7 ms·

Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

160 points by stevenwoo 3mo ago

m463 3mo ago
> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes isn't that a common question? "How do fish appear in landlocked lakes/ponds/etc"? After digging a pond and letting it fill with rainwater/groundwater, fish appear. I don't think its because people carried them there. (don't really know the common answer though)
- stevenwoo 3mo ago
  In this case they have carbon dated wooden equipment for fish farming and know due to geological factors when the lake could support fish, though of course the fish might have gotten there first somehow. I thought this was interesting because it predates agriculture in the same area.
  - Kye 2mo ago
    Humans were shaping their environments to produce food long before they plowed fields. Hunter-gatherers didn't just hunt and gather willy-nilly, picking up whatever they found, oblivious to how it got there.
    - imtringued 2mo ago
      Yeah, you have to consider that when you're living in nature you actually need to identify the plants that are edible so you can't actually just eat everything you find even if you could eat it in theory. So if you wanted to gather plant food how do you make sure that the food you find is edible? It's quite simple. If you know a plant is edible you take the seeds and you carry them with you and broadcast them all over the place. The interesting part about this is that this is also a form of selective breeding, since you're choosing the edible plants over the inedible plants. Note that you do not tend to the plants or do any form of agriculture, you're still foraging from random plants you encounter.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
    - ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
      It blows my tiny wee Homo just-about-Sapiens mind that I have this brain which evolved to travel at walking pace for a few hours and think in terms of "you get loads of rabbits about an hour's walk from here behind those hills, and the really good berries are that way down towards the river". And yet despite that it can quite happily plan out and navigate a route that is hundreds of miles long, at roughly 20 times the speed it was designed to travel at. I'm sitting here writing a text message to someone 1800 miles away giving them directions to a shop in Vienna and I can visualise where they need to go for that to all work, with a brain that evolved to think about "not the next hill but the one after that" distance.
  - soperj 2mo ago
    How did wooden equipment not whither away in 7000 years?
    - zwirbl 2mo ago
      Likely isolated from oxygen in deep water or sediment
    - teepo 2mo ago
      I have the same question - My guess is at that altitude, temperature, and under an ice sheet, and silt until the lake was drained. Here's the paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/introduction-of-fish-to-the-scandinavian-mountains-by-hunterfishergatherers-5000-bc/29BD68BA540BA600E05E867CBDF4C6D9 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/in...
    - marking-time 2mo ago
      Artifacts that survive this long are usually found in a buried context, which can, under favorable conditions, preserve them for long periods of time. The artifact can be buried by colluvial(gravity driven), or alluvial(water driven) deposition before they have a chance to decay. For more information you can consult a geomorphologist, which I am not.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
      Intact human bodies thousands of years old have been found in Irish bogs - cold, anoxic, acidic. Apparently in this case cold and anoxic were part of it, and also pine resin in the wood acting as a perservative.
    - ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
      In the peat bogs on Skye where I grew up and where people still cut peat for fuel, you often see the remains of silver birch trees that must have grown a couple of thousand years ago. They're often so well-preserved that not only can you clearly see the markings on the bark but you can sometimes make out the rings in the wood. I remember my dad pulling out a piece that was so well preserved you could see where deer had gnawed it.
- iefbr14 2mo ago
  Fish eggs often travel long distances by sticking to the feathers or legs of waterfowl I have been told at school long ago.
  - giancarlostoro 2mo ago
    Close, I looked it up out of curiosity, it seems Waterfowl eat the eggs, but they travel through their digestive system fully alive. Really interesting even so!
    - BurningFrog 2mo ago
      I can see how the evolutionary advantage of such hardened eggs would be huge!
      - barbazoo 2mo ago
        Right, as long as you can still get out.
      - soperj 2mo ago
        I would think that would lead to a lot of inbred fish
        lazystar 2mo ago
        a high rate of mutations would be an advantage in a new environment, though.
        prerok 2mo ago
        If it happened just once, yes.
        MagicMoonlight 2mo ago
        [dead]
        vitally3643 2mo ago
        This tends to simply not be that much of a problem for "lower" species.
- sejje 2mo ago
  I've had a pond for 11 years that has not acquired fish. It existed before that, too, but I'm not sure for how long (I think several decades). It has lots of amphibians and snakes. Rarely any birds.
  - profsummergig 2mo ago
    Maybe the snakes have been eating the fish eggs / baby fish?
    - sejje 2mo ago
      The bullfrogs are the big carnivores, and sure, maybe. Snakes are active but I doubt they eat nearly as much as the bullfrogs.
      - giancarlostoro 2mo ago
        Apparently if you introduce a large fish species to your pond, the bullfrogs will not eat them, not sure how you would secure the eggs though. Maybe some sort of area that could shelter from them, but once they come out of shelter when they hatch, its kind of the same problem. Could also introduce fish that will eat the frogs to keep them under control. Or just leave it all as-is.
- wil421 2mo ago
  Mountain lakes are completely different. There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.
  - williamdclt 2mo ago
    How did they appear upstream?
    - wil421 2mo ago
