Fish smoking coral meat with death kiss

With a quick kiss, "mucous lips" can clean up coral meat, one of the most indigestion menus on Earth.

Fish Labropsis australis easily draws coral containing toxin with a mucus-filled "kiss" with powerful attraction, according to Reuters. Scientists consider this to be one of the most unique feeding strategies in the animal world.

Using scanning electron microscopes and high-speed video, scientists on June 5 first described how to feed the 18 cm long fish. With just a kiss of 1/50 second, they can remove the flesh of the coral covered by the toxin-containing mucus.

The pair of death lips of coral-eating fish.(Photo: Reuters).

"Smoking the mucus and coral meat with self-lubricating lips is not what we think," said ocean biologist Victor Huertas of James Cook University, Australia.

Their weapons are thick lips, with folded tissues stacked like the inside of a mushroom cap, covered by mucus.'From what we know, this type of lips has never been recorded before , ' said biologist David Bellwood.

The mucus protects the fish's lips from coral's itchy hair cells, helping to increase the power of attraction. " It looks exactly like a kiss with a distinctive sound of kiss , " Huertas said. Bellwood argues that the fish-breeding technique is like a horror movie scene.

Labropsis australis fish live in reefs in the Indian Ocean, central and western Pacific regions. Of the more than 6,000 species of reef fish, only about 128 species eat corals.