Ask Lemmy

37376 readers

1207 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

6) No US Politics.

Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Bluetreefrog@lemmy.world

TheSaneWriter@lemm.ee

TheSaneWriter@lemmy.thesanewriter.com

Asudox@lemmy.world

lemmy_bot@lemmy.world

beefbaby182@lemmy.world

ModeratorCan@lemmy.world

neidu3@sh.itjust.works

asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev

candyman337@lemmy.world

candyman337@sh.itjust.works

237

Which living creatures can swim and fly, but not walk? (feddit.org)

submitted 3 days ago by bricked@feddit.org to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

70 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Whenever I see this picture I think of this:

| Creature | Swims | Walks | Flies |
| -------- | ----- | ----- | ----- |
| Dog      | X     | X     |       |
| Fish     | X     |       |       |
| Bird     |       | X     | X     |
| Duck     | X     | X     | X     |

Notice how for each combination of swimming, walking and flying, there is a living creature that can do just that, with the exception of swimming and flying.

Sure there are flying fish, but they glide rather than fly. Did evolution really forget to cover this niche?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, that's true. But it's more a stumbling waddle than a walk. I looked at some videos of gannet colonies, and hardly any of the tens of thousands of birds are walking. I think like most of these diving seabirds their feet are set well back.

This is a really nice vid of a Canadian colony: https://youtu.be/g9bzWqfIu2Y

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 0 points 4 hours ago

Considering that I am including a snake's movements in "walking" in this context, I'd say that's good enough.
Honestly though, considering 2/3 of the planet surface (and increasing) is water, one would think there would be some answer to this, but I suppose it has something to do with the physics of it...

There is a lot of vertical space in the oceans and it is possible for some, to escape to depths that other species cannot.
As compared to that, fast vertical movement in a land area will mostly include air-time, meaning gliding will give an advantage by reducing fall damage.
There is a sharp drop in the buoyancy from water to air, meaning that anyone wanting to move to air to escape underwater threats will require much lower body densities, which in turn make it harder to have long deep-water time and there are more resources underwater anyway

So I think that the air-time of flying-fish is optimised more than enough for such a purpose and that the birds that we see diving to get food are more from the evolutionary route of - land animals that can fly, adapting to get food from deeper into the water.