The mouth almighty is a fish that is found in Australia's ponds and streams. The jaws of the species snap up prey. As many as hundreds of babies are carried by the males with their mouths.
For two or three weeks at a time, the dads do mouthbrooding. They do it at a great personal cost. According to a study published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters, mouth almighty fathers sometimes carry babies that aren't their own.
Tony Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Brooklyn College who studies reproduction in fish and wasn't involved in the research, said it was pretty neat.
The lead author of the study is a PhD candidate at Charles Darwin University in Northern Territory, Australia. Both live in Australia. The fathers of both species scoop fertilized eggs into their mouths and carry them until the young have hatched.
Mrs. Abecia's research suggested that the two species don't eat when they're on dad duty.
Research has shown that mouthbrooders who can be fathers or mothers don't eat. It may be difficult to breathe if you have a mouth stuffed with offspring. Mrs. Abecia said that it could make it harder to escape the clutches of the predator.
It makes sense that fish parents would only take care of their own babies. Scientists don't know how often this is true.
Mrs. Abecia collected the fathers of the mouth almighty and blue catfish from the Northern Territory. She collected fish with no young in their mouths. She looked at the father's mouth and found about 10 eggs or babies from him.
The blue catfish was as expected. The dads seemed to be carrying their own young, and the baby fish all had the same mother.
Things were a little weird in the powerful jaws of the mouth. Mrs. Abecia said that the mouth almighty species forms seemingly faithful pairs in the lab. Out of 15 batches of young that she studied from the wild, four didn't fit with the story.
Two batches of young girls had multiple mothers, suggesting that the male had courted a female while he already had eggs in his mouth. One of the batches had multiple fathers because another male sneakily fertilized some eggs before the brooding dad slurped them up. The young were unrelated to the fish that was carrying them.
It is a very small study and it will be premature to draw conclusions about how common these dads are. Even though the blue catfish seemed monogamous, there might have been hanky-panky that the researchers didn't catch.
The genetic techniques used in this study are making it easier for scientists to ask questions about the private lives of monogamous animals.
Other mouthbrooding fish carry the wrong babies. A second dad is included in about 8 percent of broods. A study of fish found that out of 14 brooding dads, two had completely unrelated children.
These dads will not pass down their genes. Why hasn't evolution made them more careful?
It is possible that a mouth full of baby fish makes them sexy.
Some female fishes in other species are attracted to males that are already caring for their young, according to Mrs. Abecia. Males that get stuck with the wrong babies now could make up for it later; maybe even more females will be eager to fill those males with eggs.
Mrs. Abecia said that it shows that it is not only the females that care for their offspring.
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