I was reading through last week’s issue of Science magazine this evening and discovered an interesting summary of some work done by Philip Anderson at UMass, Amherst. He has been studying how early tetrapods (like Tiktaalik) may have struggled with eating while on land because they still had heads and jaws specialized for feeding in the water. “With fishlike mouths, early tetrapods would have faced a difficult task eating on land.” 1
He and others have wondered what these animals ate, where they hunted (land or sea) and how they even managed to get food into their mouths. Sam Van Wassenbergh has studied more modern animals that live at the land/water interface to see how they accomplish the same task and found some interesting strategies. One such example is the “eel catfish, Channallabes apus, catches unsuspecting victims by arching upwards and descending upon prey, trapping an insect against the ground before sucking it up.”2 Van Wassenbergh suggests that this may have been amongst the strategies of early tetrapods as they were adapting to life on land. Van Wassesbergh made a film of this behavior:
References:
2. Hopkin, “The Fish that hunts on land” Nature, 12 April 2006
3. Van Wassenbergh S., et al. Nature, 440. 881 (2006).
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