      There’s a stream in my back yard that doesn’t hold fish over the winter because it’s too shallow/cold. A large property near me has a pond that overflows into my stream. The fish survive in the deeper waters of the pond and spring rain usually washes fish eggs or even fish into my stream. They gather in the rocks in my backyard near the storm drain. Alpine lakes are fed by snow met. There’s not going to be fish eggs on the snowpack that melts into the lake.
      - kakacik 2mo ago
        You yourself wrote in this thread: > There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places. Do you realize that in the summer mountains below 4000m are mostly snow-free and thawing point ie in Europe has been pushed above 5000m repeatedly during summers. Its easy to have 25C in 2500m in today's alps (ie today 22C in 2000m in Chamonix, France). The term 'alpine lake' doesn't mean anything specific, and most are fed from rain during entire summer without any/much of snow or ice contribution.
    - ShinyLeftPad 2mo ago
      A tornado?
    - pvaldes 2mo ago
      Swimming upstream is what brown trouts do all the time. If hunter gatherers did it 7000 years ago, should be possible to suspect it, but modern people do this things all the time. It should be easier to prove at least that they not were released in, lets say, 1780.
- jmalicki 2mo ago
  In California, it's because people (the state department of fish and wildlife) put the fish there. You can even see their scheduled fish plantings online: https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FishPlants/PublicPlantSearch https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FishPlants/PublicPlantSearch
  - pfdietz 2mo ago
    https://theonion.com/wildlife-officials-restock-lake-by-dropping-thousands-o-1847291583/ https://theonion.com/wildlife-officials-restock-lake-by-drop...
    - jmalicki 2mo ago
      Also, TIL about the Antonov AN-2 ("Wait... that kind of looks like a Cessna Caravan, but is a biplane, and is a tail dragger... what sort of aircraft is that?")
- giancarlostoro 2mo ago
  Birds can drop fish after they've captured them. Not longer than a year now, we were visiting my wife's family, and me and my father in law got to Walmart there was a dead fish in the front, but when we mentioned it to my wife who got there before us (separate cars) she said it was struggling for life when they saw it, I don't think there was a lake nearby enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if birds have accidentally introduced life into new bodies of water.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
    Yeah, but at least two live fish (a male and female) being dropped into the same remote lake, then finding each other at spawning time seems increasing implausible. Never say never, but ... Apparently some fish species do have small sticky eggs that can stick to the legs of water fowl, or even (with very small probability) pass through them intact, so this seems much more likely. Maybe a group of ducks feeding in one place then flying off to another?
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ge96 2mo ago
      The fish equivalent of https://soundcloud.com/noisykeyboard/last-kauai-oo-extinct https://soundcloud.com/noisykeyboard/last-kauai-oo-extinct or my weekends
    - lukan 2mo ago
      "Yeah, but at least two live fish (a male and female) being dropped into the same remote lake, then finding each other at spawning time seems increasing implausible. Never say never, but ..." It just needs to be one pregnant fish. (or many eggs)
      - robbiep 2mo ago
        To the best of my knowledge fish eggs are fertilised outside the body
- ekjhgkejhgk 2mo ago
  It's not the only possible explanation. Fish can get sucked up by tornatos and get dropped later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals > Tornadoes and waterspouts may lift up animals into the air and deposit them miles away.
- Theodores 2mo ago
  Before we developed a taste for fish, marine life was far more abundant, particularly in rivers. There are rivers that we consider to be in good health today that have a fraction of the original species. For example, the Thames in London was once full of eels, nowadays an eel in the Thames poses a mystery as to 'how it got there'. By full, that means not being able to see the bottom of the river due to the amount of eels present. We ate them all. The eels made it all the way to the Sargasso Sea and back, for breeding purposes. Clearly they would not be able to get from the sea to a fully landlocked lake, with no route to the sea. However, my point is that we had so much marine life before we cleared out the rivers, to then need the sea, to go from coastal waters to the depths of the Antarctic ocean in the quest for any fish that have survived previous quests. It is just hard for us to imagine the abundance there once was, and, therefore, the relative ease to populate an isolated alpine meadow lake with fish in former times.
  - ijidak 2mo ago
    Went to a museum in Seattle. Can't remember the name of it. They explained that the salmon were so abundant in the Pacific Northwest during the early frontier period that they would catch them by the bucket full using water wheels and use the dead salmon to fertilize farms. Humans have decimated Earth's abundance.
  - noelwelsh 2mo ago
    A few comments on the previous abundance of cod, from https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/a-tragedy-with-no-end/ https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/a-tragedy-wi... In 1873, French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote that if every egg reached maturity, within three years “you could walk across the Atlantic dryshod on the backs of cod.” In 1885, the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture said it was not only impossible to exhaust the cod supply, but even to make a noticeable dent in it. “Unless the order of nature is overthrown, for centuries to come our fisheries will continue to be fertile,” the ministry declared. Humans find a way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_cod_fishery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
- ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
