Alabama Center for the Arts - Visual Arts Building - Room 118

Fish Under Alabama: How Fish Came to Live in Caves

Some of the most inhospitable environments are caves. With no light, any cave organism relies on food that comes from the outside. Despite these conditions, fish have moved into caves many times all over the world. For a long time, we believed that cave organisms had to have small distributions because their lack of eyes and pigments would mean that they would not be able to survive outside of their dark environments. However, one of Alabama’s two cavefishes, the Southern Cavefish, is distributed across Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama. Turns out that the underground world is a lot more complex than we had thought.