Eye blinking is part of our body’s natural response. This process helps keep our eyes clean, moist, and protected. Biologists have recently been studying how blinking evolved from the past to the present.
There are several species of fish that do not exhibit eye blinking. A research paper has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. High-speed video and scanning technology have been used in this study.
Research shows that non-blinking fish have the muscles necessary to blink. For billions of years, life on Earth existed only in water. About 375 million years ago, some fish began to move from water to dry land.
From water to land, the world was challenging and full of new opportunities. But the eye needed to evolve to see well on land. A dry eye may initially be a vision problem, but it develops over time.
Mammals such as birds and four-limbed animals such as reptiles evolved to blink. As a result, the eyes are protected and it is possible to see well on the ground. Although fish live in water in modern times, they still have the ability to blink. Scientists believe that this evolution of fish took place long before moving to land.
Research has been conducted on a fish called mudskipper. It is able to walk short distances on land without water. Mudskippers can blink even when not in the water. So this gives an idea of how land animals can blink.
The blinking function in mudskipper fish works well as in humans. While in the water, this species of fish blinked its eyes frequently. However, the blinking system of a quadruped is quite different from that of a mudskipper fish.