Fish with feet found in Thailand's caves & waterfalls

Half way between fish & animal on land, this blind fish uses its fin as a leg to pull itself up waterfalls.

FISH & NATURAL HISTORY

Fish with feet found in Thailand's caves & waterfalls

The blind waterfall climbing cavefish named Cryptotora thamicola lives in fast-flowing streams as well as waterfalls in caves in Thailand.

The fish is a distant relative of pet goldfish.

Unlike other fish, this fish has a pelvis built for walking.
 
The fish uses its fins, two in front and two in back, to climb up steep rocks and waterfalls in caves as the fast-running water rushes over its body.

For most fish, if they find themselves on land instead of water they move their tail from side-to-side

This cavefish uses its tail like animals with four feet (tetrapods) do.

It plants its tail on land as if it was a foot and then pulls itself along.

The fish's skeleton has adaptations for walking that have never been seen in a fish.

The pelvis and spine (vertebral column) of this fish allow it to support its body weight.

This ability to walk makes the fish a sort of "missing link" in evolution (see here).

Here is a YouTube video that shows the fish living in its natural habitat:



TRANSCRIPT:

These cavefishes have a problem in that they are not only in an environment that is dark they are in an environment that is flowing.

So we found this excellent cave fish in Thailand that ... um ... is specialised in these waterfalls.

And what these fish do in complete darkness is that they stick to the rock and they climb waterfalls completely underwater.

Now, this is a problem, because what fish usually do is that they sense their environment by detecting water flow.

And now this fish not only has no vision because it is completely dark.

0:34

They have no eyes. They  are in a high flow environment.

How do they find each other and make babies?
How do they sense where their food is?

All these are interesting and important questions. 

0:46

And what I think is super - exciting about these fish in general is that because they are in these high flow environments, they have fin structures unlike any fish i have ever seen anywhere, out of the 30,000 species of fishes that we know to exist.

1:00

These fish are truly spectacular,  different from everything else we have seen.

They are able to climb up rock faces, in very much the same way that salamanders do.

So from an evolutionary perspective, this is a huge finding.

1:15

This is one of the first fish we have that is a living species that acts in a way that we think fishes must have acted when they evolved from a fluid environment to a terrestial environment. at the very beginning of the fintelum transition when there were the first limbs that evolved
in our earliest ancestors.

So having a living representative of something so we can see how it moves in these conditions could be hugely important to understanding that huge landmark in history.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/walking-fish-1.3507464

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_fish#Fish_to_tetrapods

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep23711

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SguiYeG_O8o

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/topic/906456-fish-with-pelvis-built-for-walking-discovered-in-thailand/

สามารถฝึกอ่านออกเสียงและดูคำแปลได้ที่ : http://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/learning-from-news/914357/fish-with-feet-found-in-thailands-caves-waterfalls