  As well as the other answer I think aquatic birds will occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and scatter them about.
- sampsn 2mo ago
  or they havent always been land locked
- pvaldes 2mo ago
  > That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes Maybe an explanation, even a decent one, but not the only possible, not by a mile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals This is one of the biggest problems with science. Lack of imagination an partially cooked theories written as gods speak and engraved in marble forever. Is true than being selectively blind may be a requisite in the stupid publish or perish race rat. Trouts are stubborn fishes, able to jump. If the idea is that lakes created thousand years ago, never had a hidden sink connecting karst systems, a temporary river or a specially big detaw flood that trouts could use... okay, prove it.
- Suppafly 2mo ago
  >isn't that a common question? Only among people who've never looked into it. Generally it happens because birds drop them and also birds occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and move them around.
fractallyte 3mo ago
An alternative vector: "cloud seeding" (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/sep/09/science.research https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/sep/09/science.rese...) Charles Fort collected numerous data for his famous "The Book of the Damned" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Damned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Damned
- pnut 2mo ago
  It rained fish in my front yard in South Carolina back in the 80's, it's definitely a real phenomenon.
- codethief 2mo ago
  From the The Guardian article: > As well as living matter, inorganic substances also crash to earth, including seeds, stones and sand. However, these pale in comparison to the mighty ice blocks. January 2000 saw several chunks weighing up to four kilograms each fall on Spain, but they're dwarfed by the 200kg titans that struck Brazil in 1995. Wat. Does anyone have a reference for the Brazil one? Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacryometeor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacryometeor ) mentions nothing. Megacryometeors: Distribution on Earth and Current Research (2006)[0] says: > In Campinas and Itapira, Brazil, two huge megacryometeors of 50 and 200 kg fell in 1997; the atmosphericisotopic signature of both specimens wasunequivocally confirmed (8). Finally, on 21 July 2004, a huge mass of ice weighingapproximately 400 kg fell very close to a 15-year-old girl in Toledo, Spain. 400kg! Unfortunately, no reference is given for this one and for the one in Brazil they refer to https://cepagri.unicamp.br/gelo/gelo.html https://cepagri.unicamp.br/gelo/gelo.html, which – like many other of their references – produces a 404 nowadays. And, of course, the page hasn't gotten preserved by the Internet Archive, either. :( [0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4315744 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4315744 , PDF download available on https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6561843_Megacryometeors_Distribution_on_Earth_and_Current_Research https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6561843_Megacryomet...
ck2 2mo ago
I thought bird poop was the commonly accepted explanation 7000 years ago is the edge of recorded human civilization (well 8000 years, I remember this because it's also the edge of a gamma ray burst in light years that could destroy all life on earth after traveling all that time)
- sejje 2mo ago
  It doesn't matter if it's recorded. This is inferred, not written down. Hunter-gatherers aren't known for their civilizations.
  - t-3 2mo ago
    Civilization refers to cities, not literature. Urban societies need writing and complex social rules to survive, but it's not as if those things can't or haven't arisen in other types of human societies.
    - bluGill 2mo ago
      Have they? I'm no historian, but from what I can tell following discussions of real historians they think that alphabet developed exactly once, and then spread (this leaves open the possibility non-alphabet writing may have developed separately). Also I believe that Urban society is needed just to give enough people enough leisure time to sit and think of things like this. Hunter gathers can learn to read/write, but to figure it out they couldn't do.
- masklinn 2mo ago
  > 7000 years ago is the edge of recorded human civilization (well 8000 years The earliest pre-pottery Neolithic complexes are nearly 4000 years older than that.
  - ikidd 2mo ago
    Did they have writing and kept records that we've found? That's the "recorded" part.
spwa4 2mo ago
Yes. One thing that becomes very obvious if you go along "native" human villages in Africa is the reason civilization develops. When you look at villages that don't grow, but do the normal human thing. Grow, war (2 kinds: young vs old and village/tribe vs village/tribe), grow. It's not because of agriculture. They have agriculture (they grow maniok, and you don't need much. They have fire, weapons, ... Also the entire countryside is full of grain). It's not that they don't understand how things work. They just don't care. It's not because they're dumb. In fact on pretty much all measures the humans living in those villages are better, in a genetic sense, than we are. They're smarter. They're more beautiful. Every last one is in shape, even the oldest (the oldest, btw, are maybe 45, not that they even know themselves. In both villages I saw the oldest was a couple). They're even better, genetically, than the black people living in cities around them. They have no sick (maybe 1), because the sick are dead. Even sick children regularly die. They bury their dead, with respect, after a burial but to say they have a religion is overstating matters. They have noone that can't run a marathon, or is fat, or ... because if you can't hunt you don't eat. Wounds are deadly. Not because the wound is so serious, but because you're nearly guaranteed to develop fever and die. Most people die from complications with infections. They have only beautiful men and women, because if you can't participate in "evening activities" you'll go hungry or get murdered (and it's not just men: women have lovers kill other men due to "insults", or they poison someone. And regularly it doesn't take much incentive at all for a murder to happen). Sometimes they (try to) treat cities the way the treat neighboring tribes: they attack them to kill everyone (at the very least all men). That usually fails due to guns, but it's not like it never works. There are very few people in those villages that want to leave. And they're not about to starve. There's no need for civilization, and, frankly, they don't want to. But also, I don't care what religion or non-religion you have: you will find that way of live thoroughly immoral.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- orsorna 2mo ago
