A Peculiar Fish and an Evolutionary Mystery
What we can learn from the macabre diets of a curious species of cichlids. The post A Peculiar Fish and an Evolutionary Mystery appeared first on Nautilus.
Our story begins in 1954, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in what was then Belgian Congo, with a little paper about fish diets titled “A Curious Ecological ‘Niche’ among the Fishes of Lake Tanganyika.”
The authors, biologists Georges Marlier and Narcisse Leleup, describe a little-studied species of cichlid fish. According to their findings, adults subsist mainly on the scales of other fish, which they tear off their living prey with fearsome teeth. Marlier and Leleup note that the individuals they held in an aquarium would not eat “earthworms, fish powder, or insects” or anything else they presented
