Mudskipper
A fish that lives on land, breathes air, climbs trees, and courts mates by doing push-ups
No photo available for Mudskipper
Superpower
Mudskippers breathe through their skin (cutaneous respiration) while on land as long as it stays moist, and through the lining of their mouth and throat. Their pectoral fins are muscular enough to function as crutches, propelling them across mudflats using a crutching gait, and their fused pelvic fins form a suction cup for climbing mangrove roots and branches. They're the only fish known to successfully defend terrestrial territories against other fish, holding burrow entrances and engaging in above-water confrontations.
Overview
Mudskippers (subfamily Oxudercinae) are gobies found in intertidal mudflats and mangroves across the Indo-Pacific and West Africa. They evolved their terrestrial adaptations independently from the evolutionary line that produced land vertebrates — but their ability to function on land, combined with visible physical resemblance to early fish-like tetrapods in the fossil record, makes them one of the most useful living models for understanding the fish-to-land transition.
Found in
Intertidal mudflats, mangroves, and estuaries across the Indo-Pacific from the Persian Gulf to Japan and Australia, and along West Africa. Require both marine and terrestrial access.
Things worth knowing
- 1
Male mudskippers court females by leaping repeatedly into the air from the mudflat — a behavior called 'skipping' — doing this hundreds of times during courtship. The displays that give them their name are primarily sexual advertisement, not locomotion.
- 2
Mudskippers store air in their burrows — they construct burrows with an air pocket at the top that they visit to breathe, and which provides an oxygen supply to their eggs laid inside.
- 3
Mudskippers can see both in air and in water — they have highly mobile eyes that can swivel independently and retract into the skull for moisture. Their eyes are so mobile they can look behind themselves.
- 4
During high tide, mudskippers retreat to burrows, climb mangrove branches above the waterline, or simply wait the tide out on elevated spots — they treat the ocean's return as an inconvenience, not a relief.
- 5
Mudskippers blink — one of the very few fish with functional eyelids. The blink keeps the cornea moist in the terrestrial environment, exactly as it does in land vertebrates.