In 1964 an earthquake made some parts of the Pacific into ponds on a few islands. Fifty years later and the fish in those ponds are now freshwater fish. Apparently the genes for dealing with that sort of wild extreme change are held by some of the fish in the crowd and natural selection can work its wonders in a decade.

In terms of ocean acidification, this is as catastrophic as it gets, not only did the ocean become “more acidic” but it stopped being an ocean.

I can’t get much worse than this for a fish, and yet somehow life on Earth had the answer.

What’s the pH of those ponds — The ocean pH is 8.1, rain is 5.5. Those ponds will be somewhere in between.

And some people think a man-made “ocean acidication” that’s smaller than this and slower, will devastate the ocean.

Science Daily

Evolution is usually thought of as occurring over long time periods, but it also can happen quickly. Consider a tiny fish whose transformation after the 1964 Alaskan earthquake was uncovered by University of Oregon scientists and their University of Alaska collaborators.

The fish, seawater-native threespine stickleback, in just decades experienced changes in both their genes and visible external traits such as eyes, shape, color, bone size and body armor when they adapted to survive in fresh water. The earthquake — 9.2 on the Richter scale and second highest ever recorded — caused geological uplift that captured marine fish in newly formed freshwater ponds on islands in Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska south of Anchorage. Stickleback, the researchers concluded, have evolved as a species over the long haul with regions of their genomes alternatively honed for either freshwater or marine life. And this is not just a plastic change, like becoming tan in the sun; the genome itself is being rapidly reshaped,” she said. “Stickleback fish can adapt on this time scale because the species as a whole has evolved, over millions of years, a genetic bag of tricks for invading and surviving in new freshwater habitats. This hidden genetic diversity is always waiting for its chance, in the sea.” “In some of the populations that we studied we found evidence of changes in fewer than even 10 years. For the field, it indicates that evolutionary change can happen quickly, and this likely has been happening with other organisms as well.”

From the paper

Significance

On several Alaskan islands, phenotypically variable threespine stickleback fish now live in ponds that were formed during uplift caused by the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake. We analyzed phenotypic and genome-wide genetic divergence of resident freshwater and oceanic threespine stickleback populations from three islands. These data support the hypothesis that the freshwater populations evolved repeatedly from their oceanic ancestors in the past half-century, and have differentiated to nearly the same extent as populations that were founded thousands of years ago. This work raises the possibility that much of the evolution that occurs when oceanic stickleback invade fresh water takes place in fewer than 50 generations after colonization, rather than gradually over thousands of years.