Page 105 - BBC Wildlife Volume 36 #12

OURWILD WORLD

What

is it?

STRIPED MACKEREL

Certain terrestrial vertebrates consider
it rude to eat with your mouth open.
But for many aquatic ones, it’s entirely
unavoidable. The gills of filter-feeding
fish, such as this striped mackerel in the
Red Sea, extract not only oxygen from
the water, but also plankton. And that
means opening wide – very wide.
Once our fishy ancestors crawled out of
the water and onto land, gills became
redundant. But evolution didn’t just ditch
them. Instead, all that machinery was
redeployed to build our jaws, ear bones
and even our voice boxes – which give us
the power to reprimand others for their
bad table manners. SB

December 2018 BBC Wildlife 105