Female Fish Can Breed Outside Their Own Species, They Just Don’t Need to Be That Picky

Female Fish Can Breed Outside Their Own Species, They Just Don’t Need to Be That Picky
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Fish will mate with a species outside their own if the male’s coloring is attractive enough or if the female can’t see him correctly, according to new research. Fish want to mate with a species that’s outside their own if the coloring of the male is attractive, or if the female cannot see him correctly.

This thing in mate choice will lead to the evolution of a new species, an international team of researchers found. The team studied 2000 fish and analyzed the DNA of more than 400 cichlid fish from two freshwater lakes in East Africa. They also discovered more than 40 new species in Lake Mweru, which was formed about one million years ago.

Dr. Joana Meier is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge and is also the lead author of the research, which was published in Nature Communications. She stated that they found a dazzling diverse new species, which are called radiations, which were unknown up until now.

Female Fish Can Breed Outside Their Own Species

This new species of cichlids managed to adapt to use all the food resources from the lake. Some eat insect larvae, other zooplankton, or algae. Some fish that were recently discovered are predators that have large teeth, which were named ‘large-tooth serranchromines.’

Many people assume that fish are all of the same species simply because they all live in water. You should know that there are 30.000 different species of fish, and many of them are different from each other. If you expect all of them to mate, no matter the species, it’s like you accept a dog and a horse to mate because they all have four legs and a tail.

Fossil records show that fish existed for more than 500 million years, which is a lot on the evolutionary scale. There are more than 1300 species of cichlids, and most of them are popular aquarium fish.


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Jeffrey likes to write about health and fitness topics, being a champion fitness instructor in the past.

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