A Fish That Does Not Need the Water to Stay
The Snakehead Murrel, Channa striata, can breathe air. Not as an emergency reflex, not as a brief surface gulp, but as a sustained physiological system. When dissolved oxygen in a stagnant pond drops toward zero, which happens every dry season across peninsular India, the Murrel simply rises to the surface, opens its mouth, and keeps going. The organ that makes this possible is called the suprabranchial chamber, a pair of air-breathing cavities sitting above the gills, lined with folded, vascularised tissue that absorbs oxygen directly from the atmosphere. It is not a lung, but it functions like one well enough to keep the fish alive when nothing else survives.
