Posted on 08/27/2014 3:03:48 PM PDT by EveningStar
Raising fish on land seems like the sort of idea you’d get while recovering from general anesthesia. But for three McGill University researchers, it made perfect sense. How else would you find out what behavioral and physiological changes might have taken place when fish first made the move from sea to land over 400 million years ago?
"I used to look at fins and their motion, and I always thought it was so interesting and complex," says Emily Standen, lead author of a study published in Nature today, and an evolutionary biomechanics researcher who now works at the University of Ottawa. "And then I thought, wow, how does that change from a fin to something that might work on land? That’s how this project started."
(Excerpt) Read more at theverge.com ...
Hey! William Shatner went there! :-D
To #19: Which one is Helen Thomas and which one is Nancy Pelosi? So hard to tell the difference.
“These fish have functional lungs and can breathe air,” explains Standen. Dinosaur eels also have gills, but they breathe at the surface regularly to increase their oxygen supply. They also occasionally use their fins to walk on land.
So they found a fish that has already adapted to surviving out of water, and just forced it to do that for a longer period of time than it would prefer. It would be a lot more impressive if they could take a fully aquatic fish and repeat their experiment.
Oh, I wasn't ripping on the school. It was the gill - fish thing... Never mind.
Oh, I wasn't ripping on the school. It was the gill - fish thing... Never mind.
OK. Now I get it. :)
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