Evolution has gone crazy. In just 16,000 years, three fish species created 500 new species of fish in Africa’s largest lake.

Lake Victoria is the largest in Africa and relatively young; It is only 16,000 years old. However, IFLScience writes that, from a geological perspective, approximately 500 different cichlid fish managed to evolve here in this small time period.

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The most surprising part of this story is that this explosion of diversity occurred primarily due to hybrids resulting from interbreeding between species. During the study, a team from the University of Bern and Cambridge and the Wellcome Sanger Institute discovered that the lake contains 500 completely new species of fish that have formed there over the last 16,000 years. What’s more, scientists discovered that they were all descendants of three cichlid lineages that arrived when Lake Victoria filled after a severe drought. Note that from an evolutionary perspective, this happened extremely quickly.

Today, scientists have discovered more than 500 species of cichlids in the lake, according to the study’s first author and team leader, Joana Mayer. Further analysis showed that they were probably descended from three lineages that met at the lake, hybridized at some point, and then combined their genetic variation to create a wide variety of hybrids that eventually evolved into different species.

Mayer also notes that what’s happening in Lake Victoria is “completely crazy” from an evolutionary perspective. It usually takes more than a million years for a new species to develop, but this time it took only 16,000 years for more than 500 new species to appear on Earth simultaneously.

The team surveyed the lake and found that cichlids thrive in Lake Victoria today, occupying almost every available space. Local residents also differ from each other in shape, size, color and form. Mayer notes that all the species in Lake Victoria are completely different: Some skim algae, others feed on zooplankton, and still others are apex predators that prey on other fish.

Exactly how this happened is still unclear, but the team suggests that it was due to the turbidity of the water in which the cichlids first found themselves: they could not distinguish each other’s colors and therefore it was difficult for them to identify the species. The result, according to the team, was a “hybridization festival.”

Equally intriguing, the successful hybridization of cichlids in Africa’s largest lake challenges one of the oldest assumptions about evolution: that two different species cannot reproduce and produce fertile, viable offspring. Simply put, the Lake Victoria hybrids should have been an evolutionary dead end, but quite the opposite happened.

Previously Focus He wrote that they were the first scientists to breed a monkey and human hybrid.