Cave fish are a subpopulation of Astyanax mexicanus who live in caves. They have light-dwelling relatives, both of which are shown in the picture I attached below. These fish are fun because their blindness lets you have all sorts of interesting experiments transplanting goofy eyes to them. I glued some googly eyes to the front of them and set them loose in an aquarium, you’ve never seen such a panic! I’m going to give cave fish echolocation powers, and then pit them against cave fish with night-vision eyes I’ve made to see which ones can run a maze better. That one will get genetically engineered to be gigantic and set loose attacking the Eastern Seaboard. Just because I can. MuHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Let’s start with a story about blind cave fish regaining their sight…

Progeny Of Blind Cavefish Can ‘Regain’ Their Sight

Blind cavefish whose eyes have withered while living in complete darkness over the course of evolutionary time can be made to see again. In some cases, the offspring of mated pairs originating from distinct cave populations regain vision, researchers found. The result shows that mutations in different genes are responsible for eye loss in separate cavefish lineages that may not have been exposed to light for the last one million years.

…..

The study examined four populations of blind cave fish, Astyanax mexicanus, which inhabit different caves in northeast Mexico. Blind for millennia, these fish evolved from eyed, surface fish. The researchers’ genetic analysis showed that the evolutionary impairment of eye development, as well as the loss of pigmentation and other cave-related changes, resulted from mutations at multiple gene sites.

In order to gauge how genetic make-up could bring about the restoration of vision, the researchers created hybrids of the different cave fish populations. Among these various hybrids, they found that nearly 40 percent in some hybrid crosses could see.

Article about transplanting lenses onto cave fish, who then grew other eye-parts.

Researchers Find Way To Reverse Evolution Of Cave Fish Blindness

The old cliche “the blind leads the blind” may no longer apply to a population of cave fish. Eye parts lost during the past million years of evolution were restored in just a matter of days after a lens transplant from a sighted surface-dwelling fish of the same species (Astyanax mexicanus), according to a University of Maryland biology research report featured in the July 28 issue of Science.

….

Within eight days of implanting a lens from a sighted surface-dwelling fish to a blind cave fish of the same species, Maryland researchers began to see an eye develop from underneath a flap of skin. After two months, the cave fish had grown a large restored eye with a distinct pupil, cornea and iris. In addition, the retina of the restored eye showed rod photoreceptor cells, which are rare in the degenerate cave fish eye.

Why are cave fish blind? Regressive evolution:

‘Regressive Evolution’ In Cavefish: Natural Selection Or Genetic Drift

“Regressive evolution,” or the reduction of traits over time, is the result of either natural selection or genetic drift, according to a study on cavefish by researchers at New York University’s Department of Biology, the University of California at Berkeley’s Department of Integrative Biology, and the Harvard Medical School.

Previously, scientists could not determine which forces contributed to regressive evolution in cave-adapted species, and many doubt the role of natural selection in this process. Darwin himself, who famously questioned the role of natural selection in eye loss in cave fishes, said, “As it is difficult to imagine that eyes, although useless, could be in any way injurious to animals living in darkness, I attribute their loss wholly to disuse.”

Of course that doesn’t explain anything, as random genetic drift and natural selection are completely opposite! It’s either random or selected for! But the fact it seems to have showed up many times shows that there is selection for it, but the appearance is probably random, as it has dozens of different places the mutations showed up. Thus the regressive evolution could be countered by cross-breeding different populations of cave fish.

In addition: rare cave fish were still popping up in 1999..

Rare Cavefish Found By Scientists
Dr. Whit Gibbons and Dr. Kurt Buhlmann, scientists from the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory (SREL) accompanied John Jensen and Jim Ozier of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources on a spelunking expedition in north Georgia last week and found a rare, blind fish known as a southern cavefish.
…..

Cavefish are not just blind; they are eyeless. They are small white fish known to inhabit the waters deep beneath the earth but they are rarely seen by people because they are found only at limited points at which underground lakes can be reached through caves. While some scientists look for the cavefish for years, this group had been underground for about an hour and had come to the end of a winding tunnel. The rain outside was making the water level of the cave rise when Buhlmann spotted the fish. Within 30 minutes he was able to capture it using a net. Only two other individual cavefish have ever been caught in Georgia, one in 1969 and one in 1973.

Little is known about this elusive fish. Even to call them rare may be inaccurate. They may be abundant, but simply live outside our knowledge. Their number cannot be estimated and no one knows how they live or reproduce. As Dr. Gibbons points out, “The ultimate question is how many species are living beneath the earth’s surface that humans are yet to find, and perhaps never will?”

My quest to create a massive increase of albino animals continues! Why albinos? Why not! They are weird, which is all that matters. I’ve made a large batch of albinos recently of all species, and have set them all loose, except for a white black jaguar, and my white venus flytrap. I’ve been doing this for years, but the latest push is the most diverse and largest yet! There will be no stopping the bleaching of wildlife, until I start to created melanistic animals instead! The black and white will combine to grey, which will allow me to rule the world! It’s true. Grey animals=ruling the world.

