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> 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 landloc
by 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 agoIn 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 3mo agoHumans 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 3mo agoYeah, 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 3mo ago[deleted]
- ErroneousBosh 3mo agoIt 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 3mo agoHow did wooden equipment not whither away in 7000 years?
- zwirbl 3mo agoLikely isolated from oxygen in deep water or sediment
- teepo 3mo agoI 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 3mo agoArtifacts 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 3mo agoIntact 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 3mo agoIn 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 3mo agoFish eggs often travel long distances by sticking to the feathers or legs of waterfowl I have been told at school long ago.
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoClose, 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 3mo agoI can see how the evolutionary advantage of such hardened eggs would be huge!
- barbazoo 3mo agoRight, as long as you can still get out.
- soperj 3mo agoI would think that would lead to a lot of inbred fish
- lazystar 3mo agoa high rate of mutations would be an advantage in a new environment, though.
- prerok 3mo agoIf it happened just once, yes.
- MagicMoonlight 3mo ago[dead]
- vitally3643 3mo agoThis tends to simply not be that much of a problem for "lower" species.
- sejje 3mo agoI'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 3mo agoMaybe the snakes have been eating the fish eggs / baby fish?
- sejje 3mo agoThe bullfrogs are the big carnivores, and sure, maybe. Snakes are active but I doubt they eat nearly as much as the bullfrogs.
- giancarlostoro 3mo agoApparently 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 3mo agoMountain 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 3mo agoHow did they appear upstream?
- wil421 3mo agoThere’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 3mo agoYou 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 3mo agoA tornado?
- pvaldes 3mo agoSwimming 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 3mo agoIn 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 3mo agohttps://theonion.com/wildlife-officials-restock-lake-by-dropping-thousands-o-1847291583/ https://theonion.com/wildlife-officials-restock-lake-by-drop...
- jmalicki 3mo agoAlso, 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 3mo agoBirds 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 3mo agoYeah, 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 3mo ago[deleted]
- ge96 3mo agoThe fish equivalent of https://soundcloud.com/noisykeyboard/last-kauai-oo-extinct https://soundcloud.com/noisykeyboard/last-kauai-oo-extinct or my weekends
- lukan 3mo 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 3mo agoTo the best of my knowledge fish eggs are fertilised outside the body
- ekjhgkejhgk 3mo agoIt'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 3mo agoBefore 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 3mo agoWent 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 3mo agoA 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 3mo agoAs well as the other answer I think aquatic birds will occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and scatter them about.
- sampsn 3mo agoor they havent always been land locked
- pvaldes 3mo 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 3mo 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.