LUNG FISH

Greymouth Evening Star, 15 September 1924, Page 8

LUNG FISH

CURIOSITY OF LONDON ZOO

An African Lung Fish has just been installed in the London Zoo aquarium, where the three kinds of Lung Fish —African, South American, and Australian —are now represented, writes A.E.H. in the “Daily Chronicle.” Making use of their air bladders as lungs, these fish bear many resemblances !to the batrachians (frogs, toads, and salamanders). It is believed that the ancestral lung-fishes breathed by gills alone, so that their modern descendants are not degenerate batrachians, as might be supposed, but true fishes which have learned to adapt themselves to the exigencies of life.

In the stagnant pools inhabited by the Australian lung-fish the water att imes becomes so foul that it is almost impossible for the gills to function, and it is then that the fish rises to the surface and gulps down atmospheric air and thus makes use of its primitive lung. The South American and. African lung-fishes have “gone one better” than this, for when the mashes dry lip they burrow in the mud, and there lie dormant until the rainy season returns. In the case of the African species, a quantity of mucus is exuded from the body, which, mixing with the mud, forms a hard cocoon, the fish taking care that a small passage is left so that air may reach it.

The Zoo specimen, which came from Southern Sudan, arrived, literally, inside “a square foot of Africa” —a cake of sun-baked mud —which, when dissolved in tepid water, revealed the “sleeping beauty” within.

At first the awakened fish was very sluggish, but it soon gathered its scattered wits together, and is now occupying a large tank in the Tropical Hall.