Researchers have found a blind cavefish that can climb waterfalls. No, I am not making this up. The New Jersey Institute of Technology featured this story.

This research is reported in a March 24 Nature Scientific Reports article, “Tetrapod-like pelvic girdle in a walking cavefish,” by Brooke Flammang, Daphne Soares, Julie Markiewicz and Apinun Suvarnaraksha. Flammang and Soares, assistant professors in the NJIT Department of Biological Sciences, were assisted with the research by Markiewicz, an NJIT post-baccalaureate research volunteer in the Flammang lab at the university. Investigator Suvarnaraksha is a member of the Faculty of Fisheries Technology and Aquatic Resources of Maejo University in Thailand. The full text of their article is available at www.nature.com/articles/srep23711.

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Flammang studies fish locomotion at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, so she’s used to seeing fish moving on land. She wasn’t surprised to see one that could push itself over rocks and through water gushing like a fire hose. But other “walking” fish hop forward by leaning on their pectoral fins like a pair of crutches, or flex and shimmy to wriggle over surfaces. This one was taking steps, moving one of its front fins in time with the back fin on the other side of its body, alternating in a diagonal two-step like a salamander. Flammang was incredulous. “I was like, ‘Fish can’t do that,’” she says. “That’s ridiculous.”

Read more at: NJIT.com and at Wired.com