  Great point until the end. None of your descriptions imply a lack of morality for living isolated from a greater civilization. If anything, such small societies inhabit a neutral position, in that they don't care, which is something you already stated. I think the only people arguing that the North Sentinelese are immoral are religious, for instance (hence why most attempts to visit are done by missions). The general consensus is otherwise awe for being separated from the rest of us, relatively unmolested.
EvanAnderson 2mo ago
"Someone brought the black bass to this lake from far away, changing the biological distribution of the lake." https://youtube.com/watch?v=5w35n0Hm_m0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=5w35n0Hm_m0
moebrowne 2mo ago
https://archive.is/ZuKV6 https://archive.is/ZuKV6
- _superposition_ 2mo ago
  Thank you!
fred_is_fred 2mo ago
Someone below mentions bird poop, but could a fish egg survive the human (or a dogs) digestive system as well?
hnd9q09qk4 2mo ago
[dead]
honeycrispy 2mo ago
> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes I hate how much of historical science is performed this way. Speculation is not very scientific.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
  Unfortunately the full article that they are reporting on is paywalled. https://www.khm.uio.no/english/about/organisation/archaeology-department/staff/axelm/ https://www.khm.uio.no/english/about/organisation/archaeolog... To be fair, Gemini says there are no presumed cases of specifically brown trout populating an isolated water body by means other than human stocking. For other types of fish, maybe (eggs stick to bird legs, or one gets pooped out intact), but for brown trout, no! The eggs only survive in cold water, not inside a bird, are relatively large and non-sticky. To survive a long schlepp up a mountain in a waterskin, it would presumably have been fertilized eggs that were transported (can be found in river gravel) since they have low oxygen needs. According to Gemini even baby fish might only survive a couple of hours, but eggs (if kept in cold water) could survive days or weeks, and obviously would be more practical to transport a sufficient number to have a decent chance of establishing a breeding colony. Interesting stuff, but maybe better considered as reconstructive history than science.
onlypassingthru 2mo ago
I wouldn't be so sure. Were there ever any ducks? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/special-delivery-duck-poop-may-transport-fish-eggs-new-waters-180975230/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/special-delivery-d...
metalman 2mo ago
hmmm, I have seen big fish in much bigger birds claws, and have seen even bigger birds dive bombing other birds to force them to drop there fish plus a bird can get a fish over ANY lake in minuits, vs an all day random fish carrying hike? so to recap, I have seen many birds with fish, but zero human fish hikers
rurp 2mo ago
Somewhat related, after desert rains you can often see fairy shrimp (think sea monkeys you might have had as a kid) swimming around in the isolated pools that form. I looked this up after wondering how the heck these water creatures could survive dozens of miles from the nearest permanent water source. The answer is that their eggs are extremely lightweight, so much so that wind can carry them long distances. Their entire life cycle is extremely accelerated. Once water soaks the eggs the critters can hatch, develop, and lay new eggs in a matter of days. The newly laid eggs have a tiny chance of reaching a new seasonal pool area.
sampsn 2mo ago
[flagged]
yrjrjjrjjtjjr 2mo ago
One possibility for fish eggs getting to lakes I want to propose is extreme weather. Winds can move sand from side of earth to the other. Flooding. Tornadoes.
1970-01-01 2mo ago
Very old fish traps found, dated --> humans carried trout to the lake They've jumped to conclusions.
- leptons 2mo ago
  It was aliens...
nephihaha 2mo ago
Can I offer some further explanations? * Accidental human seeding. Rather than bringing a full grown fish up to a lake, is it possible that the eggs could have been in waterskins/containers and when the humans refilled them, the eggs washed out? * What about eels? Eels can travel across land in damp conditions (and Norway is damp much of the time). Could they take other fish eggs with them?
BeetleB 2mo ago
Related: Fish were introduced to Crater Lake in the US a little over a hundred years ago, and is generally considered to have been the wrong thing to do. If you go there, you're free to fish to your heart's content.
- ncgl 2mo ago
  Generally by who?
  - BeetleB 2mo ago
    I think by almost everyone. Crater Lake is a pretty special lake: It was formed purely from rainwater into a crater over the last 7000 years. It is still the clearest lake in the world. With fish, however, came a whole ecosystem. When fish die they decompose. I don't know the details, but the whole process is leading the lake to be less and less clear. (Some people also consider it the bluest lake in the world, but that title tends to be disputed). Just checked again and it seems you need to release any bull trout caught there, as they are now endangered. Pity.
aussieguy1234 2mo ago
Non paywalled article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hunter-gatherers-brought-trout-to-a-norwegian-mountain-lake-7000-years-ago-the-earliest-known-example-of-humans-translocating-fish-180989167/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hunter-gatherers-b...

