I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying theĀ causes and processes ofĀ illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
Dear Boobsta; There are amphibians that live in water and on land, but I do not think that fish will ever develop feet and be able to walk on the land. I think it is marvelous to have immagination of fish communicating with lions. Why don’t you develop that idea into a story? It will be very interesting.
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They already did! You have lungs and feet, right? Did you walk to school today? (I don’t know if you communicated with a lion, but I’ll just assume that you’re really awesome and would do fine if I put you in the lion cage). You may say that you’re not a fish, and that’s true, but you share a common ancestor with them far back in history, probably about 500-550 million years ago. That’s when the groups split and the one that eventually evolved into tetrapods (‘four-footed’) and then into reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals arose; the other one ended up as a different group of fish, the ray-finned fishes. You probably know many of the ray-finned fishes, like salmon and trout.
On the other hand, if you’re asking whether populations of fish that are alive now will, over a long time, evolve into land animals *again*, that’s a tougher question to answer. If nothing major changes in the animal kingdom, then the answer is probably ‘no’. I’m simplifying here, but animals tend to evolve to fill empty jobs (‘niches’, they’re called), like someone who starts a business selling a new product that people want. If fish were to evolve into land animals again, they would be entering a market that’s already crowded with other animals doing the same jobs. Can you imagine how hard it would be to start a company selling a competitor to the iPhone right now? That’s what fish trying to evolve onto land would be facing; land animals are already doing that job and doing it better.
However, there is one possible way that this could happen. Throughout history, there have been what’s known as ‘mass extinctions’, where many of the species alive suddenly disappear (I say suddenly, but we’re actually talking about many thousands of years). One of these happened 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared. Until then, mammals were generally small and uncomplicated, but after that they exploded into the jobs that had, until then, been filled by the dinosaurs. That’s what allowed us, as humans, to evolve into what we are now. If another mass extinction happened and wiped out the land animals, then whatever fish were left would be free to evolve onto land once again. Unfortunately, it’s pretty unlikely that there would be any lions left to talk to, but you can’t have everything. š
I should say that the things that we’re doing to the planet, like climate change and building over the habitat of animals, is causing what many biologists refer to as a mass extinction *right now*. Species are going extinct at a rate much higher than they should, and we’re losing ‘biodiversity’ (the range of life in existence) across the entire planet at an alarming clip. An entire field of biology, conservation biology, is dedicated to fighting this loss. Maybe you can find a way to help!
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Yep, it has happened in the past (evolution) and might happen again in the future! Usually what you’ll find is that things start to change when there is a need for it, or a change in the environment. For example, researchers have now found tropical fish far South of the Great Barrier reef, and they think it’s because the water is getting warmer and the fish want a slightly cooler environment. For us humans, because we have more readily available food and better medications for diseases, you see that our average height is increasing (most of you will at some stage be taller than your parents probably!).
So think of a setting where fish would need to develop lungs and feet and that’s exactly what might happen one day! This adaptive change would take many many many many years though, so you wouldn’t actually get to see it happen yourself. But if you could imagine that the oxygen levels in the ocean would suddenly drop and there wouldn’t be much food for the fish, they might start to adapt and possibly take a breath of air on the surface (like whales) and eventually develop some sort of feet so they can get their brekkie, lunch and dinner on land!
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Steven and Natasha have both explained the future evolution side of things really well!
Did you know that there are already fish that have lungs? They’re called, very creatively, lungfish. There are also “walking fish”, like mudskippers, that can move about out of water quite effectively. They don’t really walk, but they get around alright! I don’t know of any fish that can communicate with lions, though if I was a fish, I’d probably be swimming away from those teeth!
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I think I’ll leave the discussion of evolution to the experts – Steven and Natasha (who have taught me a few things as well!). I’m not sure about whether fish will ever want to communcate with the lions though…
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