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Flying fish Meet Japan's hitchhiking fish Medaka catch rides on obliging birds, confirming one of Darwin’s hunches THE JAPANESE picture book “Soratobu medaka” tells the extraordinary tale of tiny stream-dwelling fish called medaka hitching a ride on an obliging bird to a far-off freshwater pool. The story has delighted children in the country since 1999, when it was first published, but now comes an even more delightful twist: it is true. Researchers have long been baffled by fish that turn up in isolated ponds and lakes far from other bodies of water. Even Charles Darwin was puzzled by the problem. In “On the Origin of Species”, published in 1859, he postulated that the larvae of aquatic creatures might stick to the feet of unwitting waterbirds. But his bright idea remained little more than a theory. In 2019 Yao Akifumi, then a biology student at the University of Tsukuba, wondered if he might have been right. Mr Yao had observed that many fish-hunting birds commonly walked
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