Whenever I see this picture I think of this:
| Creature | Swims | Walks | Flies |
| -------- | ----- | ----- | ----- |
| Dog | X | X | |
| Fish | X | | |
| Bird | | X | X |
| Duck | X | X | X |
Notice how for each combination of swimming, walking and flying, there is a living creature that can do just that, with the exception of swimming and flying.
Sure there are flying fish, but they glide rather than fly. Did evolution really forget to cover this niche?
Flying fish
The fish only says it can’t walk
lungfish
Okay, but does it fly? Find me a fish that can do all three
Lungfish in a hang glider
A paraplegic seaplane pilot
Genus Chrysopelea, commonly referred to as flying snakes. Most snakes are perfectly fine swimmers, so I bet that Genus can swim as well.
I personally can’t wait for the snakenado trilogy to come out
That’s pretty cool and also quite scary!
You have to take a restrictive definition of “walk”, though.
huh, is it restrictive to say that you need some number of legs to be able to walk?
In this context, one way of looking at it is just propulsion against the ground vs. through the air or through the water. By that definition snakes, or even something like snails, are walkers.
And, for what it’s worth, even if you require legs there are edge cases. Is inchworming a kind of slither, or a kind of walk?
Loon
That actually might be the best answer! Flying fish only glide.
We need to add digging/ tunneling to the grid.
It’s called a @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world
All fish fly, just not through the air.
And, uh, The Common Loon is a creature that can swim and fly, but can’t walk. It’s feet are too far back to be able to walk.
I would vote for the gannet as able to fly and swim. They dive incredibly fast to catch fish, so they go deep, and once down there, they use their wings to swim after fish.
Great article here, with photos: https://www.naturettl.com/underwater-world-gannets/
So while it needs to get out to breathe, it can still swim underwater for as long as it has breath. Nice.
However, those feet look like they can be used to walk.Yes, that’s true. But it’s more a stumbling waddle than a walk. I looked at some videos of gannet colonies, and hardly any of the tens of thousands of birds are walking. I think like most of these diving seabirds their feet are set well back.
This is a really nice vid of a Canadian colony: https://youtu.be/g9bzWqfIu2Y
Considering that I am including a snake’s movements in “walking” in this context, I’d say that’s good enough.
Honestly though, considering 2/3 of the planet surface (and increasing) is water, one would think there would be some answer to this, but I suppose it has something to do with the physics of it…- There is a lot of vertical space in the oceans and it is possible for some, to escape to depths that other species cannot.
- As compared to that, fast vertical movement in a land area will mostly include air-time, meaning gliding will give an advantage by reducing fall damage.
- There is a sharp drop in the buoyancy from water to air, meaning that anyone wanting to move to air to escape underwater threats will require much lower body densities, which in turn make it harder to have long deep-water time and there are more resources underwater anyway
So I think that the air-time of flying-fish is optimised more than enough for such a purpose and that the birds that we see diving to get food are more from the evolutionary route of - land animals that can fly, adapting to get food from deeper into the water.
I’m finding this discussion so interesting! It’s honestly something I’d never thought of at all, but it’s an excellent exercise for my brain. Gannets have evolved special protection for their brains when diving, btw. They hit the water at 60mph. I wish we’d evolved some cooler attributes than opposable thumbs and walking upright. Gills, for example. Ah well.
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Ducks are birds
Japanese flying squids?
Here’s an australian lungfish
Here’s linda the lungfish
Only walk could be an ant, I guess, but what about only fly?
Some species of ants form rafts and “swim” on water.
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