“They (the fish) shed some of the heavy armor plates that protect against ocean predators but seem to hinder quick escapes in freshwater; they lost belly spines that proved a handicap with insects grabbing at the young fish from below. Sticklebacks that live on lake bottoms are almost always lighter in color than their marine counterparts, probably for camouflage.
Those patterns repeat around the world. Researchers say that means it’s not chance, but natural selection, behind the wheel.
“One of the beautiful things about the stickleback is that the process of colonizing new lakes and streams from the ocean has played out countless thousands of times,” said Stanford University developmental biologist David Kingsley, who has led much of the genetic work. “You’ve got all these natural experiments replicated over and over again.”
To replicate those experiments — but in a controlled way — Schluter built more than 30 ponds on the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver campus, each up to 75 feet square. He jokingly calls the complex his “evolution accelerator.””
At what point do these scientist predict the fish will acquire legs and wings?
As I recall (and I’ve been fed a lot of crap over my lifetime), when sticklebacks fight each other, the stickleback closest to his own nest wins.
Trust the MSM to skip the important questions:
What do they taste like?
I only know it from a line in Genesis’ “Carpet Crawlers”
“And the tickler takes his stickleback...”
I have no idea what it means, and I have listened to that song hundreds of times, and it’s still one of my favorites.
Evolution in Your FaceLake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, is home to more than 300 species of cichlids. These fish, which are popular in aquariums, are deep-bodied and have one nostril, rather than the usual two, on each side of the head. Seismic profiles and cores of the lake taken by a team headed by Thomas C. Johnson of the University of Minnesota, reveal that the lake dried up completely about 12,400 years ago. This means that the rate of speciation of cichlid fishes has been extremely rapid: something on average of one new species every 40 years!
by Patrick Huyghe
Omni