1/16th siren

You get a Splendid Dottyback

Hello and happy day, everybody! Today's fish of the day is the Alabama sturgeon!

The Alabama sturgeon, known by scientific name Scaphirhynchus suttkusi is an incredibly endangered sturgeon found in the American South. Found, as the name implies, in the great state of Alabama, this species once had a wide historic range, stretching the entirety of the Mobile basin and bay, from the Alabama, Tombigbee, and Cahaba Rivers, but now has such limited numbers they are listed as wherever found. The Alabama sturgeon is now found only in the lower 130 miles of the Alabama river, living in fast currents of water 6-14 meters of depth nearby rock or mussel beds.

With only 3 confirmed sightings of them since 2009 confirming the species is still extant. With little hope of proving that the Alabama sturgeon continues to live other than the rare sightings, in 2016 researchers turned to another way. Using eDNA, which is usually sheddings, excrement, or other materials left behind in the environment around an animal, they got a positive result determining that the Alabama sturgeon population is still alive, leading to hopes of a captive breeding program. Despite this, there have been no female Alabama sturgeons caught, forcing plans for a breeding program to be entirely paused until they can secure eggs for it.

Regardless of current conservation efforts of the sturgeon, let's discuss other things known about this fish. This sturgeon's diet is made up of plant materials, aquatic bugs, mollusks, and other small bottom dwelling organic matter. Like other sturgeon, the Alabama sturgeon is a bottom feeder with a protrusible mouth, acting as a vacuum. They can get up to a size of 30 inches, relatively small for sturgeons, and are mostly known within the family for their striking orange-yellow color. Their life cycle is nearly identical to that of other sturgeon: sexual maturity occurs at 5-7 years of age, at which point they swim upstream to lay eggs, repeating this every 2-3 years until their lifespan comes to an end around 12-20 years!

HERALDIC DEVICES WERE NOT MEANT TO BE DESCRIBED

CENTURIES OF HERALDRY yet NO REAL-WORLD USE for the word GULES

Want to blazon for a laugh? We have a tool for that, it's called USING A PENCIL

"Argent, three torteauxes in bend between two cotizes sable" - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged

LOOK at what Heralds have been demanding your respect for all this time (this is REAL Heraldry, done by REAL Heralds)

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"Hello, I would like Sable, a cockatrice displayed argent, crested, membred, and jollopped Gules please"

I've been able to find... basically what's on that wiki page: when & where & by whom it was made, which families are represented, & that it has 719 (seven hundred nineteen) quarterings. but I need to know

why

is it like this?

why so many quarterings? And why so much repetition? SO MUCH. I spent... a while erasing the duplicates that I could find (counting birth order symbols over the same designs as separate arms for simplicity). I came up with these (in their places & then condensed):

the rest are all duplicates. And I'm not actually even sure I found 'em all due to some difficult to identify color patterns that are probably about the original photograph, and the hour at which I finally climbed back out of my hole.