Sometimes dubbed the “anti-aircraft gunners” of the aquatic world, the archerfish has evolved such unerring eyesight and precise control that it can shoot down flying insects it feeds on by spitting out a jet of water from a distance of several feet.
April 24, 2022, 6:48 PM UTCAmid the many methods that animals have devised for hunting their prey — the sticky webs that spiders use to catch insects or the fake tasty morsel some turtles display in their mouths — the shooting technique of archerfish stands out.
Just how archerfish could have evolved such a bizarre trait, however, has long puzzled scientists. A new study suggests it’s been developed from jets their ancestors used underwater to clear away sediments in their search for anything edible.Archerfish.“We knew about this behavior, the spitting mechanism,” said Matthew Girard, an ichthyologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington who began the research while studying for a doctorate at the University of Kansas.
Girard noted that there has been debate for almost 100 years as to whether the archerfish’s precise water jet is caused by such a blowpipe structure or whether it’s caused by a “pressure tank” structure in the mouths of the fish — and the new research argues for the blowpipe hypothesis. It now seems archerfish may have developed their shooting abilities by evolving the existing structures in their mouths, perhaps originally to generate a jet of water that they used to clear away sediment from edible organisms on a lake or riverbed — a technique they still use today.
Miriam Ashley-Ross, a professor of biology at Wake Forest University, has studied the behavior of archerfish but wasn’t involved in the latest research.
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