Ecology and Life History
African and South American lungfish are capable of surviving seasonal drying out of their habitats by burrowing into mud and estivating throughout the dry season. Changes in physiology allow it to slow its metabolism to as little as 1/60th of the normal metabolic rate, and protein waste is converted from ammonia to less-toxic urea (normally, lungfish excrete nitrogenous waste as ammonia directly into the water).
Burrowing is seen in at least one group of fossil lungfish, the Gnathorhizidae. It has been proposed both that burrowing is plesiomorphic for lungfish, and that gnathorhizids are directly ancestral to modern Lepidosireniformes, but the similarity possibly is simply due to convergent or parallel evolution.
Lungfish can be extremely long-lived. The Queensland lungfish at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago has been part of the permanent live collection since 1933.
Read more about this topic: Lungfish
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