User:Neurocorgi/sandbox

Habitat and behavior
Except when breeding, the typical habitats for this marine fish are sandy and muddy bottoms from shallow water just below the tide to depths of 366 m.

Its diet includes crustaceans and fish. It is nocturnal, feeding at night and resting during the day, when it buries itself in the sand.

Breeding
This fish is oviparous, and the male is dimorphic, designated as Type I and Type II. The Type I male claims a nest site, which is generally under a rock in the intertidal zone. Once the female spawns, she leaves the eggs in the care of the male and departs. One female can lay up to 400 eggs, and the number of eggs varies directly with body size. The male may mate with a few females and end up with over 1000 eggs in his nest. The eggs and larvae adhere to the wall of the nest. The male tends them by fanning them, keeping the nest clean, and hydrating them if they begin to desiccate at low tide. He protects the larvae post-hatching until they reach their juvenile stage and leave the nest, about 45 days after fertilization. Very occasionally, an egg will yield twin larvae.

Type II male is much smaller in size than the Type I. There are significantly less type II males within reproductively active males compared to Type I males, with a Type I to Type II ratio around 9:1. In contrary to Type I males, Type II males do not defend nests or guard eggs, but rather sneak in the nest sites of Type I males and fertilize the eggs there. The ratio of gonad weight to body weight of Type II males is on average nine times greater than that of Type I males. Type II males can be mistaken as gravid females as their abdomen distend due to enlarged testes.

The conditions of the intertidal breeding habitat change regularly with the tide. A male that tends to his nest can become stranded as the tide recedes, even becoming beached completely out of the water. The fish tolerates this well. It can breathe air. Physiologically, it is well adapted to hypoxia, as well as hypercapnia. Even its sperm are quite functional in low-oxygen conditions.

Many animals communicate through vocalization. Vocal communication serves many purposes, including mating rituals, warning calls, conveying location of food sources, and social learning. In a number of species, males perform calls during mating rituals as a form of competition against other males and to signal females. Examples include frogs, hammer-headed bats, red deer, humpback whales, elephant seals, and songbirds. The Type I male of the plainfin midshipman produces long hums to attract gravid females and generates shorter, higher-frequency grunts and growls in agonistic contexts. Other instances of vocal communication include the alarm calls of the Campbell monkey, the territorial calls of gibbons, and the use of frequency in greater spear-nosed bats to distinguish between groups. The vervet monkey gives a distinct alarm call for each of its four different predators, and the reactions of other monkeys vary appropriately according to the call. For example, if an alarm call signals a python, the monkeys climb into the trees, whereas the "eagle" alarm causes monkeys to seek a hiding place on the ground. Prairie dogs also use complex calls that signal predator differences. According to Con Slobodchikoff and others, prairie dog calls communicate the type, size, and speed of an approaching predator. The chickadee encodes information on the predator size in the "chick-a-dee" vocalization by varying the number of "dee" notes per call. As the predator wingspan decreases, the number of "dee" notes per call increases. The red-breasted nuthatch eavesdrops on the chickadee alarm calls and reacts based on the information. Whale vocalizations have been found to have different dialects based on region.