Sentences with phrase «pharyngeal jaws»

Ole Seehausen comments: «All our analyses of interactions between fish with and without pharyngeal jaws showed that, in competing for fish as food, pharyngognathous are always inferior to non pharyngognathous species.

In this respect, the spectrum of species in Lake Victoria is now similar to that found in Lake Tanganyika or in marine habitats, where fish with pharyngeal jaws have existed alongside competitors without such jaws for up to 60 million years and have therefore never become specialized for predation on large fish.

The pharyngeal jaws allowed them, for example, to crush plants or hard - shelled animals, while the oral jaws were specialized exclusively for catching prey.

What slows cichlids down is the second set of jaws at the back of their throat — the pharyngeal jaws — which originally enabled these species to exploit a wide range of food sources.

This was a crucial disadvantage for many fish - eating cichlids when the first competitor lacking pharyngeal jaws appeared in Lake Victoria around 60 years ago: while the Nile perch can swallow fish whole, cichlids have to grind them down in an extremely time - consuming process.

Not exact matches

Some fish species still have a set of vestigial teeth in their throat, but pharyngeal teeth for the most part are believed to have migrated forward into the mouth, perhaps as the jaw was evolving.

These can be taken in and crushed by the jaw or pharyngeal teeth.