160 points by stevenwoo 3mo ago

m463 3mo ago

> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes isn't that a common question? "How do fish appear in landlocked lakes/ponds/etc"? After digging a pond and letting it fill with rainwater/groundwater, fish appear. I don't think its because people carried them there. (don't really know the common answer though)

stevenwoo 3mo ago
In this case they have carbon dated wooden equipment for fish farming and know due to geological factors when the lake could support fish, though of course the fish might have gotten there first somehow. I thought this was interesting because it predates agriculture in the same area.
- Kye 2mo ago
  Humans were shaping their environments to produce food long before they plowed fields. Hunter-gatherers didn't just hunt and gather willy-nilly, picking up whatever they found, oblivious to how it got there.
  - imtringued 2mo ago
    Yeah, you have to consider that when you're living in nature you actually need to identify the plants that are edible so you can't actually just eat everything you find even if you could eat it in theory. So if you wanted to gather plant food how do you make sure that the food you find is edible? It's quite simple. If you know a plant is edible you take the seeds and you carry them with you and broadcast them all over the place. The interesting part about this is that this is also a form of selective breeding, since you're choosing the edible plants over the inedible plants. Note that you do not tend to the plants or do any form of agriculture, you're still foraging from random plants you encounter.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
  - ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
    It blows my tiny wee Homo just-about-Sapiens mind that I have this brain which evolved to travel at walking pace for a few hours and think in terms of "you get loads of rabbits about an hour's walk from here behind those hills, and the really good berries are that way down towards the river". And yet despite that it can quite happily plan out and navigate a route that is hundreds of miles long, at roughly 20 times the speed it was designed to travel at. I'm sitting here writing a text message to someone 1800 miles away giving them directions to a shop in Vienna and I can visualise where they need to go for that to all work, with a brain that evolved to think about "not the next hill but the one after that" distance.
- soperj 2mo ago
  How did wooden equipment not whither away in 7000 years?
  - zwirbl 2mo ago
    Likely isolated from oxygen in deep water or sediment
  - teepo 2mo ago
    I have the same question - My guess is at that altitude, temperature, and under an ice sheet, and silt until the lake was drained. Here's the paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/introduction-of-fish-to-the-scandinavian-mountains-by-hunterfishergatherers-5000-bc/29BD68BA540BA600E05E867CBDF4C6D9 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/in...
  - marking-time 2mo ago
    Artifacts that survive this long are usually found in a buried context, which can, under favorable conditions, preserve them for long periods of time. The artifact can be buried by colluvial(gravity driven), or alluvial(water driven) deposition before they have a chance to decay. For more information you can consult a geomorphologist, which I am not.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
    Intact human bodies thousands of years old have been found in Irish bogs - cold, anoxic, acidic. Apparently in this case cold and anoxic were part of it, and also pine resin in the wood acting as a perservative.
  - ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
    In the peat bogs on Skye where I grew up and where people still cut peat for fuel, you often see the remains of silver birch trees that must have grown a couple of thousand years ago. They're often so well-preserved that not only can you clearly see the markings on the bark but you can sometimes make out the rings in the wood. I remember my dad pulling out a piece that was so well preserved you could see where deer had gnawed it.
iefbr14 2mo ago
Fish eggs often travel long distances by sticking to the feathers or legs of waterfowl I have been told at school long ago.
- giancarlostoro 2mo ago
  Close, I looked it up out of curiosity, it seems Waterfowl eat the eggs, but they travel through their digestive system fully alive. Really interesting even so!
  - BurningFrog 2mo ago
    I can see how the evolutionary advantage of such hardened eggs would be huge!
    - barbazoo 2mo ago
      Right, as long as you can still get out.
    - soperj 2mo ago
      I would think that would lead to a lot of inbred fish
      - lazystar 2mo ago
        a high rate of mutations would be an advantage in a new environment, though.
      - prerok 2mo ago
        If it happened just once, yes.
      - MagicMoonlight 2mo ago
        [dead]
      - vitally3643 2mo ago
        This tends to simply not be that much of a problem for "lower" species.
sejje 2mo ago
I've had a pond for 11 years that has not acquired fish. It existed before that, too, but I'm not sure for how long (I think several decades). It has lots of amphibians and snakes. Rarely any birds.
- profsummergig 2mo ago
  Maybe the snakes have been eating the fish eggs / baby fish?
  - sejje 2mo ago
    The bullfrogs are the big carnivores, and sure, maybe. Snakes are active but I doubt they eat nearly as much as the bullfrogs.
    - giancarlostoro 2mo ago
      Apparently if you introduce a large fish species to your pond, the bullfrogs will not eat them, not sure how you would secure the eggs though. Maybe some sort of area that could shelter from them, but once they come out of shelter when they hatch, its kind of the same problem. Could also introduce fish that will eat the frogs to keep them under control. Or just leave it all as-is.
wil421 2mo ago
Mountain lakes are completely different. There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.
- williamdclt 2mo ago
  How did they appear upstream?
  - wil421 2mo ago
    There’s a stream in my back yard that doesn’t hold fish over the winter because it’s too shallow/cold. A large property near me has a pond that overflows into my stream. The fish survive in the deeper waters of the pond and spring rain usually washes fish eggs or even fish into my stream. They gather in the rocks in my backyard near the storm drain. Alpine lakes are fed by snow met. There’s not going to be fish eggs on the snowpack that melts into the lake.
    - kakacik 2mo ago