Killer Whale inserted around Alaska:

White Stag in Scotland:

A ghostly, mutant ratfish caught off Whidbey Island in Washington state

White Tawny Frogmouth

Rare White Giraffe Photographed

White camel

Two-headed albino snake:

More, more, MORE!!! Albino animals, coming to nature near you!

Let me step out of claiming responsibility for this one. It turns out bats developed flight first, and echolocation later. DUH! Everyone already knew that, despite the attempts by a few morons to try to say “Buh?” as to which came first. This isn’t a chicken/egg situation, there is no reason to have echolocation if you ain’t flying. Plus, many larger bats don’t have echolocation. They never did. So there really wasn’t a debate here, but I guess SOMEONE just wasn’t convinced. But screw him, the debate is over.

Now we can have fun imagining what kind of bad movie would be spawned thanks to this extinct bat. Onychonycteris – Silent Terror! The “true” story of prehistoric bats asleep in a cave awakened by teenage spelunkers and crazed to kill. Only when brave teen Jimmy and his Sheriff father send hundreds of roaches with alka-seltzer glued to their backs into the cave is the day saved, as the bats soon explode after eating them. Starring Corin Nemic, Vanessa Angel, and someone randomly from Buffy/Angel.

Missing link shows bats flew first, developed echolocation later

The discovery of a remarkably well-preserved fossil representing the most primitive bat species known to date demonstrates that the animals evolved the ability to fly before they could echolocate.
The new species, named Onychonycteris finneyi, was unearthed in 2003 in southwestern Wyoming and is described in a study in the Feb. 14 issue of the journal Nature, on which University of Michigan paleontologist Gregg Gunnell is a coauthor along with researchers from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York, the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada and the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany. A cast of one of the two known specimens is on permanent display in the U-M Exhibit Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Evolution.

“There has been a longstanding debate about how bats evolved, centering around the development of flight and the development of the sonar system they use to navigate and hunt for prey,” said Gunnell, an associate research scientist at the U-M Museum of Paleontology. “The three main theories have been that they developed the two abilities together, that flight came first, or that sonar came first. Based on the specimen described in this paper, we were able to determine that this particular animal was not capable of echolocating, which then suggests that bats flew before they developed their echolocation ability.”

Bats represent one of the largest and most diverse orders of mammals, accounting for one-fifth of all living mammal species. The well-preserved condition of the new fossil permitted the scientists to take an unprecedented look at the most primitive known member of the order Chiroptera.

“When we first saw it, we knew it was special,” said lead author Nancy Simmons of AMNH. “It’s clearly a bat, but unlike any previously known. In many respects it is a missing link between bats and their non-flying ancestors.”

Dating the rock formation in which the fossil was found put its age at 52 million years. Onychonycteris was not the only bat alive at the time—fossils of Icaronycteris, a more modern bat that could echolocate, are found in the same formations.

A careful examination of Onychonycteris’s physical characteristics revealed several surprising features. For example, it had claws on all five of its fingers, whereas modern bats have, at most, claws on only two digits of each hand. The limb proportions of Onychonycteris are also different from all other bats—the hind legs are longer and the forearm shorter—and more similar to those of climbing mammals that hang under branches, such as sloths and gibbons.

The fossil’s limb form and the appearance of claws on all the fingers suggest that Onychonycteris may have been a skilled climber. However, long fingers, a keeled breastbone and other features indicate that Onychonycteris could fly under its own power like modern bats. It had short, broad wings, which suggest that it probably could not fly as far or as fast as most bats that came after it. Instead of flapping its wings continuously while flying it may have alternated flapping and gliding while in the air. Onychonycteris’s teeth indicate that its diet consisted primarily of insects, just like that of most living bats.

“We don’t know what the initial incentive was to take to the air,” Gunnell said. “My thought is that these bats probably were commuters at first—developing the ability to fly allowed them to travel to a particular place to feed, then fly back to their nesting area.” Eventually, selective pressures likely favored the development of more sustained and agile flight, allowing bats to hunt on the wing.

Despite Onychonycteris’s resemblance to animals that came after it, its skull lacks features in and around the ear seen in bats that use echolocation to navigate and hunt. The structure of its feet and ankles, which include a special, spur-like bone that likely supported a tail membrane, led the researchers to conclude that Onychonycteris had the broad tail that modern bats use to capture prey in flight, but that the structure probably was used as an airfoil to aid maneuvering. Without echolocation, Onychonycteris likely had to make do with visual, olfactory, or passive audio cues to hunt.

“It finally gives us an answer,” Simmons said. “Flying evolved first, echolocation second.”

Source: University of Michigan