LUNG FISH.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19270, 6 September 1924, Page 10

LUNG FISH.

A CURIOSITY OP THE LONDON ZOO

An African lung- fish has jnst been installed in the London Zoo aquarium, where the three kinds of lung fish—African, South American, and Australian —arc now represented (writes A. E. 11. in tho Daily Cnroniclo). Making use of their air-bladders as lungs, these fish boar many resemblances to the batrachians (frogs, toads, and salamanders) It is believed that tho ancestral lung-fishes breathed by gills alone, bo that their modern descendants are not degenerate batrachians, as might bo supposed, but true fishes which have learned to adapt themselves to the exigencies of life. In the stagnant pools inhabited by tho Australian lung-fish the water at times becomes so foul that it is almost impossible for the gills to function, and it is then that tho fish rises to tho surface and gulps down atmospheric air and thus makes usr of its primitive lung. Tho South American ana African lung-fishes have “gone one hotter” than this, for when tho marshes dry up they burrow in the mud, and (hero lie dormant until the rainy season returns. In the cixse of tho African species, a quantity of mucus is exuded from the body, which, mixing with the mud, forms a hard cocoon, the fish faking care that a small passage is left so that air may reach it. Tho 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 tho awakened fish was very sluggish, but it soon gathered its scattered wits together, and is now occupying a large tknk m tho Tropical Hall.