How Seahorses Evolved To Swim Standing Up

Peter Teske and Luciano Beheregaray of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, have just solved one of nature's most enduring mysteries: how seahorses evolved to swim standing up ...

Seagrasses, which thrive in shallow water, spread rapidly through these newly formed environments. The researchers think that the ancestors of modern seahorses followed.

Horizontally swimming fish living in seagrass beds don't blend into the environment well and are easily picked off by predators.

A solution seems to have evolved in seahorse ancestors: the upright body shape, which enables seahorses to seamlessly blend in with surrounding seagrass.

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(Photo: Robert Sisson / NGS)


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According to the authors swimming upright was favoured by natural selection. As a proponent of evolution by natural experiment I believe that the enormous expansion of sea grass habitats allowed the ancestors of the sea horses to move into a new habitat in which was little or no selection pressure. That means that the upright position evolved because of a lack of selection, natural or otherwise.
Martin Geerts
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Now granted, I didn't read the paper that I'm sure they published on this but your header says they've "proved" how seahorses evolved to swim standing up. So where's the proof? Saying "grass is upright, and so are the seahorses, therefore that's WHY they're upright" doesn't sound very scientific to me... What about all those creatures that live inthe long grass that haven't evolved to swim upright. How come they survived?
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No, VonSkippy, man pees standing up because it's so much fun.

Timm, get a life. The hypotheses of scientific thought are vastly preferable to blindly accepting the word of a cult leader with preposterous ideas and no basis in fact. For example, Jim Jones and L Ron Hubbard.
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