Fading to black doesn’t empower fish
By Susan Milius
Field studies of three-spined stickleback fish dash a textbook example of an evolutionary principle, claims an evolutionary biology team. Males of Gasterosteus aculeatus typically turn red on their bellies and blue-green on top when breeding—unless they live in Washington’s Chehalis River watershed. There, males turn jet-black.
That quirk achieved textbook status as the only documented example of the theory of convergent character displacement, explain Robert J. Scott and Susan A. Foster of Clark University in Worcester, Mass. According to this theory, two species’ traits get either more or less similar when the species share a home.