We talk about cichlids a surprising amount in my class. They’re found all over the world, and while many species exist, many have also gone extinct. Are we about to add another to the pile? This article briefly discusses what’s facing these poor males.
This plays into another fallacy I hear or read a lot in my classes, too: the idea that a species “had to X to survive.” Well, why don’t these males just asexually reproduce? Why can’t they adapt? What is LIMITING them from accomplishing the survival of the species? In this case, it’s pretty straightforward. They can’t mate. There are no females. They don’t have the biological ability to reproduce asexually (that we know of), and that mutation isn’t just going to pop up to save the fishies. Sadly, unfortunately, they’re doomed. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a sad fact of what is in the world. Yes, these fish “have to adapt to survive” but they failed the test. There’s a penalty: extinction. Darwin himself perceived that extinctions were integral to and necessary for evolution to proceed, so while we may lose this one (very special) species, there are others, and life will continue and change despite their loss.