When it seems that every living entity on Earth has been discovered, along comes a species that has never been seen before. This is exactly what happened when Joachim Kreiselmaier, battling poor visibility, strong current and freezing temperature while exploring a water-filled cave in Southern Germany, came across a find of the millennium.
What caught his eye was a pale fish-like creature with a longish light-colored body, tiny black eyes, and wide nostrils, the likes of which he had never seen before. He promptly snapped a few photos and sent it to Jasminca Behrmann-Godel, a fish evolution expert at the University of Konstanz in Germany. He also carried a live specimen for her.
The rest, they say, is history. To the world's delight, Joachim had discovered cave loach for the first time in Europe. Of course, Jasminca was quite upbeat about the find and termed it "something really new". This new discovery turned out to be the only known cave-dwelling fish in Europe.
This cave loach, belonging the genus Barbatula, was different from its surface-dwelling cousins and had adapted itself well for the dimly lit caves. It is believed that it evolved into its present form some 16,000 to 20,000 years ago ... quite recent as per the evolutionary scale.
Dr. Jörg Freyhof, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, explains the uniqueness of the fish, thus, "Their eyes are much smaller, appearing almost as if curved inwards, and their color has all but disappeared. The fish also have elongated whisker-like barbels on their heads and larger nostrils than related fish living closer to the surface."
What surprised the scientists the most was the fact that this loach was found way up north. The fish had made the difficult-to-access crannies of Germany's Danube-Aach system its home, instead of the perfect environs of western Balkans that teems with many other aquatic creatures.
This certainly is not the end of such surprise discoveries. Just wait and watch!
