Congo's deepest river is an excellent 'natural laboratory' to study Convergent Evolution

In 2007, Melanie Stiassny while travelling on the lower Congo river noticed something very bizarre in a fish that she took out of the water. She discovered that the fish was dying but what was weird was that the fish was dying because of the formation of nitrogen bubbles under its skin and gills. This hinted at the fact that the river was much deeper and held many more secrets than reachers had previously realised.

River depths hold a secret 

According to reports, the fish that Stiassny saw dying was suffering from decompression sickness, this is when there is a dangerous build-up of nitrogen bubbles in the blood due to rapid ascent from great depths. The Congo river meanders its way lazily for 2,500 miles and then an additional 188 miles from the ocean it drops into a dangerous series of gorges that keeps getting deeper and deeper.

This dangerous stretch of river located near the border of the Republic of Congo and Angola contains almost 30 per cent of the rivers fish diversity and has long attracted ichthyologists, a type of marine biologist that specializes in fish species and physiology.

According to a research that was presented at the American Geophysical Union in January, the Congo river is much more bizarre than previously imagined, and the hostile currents that are present at a depth of more than 700 feet are a great place to learn about a phenomenon called "convergent evolution". Convergent evolution means the phenomenon of diverse species developing similar environmental adaptions.

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As per reports, the narrowest and deepest part of the Congo river was too dangerous to be traversed by boat and that is why Stiassny and her team used kayakers who had been equipped with echo-sounders and depth measurements equipment. The data gathered from the kayakers revealed the harsh underwater landscape which consisted of huge towers of rock that had been stripped bare of sediments and plants by fast currents that run both ways: upstream and downstream.

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Reports indicated that the complexity and power of the currents is the key to the evolutionary richness of the lower Congo River. Stiassny in her research explained that a lot still remains unknown about the life that occupies the deeper reaches of the congo river and therefore more research and study is necessary.