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Jack of all trades fish are better equipped to make the transition from water to land, but a new survey of blennies, a diverse group of small fish, suggests specialization helps species stay there.
Blennies are found all over the globe in marine, brackish and freshwater habitats. Most of the nearly 900 species live along the coasts, and though the majority of blennies spend their days fully submerged, a sizable percentage spend much of their lives out of the water. |
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Some species, often called rock hoppers, hang out in intertidal zones, in tidal pools where temperatures and water levels fluctuate rapidly. Others are completely adapted to life on the sand, in the splash zones where they get wet only periodically to help them breathe.
"The blennies are a very exciting group to study, from both an ecological and evolutionary standpoint," Terry Ord, study co-author and evolutionary ecologist, told UPI in an email. |
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