Subterranean Fishes of the World

3810

2014

Ambient Science

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The constant darkness of caves and other subterranean habitats imposes sensory constraints that offer a unique opportunity to examine how sensory modalities evolve. Adaptations to the underground environment represent replicate natural evolutionary experiments to a similar extreme environment, as many species have evolved similar morphological, physiological, and behavioral adaptations to survive in perpetual darkness and limited resource. Although f ish hearing has been studied for over a century and all f ish up to date have been shown to be able to hear sounds, hearing in cavef ishes has not been well explored. Moreover, despite the diversity of sound-generating mechanisms that have evolved across the Teleostei, acoustic communication was not demonstrated in any cavef ish species. Here we review the evidence for hearing in f ishes, and particularly in cavef ishes. We also discuss our own results in the group Amblyopsids. We chose to study the Amblyopsids because they are a small phylogenetic group with a large portion of its diversity comprised by cavef ish, and its phylogeny well understood.

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