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Researchers Find Fish That Walks the Way Land Vertebrates Do
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times
While other fish in the caves enjoy a life in quiet pools, the waterfall-climbing blind cave fish clambers up slick rocks as water crashes over it.
It’s one of the most famous chapters in evolution, so familiar that it regularly inspires New Yorker cartoons: Some 375 million years ago, our ancestors emerged from the sea, evolving from swimming fish to vertebrates that walked on land.Scientists still puzzle over exactly how the transition from sea to land took place. For the most part, they’ve had to rely on information gleaned from fossils of some of the intermediate species.
But now a team of researchers has found a remarkable parallel to one of evolution’s signature events. In a cave in Thailand, they’ve discovered that a blind fish walks the way land vertebrates do.
An excerpt from a video of the cave fish walking like a salamander up an incline of approximately 90 degrees on an aquarium wall in the direction of a trickle of water.
The waterfall-climbing cave fish, Cryptotora thamicola, has even evolved many of the skeletal features that our ancestors did for walking, including a full-blown pelvis.
“It’s really weird,” said John R. Hutchinson, a biologist at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London who was not involved in the new study. “It’s a good example of how much fish diversity there’s left to be discovered.”
“It’s really weird,” said John R. Hutchinson, a biologist at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London who was not involved in the new study. “It’s a good example of how much fish diversity there’s left to be discovered.”
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