Polypterus are Awesome

[Hoplo]

Not sure about the ethics of doing this, but it just goes to proving my point that polypterus are just awesome.
http://www.newscientist.com/article...the-transition-to-four-legs.html#.U_4_b65fr-I

 

[Khapham_1997]

True that! AWESOME!!!


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[Ponera]

http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/f...sing-links-between-ancient-fish-and-tiktaalik

Linked for relevance, I already gave my two cents on it as I work in paleontology so I have a smidge of an inside track on some of this.

 

[Nim Dibbley]

i want to see a bichir out of water catch a prey item.

 

[Ponera]

evolutionarily it would probably go down with them returning to the water to hunt and coming on land to avoid competition/normal predators.

 

[Nim Dibbley]

evolutionarily it would probably go down with them returning to the water to hunt and coming on land to avoid competition/normal predators.

Sure, in nature that would make sense. in the article they mentioned the bichirs were raised out of water for 8 months. they must have been fed out of water? im just curious how the fish were fed in the lab experiment.

 

[Ponera]

probably with pellets or fed cut up worms or something. Who knows, whatever they were eating probably wasn't very agile lol.

 

[Aw3s0m3]

Is there sense of smell even as good out of water as it is in? That's kinda cool though how fast they adapted to living out of water. I would've thought it would take them thousands of years to adapt like in nature.


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[SawickiB]

Did this experiment involve the bichir living completely out of land? So they just kept is very moist? Thats really cool.

 

[Ponera]

Yes, according to what I've read they were kept in high humidity and moisture environments that were all land.