risk, the National Science Foundation stepped in to help preserve decades of scientific work 1/5 @Scripps_Ocean @NSF @betanricar @Frable
New video explaining the PhD work of Fernando Melendez and research by @arciladk and the @FishEvoLabSIO at @Scripps_Ocean
youtu.be/2QnwZy5tQHk
Ben Frable 🐟 retweeted
Scripps Oceanography's Ben @Frable joins the Batiquitos Lagoon Foundation to share more about the fascinating deep-sea specimens known as #oarfish, and why they're washing up on California beaches.
📅 July 19
🕙 10 AM
📍 Batiquitos Lagoon Nature Center
sandiegouniontribune.com/202…
Ben Frable 🐟 retweeted
Our new paper reporting several new records of deep reef fishes at Australia's Coral Sea is out in Coral Reefs! Great team effort led by @fishguykai and including records made both by diving and ROVs. link.springer.com/article/10…
Ben Frable 🐟 retweeted
Our friend Francesca recently spotted this cool creature washed up on La Jolla Shores, so naturally we had to phone our other friend Ben @Frable, manager of the Marine Vertebrate Collection here at Scripps Oceanography. 🐠 Here's what he had to say. ⬇️
Ben Frable 🐟 retweeted
"This is our most common deep-water eel, the dogface witch eel, Facciolella equatorialis. They occur around 300 to nearly 2,000 feet on the seafloor. I have been seeing them in greater numbers in the last few years." - @Frable
Ben Frable 🐟 retweeted
👀 🐠Some interesting fishy finds have been spotted around the world lately, like this rare humpback #anglerfish. Ben @Frable, manager of the Marine Vertebrate Collection at Scripps Oceanography, shares more about this cool creature for @Salon. ⬇️
salon.com/2025/02/13/rare-fo…
