Scientists Discover Fish in Act of Evolution in Africa’s Greatest Lake
In what could be a first in the world, a fish species in the cichlid family has been observed by scientists in the act of splitting into two distinct species in Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake and one of the world’s biggest fresh water bodies.
This may be remarkable because what is causing them to diverge are adaptations to their vision as animals and plants try to cope with increased pollution and the effects of climate change. The change is also happening without geographical isolation, which was thought to be a precursor for evolution.
The Pundamilia nyererei is a haplochromine type cichlid native to areas in the Mwanza Gulf region of Lake Victoria. This region consists of many islands where each island region has its own color variant of the fish.
In a report published in the journal Nature, researchers from Tokyo’s Institute of Technology and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology have observed the cichlid evolve into a new species better adapted in sighting its prey and predator.
But the scientists have also tabled evidence indicating that it is not pollution and over-fishing alone that are responsible for the disappearance of some fish species in Lake Victoria and the evolving of others like the cichlid into new species.
The report summarizes that new species may be born because of vision differences and what fish see at least in one African lake could be the driving force that causes them to evolve into new species.
This may explain the very rapid loss of pundamilia in Lake Victoria over the past 30 years. The study says the eye adaptations have also affected mating patterns.
Researchers looked at two species, conspicuous by their red or blue colours. They determined through lab experiments that certain genetic mutations helped some fish adapt their vision at deeper levels to see the colour red and others in shallower water to recognise shades of blue.
The researchers showed that the eyes have adapted to this difference so that fish that live in deeper water have a pigment in their eyes that is more sensitive to red light, while shallow-water fish were sensitive to blue.
Generally, the evolutionary process of speciation (the formation of new species) occurs when one species is split by a physical distance or barrier, allowing each group to develop different traits. The observations of Lake Victoria’s cichlids provide evidence of an unusual form of evolution known as sympatric speciation, which occurs without the physical separation of a population group.
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Image credit: Erica Marshall at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Psst! Don’t tell Paulin, she still thinks we came from alien eggs about 4000 years ago, and McCain believes her! Hell, he eats lunch out of her panties and wants to believe anything she says!
evolution isnt supposed to happen within thousands or millions of years??? this evolution think is pure bull***t
This is an example of a natural mutation (or adaptation) - not evolution. There’s a HUGE difference between the two. It’s adapting to environment changes - not evolving into a completely different creature.
God works in mysterious ways.
This seems misleading. First of all, it acts as though scientists have observed one species giving birth to a new species, when in reality they are simply describing several species that they are observing. Micro-evolution, the process by which a species undergoes adaptation, has never resulted in the creation of a truly new species. And changes in the cichlids that are described in this article are really just examples of micro-evolution anyway, which no one disputes.
Nice one! Would be better than fossils, time to claim your trillion!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/creationist-offers-prize-for-fossil-proof-of-evolution-945289.html
Don’t tell Dembski either. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Don’t tell the devolved cretins at the Discovery Institute……………………
I wish we (scientist) could find more examples of this as fast as possible! Maybe then some of the fundamental right out there will stop with the nonsense…..
So, Mark and Martin,what you are saying is that you believe in evolution, you just don’t believe in evolution. Let me guess, you think that the only way to prove evolution would be for a fish to give birth to a land mammal. Is that about right? Well, for one thing, nowhere in the scientific theory of evolution does it say that one species gives birth to a completely different species. This is a process that takes a whole lot of time (millions of years is hard to wrap your brain around I understand) and is a difficult thing to ’see’. Small changes over these huge amounts of time eventually lead to a divergence of species, not one species giving birth to a new one then sending it on its way so it can continue. Do you even understand evolution?
Cichlids are not a species of fish, they are members of a family called Cichlidae. Within this family, there are at least 1,300 species of fish in this group, including Tilapias and Oscars.