A University of Wyoming researcher is part of an international team that has discovered how more than 700 species of fish have evolved in East Africa’s Lake Victoria region over the past 150,000 years.
A University of Wyoming researcher is part of an international team that has discovered how more than 700 species of fish have evolved in East Africa’s Lake Victoria region over the past 150,000 years.
Catherine Wagner, a UW assistant professor in the Department of Botany and the UW Biodiversity Institute, describes the phenomenon -- unparalleled in the animal and plant world -- as “one of the most spectacular examples of the evolution of modern biodiversity.”
She and fellow researchers from Switzerland’s University of Bern and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology have demonstrated for the first time that the rapid evolution of Lake Victoria cichlids -- brightly colored, perch-like fish -- was facilitated by earlier hybridization between two distantly related cichlid species from the Upper Nile and Congo drainage systems.
Read more at University of Wyoming
Image Credits: Florian Moser Photo
