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Evolution: Dreampond revisited

Nature volume 466, pages 174–175 (2010)Cite this article

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A once-threatened population of African fish is now providing a view of evolution in action. Laura Spinney asks what Lake Victoria cichlids have revealed about speciation.

Ole Seehausen didn't expect to find much when he dropped his trawling net into Lake Victoria in 1991. The fish he was studying, called cichlids, had been disappearing from the East African lake for years. So he was astounded when he hauled in dozens of them. Close inspection of their coloration and shapes revealed five distinct species. The graduate student couldn't wait to deliver the news to his supervisor, Frans Witte, at Leiden University in the Netherlands. "The quality of the phone line was so horrible that I wasn't sure he had understood that we had caught cichlids offshore again," he recalls.

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References

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  1. Laura Spinney is a freelance writer based in Lausanne, Switzerland.,

    Laura Spinney

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  1. Laura Spinney
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Aquatic Ecology at the University of Bern

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The Lake Victoria Fisheries Organization

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Spinney, L. Evolution: Dreampond revisited. Nature 466, 174–175 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/466174a

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