‘Missing link’ blind fish discovered

Scientists in China poking about in underground caves and rivers have made a brand new discovery: a new, very pink, very weird type of cavefish. However, what they did not discover were its eyes, because it doesn’t have any. The ‘Guiyang Golden-line Barbel’ was found in an underground stream of the Wujiang River System in 2019, but it took five more years of study to understand its significance – it seems to be an evolutionary middle step between sightless cavefish and sighted non-cave fish.

Unlike other cave fish, it doesn’t have the large whiskers (barbels) that sightless fish normally have, nor the long fins or thick scales. While it doesn’t have eyes, it almost does, with a faint black spot under the skin where its eyes would be. Some of the fish even have very rudimentary vision, able to differentiate between light and dark. It’s a missing link, showing how such features evolved. Also, despite having only been discovered, its been determined that these fish are in danger of extinction: they’ve evolved (or half-evolved) to only survive in that particular cave system.

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