      You yourself wrote in this thread: > There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places. Do you realize that in the summer mountains below 4000m are mostly snow-free and thawing point ie in Europe has been pushed above 5000m repeatedly during summers. Its easy to have 25C in 2500m in today's alps (ie today 22C in 2000m in Chamonix, France). The term 'alpine lake' doesn't mean anything specific, and most are fed from rain during entire summer without any/much of snow or ice contribution.
  - ShinyLeftPad 2mo ago
    A tornado?
  - pvaldes 2mo ago
    Swimming upstream is what brown trouts do all the time. If hunter gatherers did it 7000 years ago, should be possible to suspect it, but modern people do this things all the time. It should be easier to prove at least that they not were released in, lets say, 1780.
jmalicki 2mo ago
In California, it's because people (the state department of fish and wildlife) put the fish there. You can even see their scheduled fish plantings online: https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FishPlants/PublicPlantSearch https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FishPlants/PublicPlantSearch
- pfdietz 2mo ago
  https://theonion.com/wildlife-officials-restock-lake-by-dropping-thousands-o-1847291583/ https://theonion.com/wildlife-officials-restock-lake-by-drop...
  - jmalicki 2mo ago
    Also, TIL about the Antonov AN-2 ("Wait... that kind of looks like a Cessna Caravan, but is a biplane, and is a tail dragger... what sort of aircraft is that?")
giancarlostoro 2mo ago
Birds can drop fish after they've captured them. Not longer than a year now, we were visiting my wife's family, and me and my father in law got to Walmart there was a dead fish in the front, but when we mentioned it to my wife who got there before us (separate cars) she said it was struggling for life when they saw it, I don't think there was a lake nearby enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if birds have accidentally introduced life into new bodies of water.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
  Yeah, but at least two live fish (a male and female) being dropped into the same remote lake, then finding each other at spawning time seems increasing implausible. Never say never, but ... Apparently some fish species do have small sticky eggs that can stick to the legs of water fowl, or even (with very small probability) pass through them intact, so this seems much more likely. Maybe a group of ducks feeding in one place then flying off to another?
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ge96 2mo ago
    The fish equivalent of https://soundcloud.com/noisykeyboard/last-kauai-oo-extinct https://soundcloud.com/noisykeyboard/last-kauai-oo-extinct or my weekends
  - lukan 2mo ago
    "Yeah, but at least two live fish (a male and female) being dropped into the same remote lake, then finding each other at spawning time seems increasing implausible. Never say never, but ..." It just needs to be one pregnant fish. (or many eggs)
    - robbiep 2mo ago
      To the best of my knowledge fish eggs are fertilised outside the body
ekjhgkejhgk 2mo ago
It's not the only possible explanation. Fish can get sucked up by tornatos and get dropped later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals > Tornadoes and waterspouts may lift up animals into the air and deposit them miles away.
Theodores 2mo ago
Before we developed a taste for fish, marine life was far more abundant, particularly in rivers. There are rivers that we consider to be in good health today that have a fraction of the original species. For example, the Thames in London was once full of eels, nowadays an eel in the Thames poses a mystery as to 'how it got there'. By full, that means not being able to see the bottom of the river due to the amount of eels present. We ate them all. The eels made it all the way to the Sargasso Sea and back, for breeding purposes. Clearly they would not be able to get from the sea to a fully landlocked lake, with no route to the sea. However, my point is that we had so much marine life before we cleared out the rivers, to then need the sea, to go from coastal waters to the depths of the Antarctic ocean in the quest for any fish that have survived previous quests. It is just hard for us to imagine the abundance there once was, and, therefore, the relative ease to populate an isolated alpine meadow lake with fish in former times.
- ijidak 2mo ago
  Went to a museum in Seattle. Can't remember the name of it. They explained that the salmon were so abundant in the Pacific Northwest during the early frontier period that they would catch them by the bucket full using water wheels and use the dead salmon to fertilize farms. Humans have decimated Earth's abundance.
- noelwelsh 2mo ago
  A few comments on the previous abundance of cod, from https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/a-tragedy-with-no-end/ https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/a-tragedy-wi... In 1873, French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote that if every egg reached maturity, within three years “you could walk across the Atlantic dryshod on the backs of cod.” In 1885, the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture said it was not only impossible to exhaust the cod supply, but even to make a noticeable dent in it. “Unless the order of nature is overthrown, for centuries to come our fisheries will continue to be fertile,” the ministry declared. Humans find a way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_northwest_cod_fishery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
ErroneousBosh 2mo ago
As well as the other answer I think aquatic birds will occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and scatter them about.
sampsn 2mo ago
or they havent always been land locked
pvaldes 2mo ago
> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes Maybe an explanation, even a decent one, but not the only possible, not by a mile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals This is one of the biggest problems with science. Lack of imagination an partially cooked theories written as gods speak and engraved in marble forever. Is true than being selectively blind may be a requisite in the stupid publish or perish race rat. Trouts are stubborn fishes, able to jump. If the idea is that lakes created thousand years ago, never had a hidden sink connecting karst systems, a temporary river or a specially big detaw flood that trouts could use... okay, prove it.
Suppafly 2mo ago
>isn't that a common question? Only among people who've never looked into it. Generally it happens because birds drop them and also birds occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and move them around.

