{"id":7829,"date":"2011-10-05T09:58:24","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T16:58:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stage.headlessnauedu-b6hgdzckfdgxgzhe.westus-01.azurewebsites.net\/?p=7829"},"modified":"2012-12-12T10:19:23","modified_gmt":"2012-12-12T17:19:23","slug":"fish-jump-into-picture-of-evolutionary-land-invasion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/fish-jump-into-picture-of-evolutionary-land-invasion\/","title":{"rendered":"Fish jump into picture of evolutionary land invasion"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Fish\"<\/a>
The time-elapsed image above, taken by researchers at Northern Arizona University, shows the mosquitofish’s ability to move outside of water with apparent skill and purpose. The study suggests that vertebrates may have invaded land more frequently than previously thought. Click here to watch video clips<\/a> of the jumping behavior the researchers observed in several species of fish.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Research sometimes means looking for one thing and finding another. Such was the case when biology professor\u00a0Alice Gibb<\/strong>\u00a0and her research team at Northern Arizona University witnessed a small amphibious fish, the mangrove rivulus, jump with apparent skill and purpose out of a small net and back into the water.<\/p>\n

This was no random flop, like you might see from a trout that\u2019s just been landed. The rivulus seemed to know what it was doing.<\/p>\n

They hadn\u2019t expected to see that behavior, even from a fish known to spend time out of the water. So before long, what began as a study on the evolution of feeding behavior was shifted to a study of how fish behave when stranded on land. And considering what is implied by the truism \u201clike a fish out of water,\u201d the results came as another surprise.<\/p>\n

Some fully aquatic fishes, as\u00a0the author\u2019s video clips show<\/a>, also can jump effectively on land even without specialized anatomical attributes. This has significant implications for evolutionary biology, Gibb said, because the finding implies that \u201cthe invasion of the land by vertebrates may have occurred much more frequently than has been previously thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study is summarized in a paper,\u00a0\u201cLike a Fish out of Water: Terrestrial Jumping by Fully Aquatic Fishes,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that appears online in the\u00a0JEZ A: Ecological Genetics and Physiology<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Alice<\/a>
Biologist Alice Gibb at work in her lab at Northern Arizona University, where she and a team of researchers studied the way fish behave when stranded on land.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the case of aquatic fish, Gibb said, \u201cThis shows that you don\u2019t have to have legs or rigid pectoral fins to move around on land. So if you go back and look at the fossil record to try to say which fish could move around on land, you\u2019d have a hard time knowing for sure.\u201dGibb said the study \u201csupports a big-picture theory in evolution,\u201d which is that the nervous system, in its control of bones and muscles, can allow a new behavior to appear without necessarily bringing about a physical change.<\/p>\n

The original feeding study began with guppies, then moved to a relative, the mangrove rivulus. Once the rivulus exhibited the tail-flip jumping maneuver, Gibb shifted the focus of the research. Eventually, the guppy came back into the picture. Literally.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you do a study like this, you have to ask what your control is,\u201d Gibb said. \u201cIf a known amphibious fish is a good jumper, then what\u2019s a bad jumper?\u201d<\/p>\n

Enter the guppy, a fully aquatic fish.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe guppy jumped almost as well as the amphibious fish did,\u201d Gibb said. \u201cAnd no one has ever suggested that a guppy is an amphibious fish.\u201d As a result, \u201cwe put everything we could get our hands on\u201d in front of a high-speed camera, Gibb said. Some of those additional subjects included the mosquitofish, which has been introduced into tributaries of Oak Creek, and a common pet store zebra fish, which is a very distant relative of guppies and mosquitofish.<\/p>\n

The mosquitofish \u201chas become our lab rat,\u201d Gibb said. \u201cIt\u2019s accessible, it comes from a group that has other jumpers, and it\u2019s been reported that this fish jumps out of the water to get away from predators and then jumps back in.\u201d<\/p>\n

That particular escape behavior, Gibb said, has never been filmed. Similar stories about other fish add to mostly anecdotal literature on the topic that \u201ctends to be old and very diffuse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s high-speed video systems give Gibb an opportunity to change that. What the cameras reveal is that both species produce a coordinated maneuver in which the fish curls its head toward the tail and then pushes off the ground to propel itself through the air.<\/p>\n

Gibb and her team have discussed going into the field to capture video of fish performing this behavior in the wild. But for now Gibb and her colleagues are endeavoring to determine if there is directionality to voluntary locomotion on land and to investigate the genetic basis of the jumping behavior.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe fishes that are very good at jumping are poor swimmers,\u201d Gibb said. \u201cWe want to look at the compromises that may have been made to favor one behavior over another.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research sometimes means looking for one thing and finding another. Such was the case when biology professor\u00a0Alice Gibb\u00a0and her research team at Northern Arizona University witnessed a small amphibious fish, the mangrove rivulus, jump with apparent skill and purpose out of a small net and back into the water. This was no random flop, like…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":7833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-academics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}