Catfish surprisingly climbs wall and stuns scientists

The Armored Catfish is known for their sucking mouth but the way this fish used it is strange.

Inside a cave near Tena in Ecuador, a group of scientists filmed a catfish climbing up the wall to lick food from the roof. Climbing seems impossible for fishes, but evidence of an actual video showing an armored catfish making its way up the cave wall presents a new puzzle to the scientific community. This small yet amazing feat could lead science into another demension.

MUNTINLUPA, PHILIPPINES (Catholic Online) - The researchers brought the camera to document the variety of wildlife inside the cave complex when they observed several armored catfish attempting to climb up a vertical slope, according to the Daily Mail.

"As part of a mapping and preliminary flora and fauna inventory of hypogean life in caves, developed in Cretaceous limestone in the sub-Andean zone of Ecuador, we were able to observe a number of catfish climbing a steep flowstone waterfall in the dark zone of a cave," the research team wrote in a paper for Subterranean Biology.

The observed member of the armored catfish family has sucker-mouths that they use to cling unto rocks and trees as they navigated through fast running waters. However, this is the first time this species is seen adapting their mouth for another use in an unfamiliar environment.

According to a report, the Chaetostoma microps are not common in the areas of Ecuador and Peru.

"It's not too surprising to find another catfish that climbs rocks. What is surprising is the environment that they are doing it in," said Geoff Hoese, lead scientist of the study, in an interview with BBC.

He noted he plans to return to the area to do further studies because of the limitation of facts at hand to explain the observation.

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