Bizarre fish evolved for the oceans — but lives on land 
By Alasdair Wilkins FM Source: gizmodo 8/30/2011
Alasdair Wilkins
The Pacific leaping blenny is a marine fish in all aspects...except for the tiny detail that it spends all its time living on land. It could help us understand how the first animals colonized the land billions of years ago.

For reasons that one can only hope make perfect sense to the leaping blenny, these fish spend their entire adult lives leaping about on the rocky shores of Micronesia. The creature still needs to breathe through its gills, which means it can't entirely abandon the water. And yet it's still trying to do pretty much exactly that. Dr. Terry Ord of the University of New South Wales explains:
 

"This remarkable little fish seems to have made a highly successful transition across the water-land interface, although it is still needs to stay moist to enable it to breathe through its gills and skin. Our study showed that life on land for a marine fish is heavily dependent on tide and temperature fluctuations, so much so that almost all activity is restricted to a brief period at mid-tide, the timing of which changes daily. During our field study on Guam we never saw one voluntary return to water. Indeed, they spend much of their time actively avoiding submersion by incoming waves, even when we tried to capture them for study.

 
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