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A century-old mystery about how ancient freshwater shes breathe has

nally been put to rest, thanks to a study published last week in Nature
Communications by a team of ichthyologists and me.

The shes in questionPolypterus and related specieshave tiny holes
in the top of their heads called spiracles, and we showed how a small
valve opens a bony lid over these spiracles to allow air to be sucked in
and pumped out each time the sh surfaces.




And strangely enough, those same holes allowing the sh to breathe were
modied through evolution to become eustachian tubes, which enable us
humans to hearbut more about that later.

Research into these sh has a fascinating history stretching all the way
back to Napoleons crushing defeat by the British at Alexandria in 1801,
when one of his appointed naturalists, Etienne Geo"roy Saint-Hilaire, had
to make a hasty return to France.

Among his many specimens was a strange sh with eshy limbs caught
from the Nile River, which he described in 1802 as polypterus, meaning
many ns.




Also called the reedsh or bichir, it is widely regarded as the most
primitive living member of the true bony shes (osteichthyes). This group
includes some 30,000 living species, including many of the shes like
snapper and salmon we love to eat.

Saint-Hilaires discovery caused a bit of a stir throughout the scientic
world as the sh was thought to be one of the extinct lobe-nned shes,
which are today represented by the coelacanths and air-breathing
lungshes.

Prehistoric lobe-nned shes like Tiktaalik were anatomically very close to
the earliest known tetrapods (four-legged animals), the rst backboned
critters to invade land some 360 million years ago.

Further intrepid expeditions set out in the late 1890s to nd more
specimens of this strange sh. Scientists thought that understanding its
life history would reveal how shes might have evolved into land animals.

Although British zoologist John Budgett failed on three expeditions to
locate the sh, he was nally successful in 1903, but he died of black
fever shortly after returning to England that same year.

Before his death Budgett wrote a short scientic paper that told how
these shes were able to breathe air in through spiracles on top of their
heads, with mouths submerged, making a loud sucking sound.

When we rst saw Polypterus breathe air through its spiracles we knew
we had solved a 100-year-old mystery.
Nick Wegner
A paper written by a French researcher in 1966 backed this up by
observations from the eld. Later research, published in 1989 by a team
of well-respected scientists who observed the sh under laboratory
conditions, disagreed, concluding that these sh do not, as others have
suggested, breathe through their spiracles.

For the scientic world, this was the last denitive word about the sh and
its purported ability to breathe through its headuntil now.

The research upon which todays paper was based was initiated by the
late Je" Graham, who spent his life dedicated to studying air-breathing
shes.

When he passed away in late 2012, Nick Wegner and his team completed
the work. The results showed that under laboratory conditions, when the
tank of shes was behind a blind, Polypterus take in up to 93 percent of
their breaths using the spiracles rather than the mouth.

When the blind was removed, the sh used the spiracles for only about 40
percent of their breathing due to stress. According to Wegner: When we
rst saw Polypterus breathe air through its spiracles we knew we had
solved a 100-year-old mystery. When we captured it on lm, we knew we
could prove it.

Breathing through the spiracle gives the sh a big evolutionary advantage
as they can surface to breathe while keeping their eyes underwater, wary
for predators. It also means they are able to breathe when swimming in
shallow water where it is di#cult for them to raise their head above water.

But what does it mean for understanding our deep distant evolution? The
new nds provide a method for how the very rst prehistoric shes were
able to begin to breathe air. Breathing air is a requirement for shes if they
were to leave the water and invade land as tetrapods.

The oldest known bony sh fossils date back to 430 million years ago
from China. These include heavily armored forms like Guiyu, which has
spiracles on top of its head.

A 380-million-year-old sh from Western Australia called Gogonasus was
unusual in having enormous spiracles on top of its head. It belonged to
the group of shes called tetrapodomorphs, widely regarded by scientists
as the ancestral group from which the rst tetrapods evolved.

When my team discovered the Gogonasus with these large spiracles in
2005, we guessed they might have had something to do with air-
breathing capability, but we had no evidence to prove this.




The new research on Polypterus is the smoking gun that now supports
the idea that sh such as Gogonasus were able to breathe in air through
their large spiracles.

Furthermore, several other sh fossils of that age, like the famous
Tiktaalik, also show large spiracles on top of their heads. The earliest
known tetrapod fossils, like Ventastega, also show very large open
spiracles on their heads. All of this points to the ability of these shes and
tetrapods to take in air from their spiracles as the rst type of breathing.

Once the four-legged descendants of these lobed-nned shes had
invaded the land, the ability to breathe through their spiracles rapidly
declined. They soon switched to regular breathing using their mouths and
nostrils, as we do today.

The canal leading from the spiracle to the inside of the head soon
developed another use. Out of water, amphibians had to develop new
senses that worked better in air.

Transmitting vibrations through the air to the brain would become the next
major use of the spiracle canal. Hearing in early amphibians developed
from adapting the spiracles to become the tympanic membrane for
transmitting sound to the brain through the stapes, one of our tiny inner
ear bones.

Our three tiny inner ear bones also have a remarkable evolutionary history
that demonstrates how close our human anatomy is to the ancient shes.

Starting out as a long bone that braced the lower jaws of sharks and
other early-jawed shes, the hyomandibular bone in shes eventually
shrunk in size and became the stapes in amphibians, reptiles, and us
mammals.

In shes it braced the articulation of the lower and upper jaws, the
quadrate and articular bones.

These bones also gradually deceased in size and became restricted to
the inner ear and were renamed as the malleus and incus. Thus these
three little bones that enable us to hear are derived from these three larger
bones in the jaws of ancient sh.



It illustrates an interesting argument against the Creationist contention
that development of our complex sense organs was just too, well,
complex to have been a natural evolution... God must've done it for us.
Indeed, John Budgett would not have been able to hear the strange
sucking sounds of the Polypterus when it surfaced on the Nile River to
breathe.

So today, when you next listen to that exquisite piece of music, give a
cheer for evolution and spare a thought for the ancient fossil shes that
have given you the evolutionary legacy of listening pleasure.