Fish That Walk on Land: 7 Species and How They Do It

Several living fish really do move across land. The best known are mudskippers, which skip on their front fins; the walking catfish and climbing perch, which wriggle between ponds; the northern snakehead; the Pacific leaping blenny; and the tiny mangrove rivulus, which can live out of water for weeks. None of them walks on legs; each uses fins, the whole body or the gill covers, and each has a way to breathe air. Field & Stream and Wikipedia's Walking fish article are the sources for the list below.

• Mudskippers (25 species): Wikipedia calls them probably the best land-adapted fish alive. Their pectoral fins have two movable joints and work like crutches; they can leap up to 61 cm (24 in), live in burrows on mudflats and spend up to three quarters of their life on land. They reach up to 30 cm (12 in). See our goby page; mudskippers are gobies.
• Walking catfish (Clarias batrachus): wriggles along with help from its pectoral fin spines. Field & Stream says it can cover 3/4 mile on land and survive 18 hours out of water. See Clarias catfish.
• Climbing perch (Anabas testudineus): breathes air with a labyrinth organ; Field & Stream says it stays out of water for 6 to 10 hours, can walk several hundred metres, and lasts longer buried in mud. Wikipedia says climbing gouramis move jerkily, propped on the edges of their gill covers.
• Northern snakehead (Channa argus): Field & Stream describes a 'soldier crawl' and says it breathes air and can survive days out of water. See snakehead fish.
• Pacific leaping blenny (Alticus arnoldorum): about 3 inches long; it curls its tail and springs many body lengths, and lives for hours out of water in the splash zone around Guam (Field & Stream).
• Mangrove rivulus (Kryptolebias marmoratus): Wikipedia says it can spend up to 66 consecutive days out of water, usually inside fallen logs, breathing through its skin, and moves on land with a 'tail flip'. Most are 1 to 3.8 cm long.
• Epaulette shark: walks over rocks and sand on muscular fins and can survive several hours out of water (Wikipedia).

Walking is the easy part; breathing is the hard one. The fish above use three tricks, alone or together:

• Air-breathing organs: the climbing perch's labyrinth organ pulls oxygen from air (Field & Stream).
• Skin breathing: mudskippers absorb oxygen through the skin and the lining of the mouth, and the mangrove rivulus breathes through its skin while out of water (Wikipedia).
• Carried water: mudskippers keep enlarged gill chambers with trapped water and air so the gills stay moist (Wikipedia).

The catch is that these fish must stay damp. Field & Stream notes that mudskippers can even die if kept underwater too long, which shows how far they have shifted toward air.

Some fish walk without ever leaving the water. Wikipedia lists frogfish and handfish, which walk along the seafloor on their fins, batfish, and the tripodfish, which stands on three long fins on the ocean bottom while it hunts. African lungfish also 'walk' along the bottom using their fins much as land vertebrates use limbs.

The best-known answer is Tiktaalik, a lobe-finned fish found in 2004 on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, and dated to about 375 million years ago (Wikipedia). It was the earliest known fish with a neck, and its fins had a sturdy inner skeleton with wrist-like joints inside a web of fin rays. The largest specimens reached about 2.75 m (9 ft). Wikipedia describes Tiktaalik as a transitional form between fish and four-legged animals. Its living lobe-finned relatives are the coelacanths and lungfish.

The ability to cross land helps some of these fish spread where they are not wanted:

• Walking catfish: Field & Stream says it was first reported in Florida in Broward County in 1967, now lives in south and central Florida, including canals, ponds and even parking lots, and is illegal to transport alive in Florida. Cold limits its spread.
• Northern snakehead: found in Maryland in 2002, now established in the Potomac River system and reported as far as Massachusetts and California (Field & Stream).
• Climbing perch: invasive in Australia, where its spiny fins have choked native birds that swallowed it (Field & Stream).

If you find one of these out of the water, do not move it anywhere alive. Take a photo and report it to your state wildlife agency. FishLens can identify it from the photo.

No. The axolotl, Ambystoma mexicanum, is sold alongside aquarium fish (LiveAquaria lists axolotls among its freshwater categories), but National Geographic classifies it as an amphibian, a salamander. It lives wild only in Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco near Mexico City and is critically endangered.

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