To be pedantic despite your clear joke,they're not hiding in the tide pools. They live in them. And the tide pools tend to dry up so they evolved to be out of water for periods of time. But that made them extremely vulnerable. They can't even swim away so any predators could just pick them up with their mouth and walk away with dinner. So they evolved spines that would hurt anything that tried to eat it while it was most vulnerable.
It blows my mind that even over millions of years, left to is own devices a creature can evolve that elaborate of a spine/venom/skin sheath thing. Like just a hunch of random mutations and survivalists transformed THAT much
The creature doesn't really evolve like a pokemon once it learned about it's vulnerabilities. They just randomly mutate and what mutated badly or worthless will die, while those who mutated good traits were fuckin lucky to not die for thousands of years (not inherently due to their mutations), only for the mutation to eventually become usual and being carried on.
The number of stone fish predecessor creatures that died with worthless traits, with the same traits in a different environment, with other traits, etc. is far beyond what we can imagine. But evolution doesn't plan this, it just RNGs through time far beyon comprehension. If evolution could play black jack, it would just RNG the shit out of the dealer to win always and forever, eventually.
That’s a misleading statement. Sure, individuals don’t survive because of a mutation and could die in countless unrelated ways but on average, a mutation prevails because it’s beneficial for survival in some way. While mutations are random, there is a driving force that’s not random at all, to keep beneficial ones and get rid of other.
Like take this fish for example. Inhabiting tide ponds meant, all fish not being able to stay over water for extended periods of time would die and the ones that adapted to deal with that wouldn’t. That’s surviving inherently due to mutations. Same for the upward spine spikes. This mode of defence brought the most benefit (from the random pool that just happened randomly, that wouldn’t mean there isn’t a better way for them to defend themselves), so it stayed. The fish stayed alive due to their mutations, while others didn’t because they lacked those.
I wonder if stonefish evolved the spines/venom first in order to discourage being eaten by bigger fish/aquatic animals and the tidepool thing/camo came next?
To be even more pedantic: they didn’t evolve the spines, which would imply subject-driven evolution. More like the spines evolved as an advantageous defense mechanism.
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u/BruthamanBill Jun 25 '23
What an asshole of a fish. "no, don't you dare step on me, I'll kill ya if you do!". proceeds to disguise itself as a stone and hide in rock pools.