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- Someone below mentions bird poop, but could a fish egg survive the human (or a dogs) digestive system as well?by fred_is_fred
- Very old fish traps found, dated --> humans carried trout to the lake
They've jumped to conclusions.
by 1970-01-01 - It was aliens...by leptons
- One possibility for fish eggs getting to lakes I want to propose is extreme weather. Winds can move sand from side of earth to the other. Flooding. Tornadoes.
- I wouldn't be so sure. Were there ever any ducks?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/special-delivery-d...
- Related: Fish were introduced to Crater Lake in the US a little over a hundred years ago, and is generally considered to have been the wrong thing to do.
If you go there, you're free to fish to your heart's content.
by BeetleB - Generally by who?by ncgl
- "Someone brought the black bass to this lake from far away, changing the biological distribution of the lake."by EvanAnderson
- Can I offer some further explanations?
* Accidental human seeding. Rather than bringing a full grown fish up to a lake, is it possible that the eggs could have been in waterskins/containers and when the humans refilled them, the eggs washed out?
* What about eels? Eels can travel across land in damp conditions (and Norway is damp much of the time). Could they take other fish eggs with them?
by nephihaha - An alternative vector: "cloud seeding" (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/sep/09/science.rese...)
Charles Fort collected numerous data for his famous "The Book of the Damned" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Damned
by fractallyte - From the The Guardian article:
> As well as living matter, inorganic substances also crash to earth, including seeds, stones and sand. However, these pale in comparison to the mighty ice blocks. January 2000 saw several chunks weighing up to four kilograms each fall on Spain, but they're dwarfed by the 200kg titans that struck Brazil in 1995.
Wat. Does anyone have a reference for the Brazil one? Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacryometeor ) mentions nothing. Megacryometeors: Distribution on Earth and Current Research (2006)[0] says:
> In Campinas and Itapira, Brazil, two huge megacryometeors of 50 and 200 kg fell in 1997; the atmosphericisotopic signature of both specimens wasunequivocally confirmed (8). Finally, on 21 July 2004, a huge mass of ice weighingapproximately 400 kg fell very close to a 15-year-old girl in Toledo, Spain.
400kg! Unfortunately, no reference is given for this one and for the one in Brazil they refer to https://cepagri.unicamp.br/gelo/gelo.html, which – like many other of their references – produces a 404 nowadays. And, of course, the page hasn't gotten preserved by the Internet Archive, either. :(
[0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4315744 , PDF download available on https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6561843_Megacryomet...
by codethief - It rained fish in my front yard in South Carolina back in the 80's, it's definitely a real phenomenon.by pnut
- hmmm, I have seen big fish in much bigger birds claws, and have seen even bigger birds dive bombing other birds to force them to drop there fish plus a bird can get a fish over ANY lake in minuits, vs an all day random fish carrying hike? so to recap, I have seen many birds with fish, but zero human fish hikersby metalman
- by moebrowne
- Thank you!
- Somewhat related, after desert rains you can often see fairy shrimp (think sea monkeys you might have had as a kid) swimming around in the isolated pools that form. I looked this up after wondering how the heck these water creatures could survive dozens of miles from the nearest permanent water source.
The answer is that their eggs are extremely lightweight, so much so that wind can carry them long distances. Their entire life cycle is extremely accelerated. Once water soaks the eggs the critters can hatch, develop, and lay new eggs in a matter of days. The newly laid eggs have a tiny chance of reaching a new seasonal pool area.
by rurp - > That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes
isn't that a common question?
"How do fish appear in landlocked lakes/ponds/etc"?
After digging a pond and letting it fill with rainwater/groundwater, fish appear. I don't think its because people carried them there.
(don't really know the common answer though)
by m463 - As well as the other answer I think aquatic birds will occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and scatter them about.
- In California, it's because people (the state department of fish and wildlife) put the fish there.
You can even see their scheduled fish plantings online:
by jmalicki - > That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes
Maybe an explanation, even a decent one, but not the only possible, not by a mile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals
This is one of the biggest problems with science. Lack of imagination an partially cooked theories written as gods speak and engraved in marble forever. Is true than being selectively blind may be a requisite in the stupid publish or perish race rat.
Trouts are stubborn fishes, able to jump. If the idea is that lakes created thousand years ago, never had a hidden sink connecting karst systems, a temporary river or a specially big detaw flood that trouts could use... okay, prove it.
by pvaldes - Before we developed a taste for fish, marine life was far more abundant, particularly in rivers. There are rivers that we consider to be in good health today that have a fraction of the original species. For example, the Thames in London was once full of eels, nowadays an eel in the Thames poses a mystery as to 'how it got there'.
By full, that means not being able to see the bottom of the river due to the amount of eels present.
We ate them all.
The eels made it all the way to the Sargasso Sea and back, for breeding purposes. Clearly they would not be able to get from the sea to a fully landlocked lake, with no route to the sea.
However, my point is that we had so much marine life before we cleared out the rivers, to then need the sea, to go from coastal waters to the depths of the Antarctic ocean in the quest for any fish that have survived previous quests. It is just hard for us to imagine the abundance there once was, and, therefore, the relative ease to populate an isolated alpine meadow lake with fish in former times.
by Theodores - Mountain lakes are completely different.
There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.
by wil421 - In this case they have carbon dated wooden equipment for fish farming and know due to geological factors when the lake could support fish, though of course the fish might have gotten there first somehow. I thought this was interesting because it predates agriculture in the same area.by stevenwoo
- Fish eggs often travel long distances by sticking to the feathers or legs of waterfowl I have been told at school long ago.by iefbr14
- Birds can drop fish after they've captured them. Not longer than a year now, we were visiting my wife's family, and me and my father in law got to Walmart there was a dead fish in the front, but when we mentioned it to my wife who got there before us (separate cars) she said it was struggling for life when they saw it, I don't think there was a lake nearby enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if birds have accidentally introduced life into new bodies of water.