Fish eggs that unfortunately get into a duck’s mouth and into its stomach may just one be one of the saddest moments on Earth. These eggs get pummeled by the duck’s gizzard and then burned up by the stomach acids, and by the time that they exit the duck’s body, most of these eggs can no longer hatch. They don’t get to hatch and have a chance at life. With these great odds stacked against these eggs, you wouldn’t expect that some will survive unscathed… but some surprisingly do survive.
…a few eggs can exit unscathed in a duck’s excrement, possibly helping to spread those fish, including invasive species, to different places, a new study finds.
It’s been an “open question for centuries how these isolated water bodies can be populated by fish,” says fish biologist Patricia Burkhardt-Holm of the University of Basel in Switzerland, who was not involved with the work. This study shows one way that water birds may disperse fish, she says.
More details about this over at ScienceNews.
(Image Credit: ArtTower/ Pixabay)
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well there ya go
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