fractallyte 3mo ago

An alternative vector: "cloud seeding" (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/sep/09/science.research https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/sep/09/science.rese...) Charles Fort collected numerous data for his famous "The Book of the Damned" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Damned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Damned

pnut 2mo ago
It rained fish in my front yard in South Carolina back in the 80's, it's definitely a real phenomenon.
codethief 2mo ago
From the The Guardian article: > As well as living matter, inorganic substances also crash to earth, including seeds, stones and sand. However, these pale in comparison to the mighty ice blocks. January 2000 saw several chunks weighing up to four kilograms each fall on Spain, but they're dwarfed by the 200kg titans that struck Brazil in 1995. Wat. Does anyone have a reference for the Brazil one? Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacryometeor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacryometeor ) mentions nothing. Megacryometeors: Distribution on Earth and Current Research (2006)[0] says: > In Campinas and Itapira, Brazil, two huge megacryometeors of 50 and 200 kg fell in 1997; the atmosphericisotopic signature of both specimens wasunequivocally confirmed (8). Finally, on 21 July 2004, a huge mass of ice weighingapproximately 400 kg fell very close to a 15-year-old girl in Toledo, Spain. 400kg! Unfortunately, no reference is given for this one and for the one in Brazil they refer to https://cepagri.unicamp.br/gelo/gelo.html https://cepagri.unicamp.br/gelo/gelo.html, which – like many other of their references – produces a 404 nowadays. And, of course, the page hasn't gotten preserved by the Internet Archive, either. :( [0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4315744 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4315744 , PDF download available on https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6561843_Megacryometeors_Distribution_on_Earth_and_Current_Research https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6561843_Megacryomet...

ck2 2mo ago

I thought bird poop was the commonly accepted explanation 7000 years ago is the edge of recorded human civilization (well 8000 years, I remember this because it's also the edge of a gamma ray burst in light years that could destroy all life on earth after traveling all that time)

sejje 2mo ago
It doesn't matter if it's recorded. This is inferred, not written down. Hunter-gatherers aren't known for their civilizations.
- t-3 2mo ago
  Civilization refers to cities, not literature. Urban societies need writing and complex social rules to survive, but it's not as if those things can't or haven't arisen in other types of human societies.
  - bluGill 2mo ago
    Have they? I'm no historian, but from what I can tell following discussions of real historians they think that alphabet developed exactly once, and then spread (this leaves open the possibility non-alphabet writing may have developed separately). Also I believe that Urban society is needed just to give enough people enough leisure time to sit and think of things like this. Hunter gathers can learn to read/write, but to figure it out they couldn't do.
masklinn 2mo ago
> 7000 years ago is the edge of recorded human civilization (well 8000 years The earliest pre-pottery Neolithic complexes are nearly 4000 years older than that.
- ikidd 2mo ago
  Did they have writing and kept records that we've found? That's the "recorded" part.

spwa4 2mo ago

Yes. One thing that becomes very obvious if you go along "native" human villages in Africa is the reason civilization develops. When you look at villages that don't grow, but do the normal human thing. Grow, war (2 kinds: young vs old and village/tribe vs village/tribe), grow. It's not because of agriculture. They have agriculture (they grow maniok, and you don't need much. They have fire, weapons, ... Also the entire countryside is full of grain). It's not that they don't understand how things work. They just don't care. It's not because they're dumb. In fact on pretty much all measures the humans living in those villages are better, in a genetic sense, than we are. They're smarter. They're more beautiful. Every last one is in shape, even the oldest (the oldest, btw, are maybe 45, not that they even know themselves. In both villages I saw the oldest was a couple). They're even better, genetically, than the black people living in cities around them. They have no sick (maybe 1), because the sick are dead. Even sick children regularly die. They bury their dead, with respect, after a burial but to say they have a religion is overstating matters. They have noone that can't run a marathon, or is fat, or ... because if you can't hunt you don't eat. Wounds are deadly. Not because the wound is so serious, but because you're nearly guaranteed to develop fever and die. Most people die from complications with infections. They have only beautiful men and women, because if you can't participate in "evening activities" you'll go hungry or get murdered (and it's not just men: women have lovers kill other men due to "insults", or they poison someone. And regularly it doesn't take much incentive at all for a murder to happen). Sometimes they (try to) treat cities the way the treat neighboring tribes: they attack them to kill everyone (at the very least all men). That usually fails due to guns, but it's not like it never works. There are very few people in those villages that want to leave. And they're not about to starve. There's no need for civilization, and, frankly, they don't want to. But also, I don't care what religion or non-religion you have: you will find that way of live thoroughly immoral.

deleted 2mo ago
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orsorna 2mo ago
Great point until the end. None of your descriptions imply a lack of morality for living isolated from a greater civilization. If anything, such small societies inhabit a neutral position, in that they don't care, which is something you already stated. I think the only people arguing that the North Sentinelese are immoral are religious, for instance (hence why most attempts to visit are done by missions). The general consensus is otherwise awe for being separated from the rest of us, relatively unmolested.

