In total, she can release 20 to 100 eggs per day, “typically before noon,” says Reichard. Typically, a male simply extends his fins, and if the female likes what she sees, she’ll drop an egg that he can fertilize. “Mating does not involve much elaborate courtship.” “ do not waste time with anything,” Reichard tells Milius. That also means they don’t mess around when it comes to mating. Then again, they don’t have much to live for-eventually their muddy hole will evaporate, leaving them high and dry. Their cells also deteriorate much more quickly than other fish, meaning they age much faster as well. “But we have found that this rapid maturation is the norm rather than a rare exception.”īilal Choudhry at The New York Times reports that growing up so fast comes at a cost. “We guessed that some populations of this species could achieve very rapid growth and sexual maturation under particular conditions,” Reichard says in a press release. By observing the gonads of both males and females, the researchers found the fish reach sexual maturity between 14 and 15 days. They found that the buried fish eggs hatch within three days of a rainfall. They surveyed wild populations of killifish in southern Mozambique between January and May 2016, looking at eight ephemeral pools of water. The new study’s author, Martin Reichard, a biologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, and his team suspected that in the wild the fish might reach reproductive age even more quickly. In the lab, where the fish live a relatively leisurely lifestyle, the average rate of maturation is 18 days. In fact, the fish is used as a model animal in aging studies because of this trait. Researchers have been aware of the turquoise killifish’s super-fast maturation for a while. Not only do they make babies quickly, they bulk up fast, too-typically growing from about 5 millimeters to 54 millimeters in their lifespan. When rain fills the ephemeral pools, the embryos mature rapidly reaching sexual maturity and depositing their own embryos before the pool once again dries up. The fish spend most of their lives as tiny embryos that have been deposited in sediment in small depressions across the savannah. That rapid maturation is an adaptation to the killifish’s habitat, according to the study published this week in the journal Current Biology. This week, researchers crowned a new record holder for quick growth: Susan Milius at Science News reports that the turquoise killifish, Nothobranchius furzeri, found in Mozambique, can reach maturity in just 14 days, the fastest of any known vertebrate animal. That means they need to grow up fast, too.
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