Fish teaches itself to "walk"...with disclaimers :)

This is really cool. I saw this yesterday, but didn't hit upon the correct article. Bichir fish have always been fascinating. I would put mudskippers in the same tent(it is a big tent!). I thought that this was going to be a simple Tiktaalik redux. Was I ever wrong.

Fish raised out of water develop steady walking gait, Canadian researcher finds . The most fascinating thing to me is that the fry forced into a terrestrial existence lost the ability to swim. Astonishingly, the terrestrial birchirs modify body posture AND some features of their anatomy in order to better locomote. In reading one finds that the fish used in the experiment were not raised generation after generation so that selection does not come into play. The fish have the capacity sans any breeding program. Bichirs of normal environmental rearing have the ability to "walk," but not nearly as well as the terrestrially raised brood in the experiment.

LaMarckian nonsense is not going on here. The abilities and structure changes are obviously available in the current fish's genome.

If this sort of thing interests you in even a wee amount, open the link, read more, and watch video of "walking" fish.

Oh, and I am not "dissin'" Neil Shubin et al's discovery of Tiktaalik. That discovery was monumental. The transition from fishes to tetrapods is one of the greatest moments* in the history of evolution. Tiktaalik also definitively demonstrated the predictive power of evolutionary theory.

Hey, a happy entry!

*Yes. I know it was more than a moment when measured against the timescale of a human life. In geological terms, it happened pretty fast.