EvanAnderson 2mo ago

"Someone brought the black bass to this lake from far away, changing the biological distribution of the lake." https://youtube.com/watch?v=5w35n0Hm_m0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=5w35n0Hm_m0

moebrowne 2mo ago

https://archive.is/ZuKV6 https://archive.is/ZuKV6

_superposition_ 2mo ago
Thank you!

fred_is_fred 2mo ago

Someone below mentions bird poop, but could a fish egg survive the human (or a dogs) digestive system as well?

hnd9q09qk4 2mo ago

[dead]

honeycrispy 2mo ago

> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes I hate how much of historical science is performed this way. Speculation is not very scientific.

HarHarVeryFunny 2mo ago
Unfortunately the full article that they are reporting on is paywalled. https://www.khm.uio.no/english/about/organisation/archaeology-department/staff/axelm/ https://www.khm.uio.no/english/about/organisation/archaeolog... To be fair, Gemini says there are no presumed cases of specifically brown trout populating an isolated water body by means other than human stocking. For other types of fish, maybe (eggs stick to bird legs, or one gets pooped out intact), but for brown trout, no! The eggs only survive in cold water, not inside a bird, are relatively large and non-sticky. To survive a long schlepp up a mountain in a waterskin, it would presumably have been fertilized eggs that were transported (can be found in river gravel) since they have low oxygen needs. According to Gemini even baby fish might only survive a couple of hours, but eggs (if kept in cold water) could survive days or weeks, and obviously would be more practical to transport a sufficient number to have a decent chance of establishing a breeding colony. Interesting stuff, but maybe better considered as reconstructive history than science.

onlypassingthru 2mo ago

I wouldn't be so sure. Were there ever any ducks? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/special-delivery-duck-poop-may-transport-fish-eggs-new-waters-180975230/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/special-delivery-d...

metalman 2mo ago

hmmm, I have seen big fish in much bigger birds claws, and have seen even bigger birds dive bombing other birds to force them to drop there fish plus a bird can get a fish over ANY lake in minuits, vs an all day random fish carrying hike? so to recap, I have seen many birds with fish, but zero human fish hikers

rurp 2mo ago

Somewhat related, after desert rains you can often see fairy shrimp (think sea monkeys you might have had as a kid) swimming around in the isolated pools that form. I looked this up after wondering how the heck these water creatures could survive dozens of miles from the nearest permanent water source. The answer is that their eggs are extremely lightweight, so much so that wind can carry them long distances. Their entire life cycle is extremely accelerated. Once water soaks the eggs the critters can hatch, develop, and lay new eggs in a matter of days. The newly laid eggs have a tiny chance of reaching a new seasonal pool area.

sampsn 2mo ago

[flagged]

yrjrjjrjjtjjr 2mo ago

One possibility for fish eggs getting to lakes I want to propose is extreme weather. Winds can move sand from side of earth to the other. Flooding. Tornadoes.

1970-01-01 2mo ago

Very old fish traps found, dated --> humans carried trout to the lake They've jumped to conclusions.

leptons 2mo ago
It was aliens...

nephihaha 2mo ago

Can I offer some further explanations? * Accidental human seeding. Rather than bringing a full grown fish up to a lake, is it possible that the eggs could have been in waterskins/containers and when the humans refilled them, the eggs washed out? * What about eels? Eels can travel across land in damp conditions (and Norway is damp much of the time). Could they take other fish eggs with them?

BeetleB 2mo ago

Related: Fish were introduced to Crater Lake in the US a little over a hundred years ago, and is generally considered to have been the wrong thing to do. If you go there, you're free to fish to your heart's content.

ncgl 2mo ago
Generally by who?
- BeetleB 2mo ago
  I think by almost everyone. Crater Lake is a pretty special lake: It was formed purely from rainwater into a crater over the last 7000 years. It is still the clearest lake in the world. With fish, however, came a whole ecosystem. When fish die they decompose. I don't know the details, but the whole process is leading the lake to be less and less clear. (Some people also consider it the bluest lake in the world, but that title tends to be disputed). Just checked again and it seems you need to release any bull trout caught there, as they are now endangered. Pity.

aussieguy1234 2mo ago

Non paywalled article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hunter-gatherers-brought-trout-to-a-norwegian-mountain-lake-7000-years-ago-the-earliest-known-example-of-humans-translocating-fish-180989167/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hunter-gatherers-b...