Kryptoglanis shajii is a strange fish – and the closer scientists look, the stranger it gets. This small subterranean catfish sees the light of day and human observers only rarely, when it turns up in springs, wells and flooded rice paddies in the Western Ghats mountain region of Kerala, India. It was first described as a new species in 2011.

Soon after that, John Lundberg, PhD, one of the world’s leading authorities on catfishes, started taking a closer look at several specimens.

Soon after that, John Lundberg, PhD, one of the world’s leading authorities on catfishes, started taking a closer look at several specimens.

“The characteristics of this animal are just so different that we have a hard time fitting it into the family tree of catfishes,” said Lundberg.

From the outside, Kryptoglanis does not look particularly unusual for a catfish. But when Lundberg and his colleagues looked at its bones using digital radiography and high-definition CAT scans, they found some surprises.

Kryptoglanis was missing several bony elements – a characteristic fairly common for subterranean fish. But there were also changes in the shapes of certain bones, changes so strange that Lundberg described them as “completely unique among catfishes and all fishes as far as I know.”

Kryptoglanis was missing several bony elements – a characteristic fairly common for subterranean fish. But there were also changes in the shapes of certain bones, changes so strange that Lundberg described them as “completely unique among catfishes and all fishes as far as I know.”

Above: A specimen of Kryptoglanis shajii that was scanned in Lundberg's team's study. Credit: Kyle Luckenbill, Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University

Numerous individual bones were modified in the face, giving the fish a compressed front end with a jutting lower jaw – like a bulldog’s snout, if a bulldog also had four rows of conical, sharp-tipped teeth.

Numerous individual bones were modified in the face, giving the fish a compressed front end with a jutting lower jaw – like a bulldog’s snout, if a bulldog also had four rows of conical, sharp-tipped teeth.

Based on its teeth and subterranean home, Lundberg said that Kryptoglanis most likely eats meat, in the form of small invertebrates and insect larvae – whatever might be found in the groundwater and could be captured by the fish, which at less than ten centimeters is smaller than an adult human’s pinkie finger. The fish can move swiftly in its environment, as evidenced by video footage of collected fish darting through water to grab food. [Source]

But why Kryptoglanis is so different, and what its closest relatives are, remains a mystery.

Lundberg’s team wasn’t alone in asking the question. Lundberg’s team examined three specimens of Kryptoglanis using digital radiography, and one of these specimens using high-resolution X-ray computed tomography – resulting in detailed, three-dimensional CAT scan images after careful preparation and analysis by Lundberg’s colleague and co-author, Kyle Luckenbill, interim collection manager and a research assistant at the Academy. (A video visualization of the fish’s internal bony structures is available at http://youtu.be/PBqndwVdnrc and embedded below.)

At the same time, a separate team led by Ralf Britz at the Natural History Museum of London independently examined the bone structure of Kryptoglanis using a technique of visualizing the skeleton called clearing and staining – a chemical method in which the fish’s soft tissues are rendered as clear as glass and bones and cartilage are stained in contrasting colors. This team’s description of the structures was published in the March 2014 issue of the journal Ichthyological Exploration of Freshwaters.

“There was an amazing congruence between the results,” Lundberg said. “Neither of us was way out.”

Neither could figure out which other catfishes Kryptoglanis was most closely related to, although Britz’s team chose to assign it to its own new taxonomic family within the order of catfishes.

This fish just one of many unresolved branches on the catfish family tree, in a section where even DNA evidence has thus far proven unhelpful. Subterranean species like Kryptoglanis tend to have dramatically different DNA sequences from one another and from their open-water relatives, making it difficult to identify their evolutionary histories.

“It continues to be a puzzle,” Lundberg said.