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Home: Middle East: Oman: Mountains: Hoota:
garra barreimiae
“How’s business?” I asked, and hazarded /
a motherly smile to keep from crying out: /
Are you content to conduct your life /
as a cliché and, what’s worse,
T S Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922
But perhaps the most enchanting feature of the subterranean tank is the fact that even its dark recesses hold life. Here, where there has never been sunlight, lives a blind fish that has little use of eyes or pigment. Garra barreimiae is unique to this ecosystem, and, even more extraordinarily, lives off a by-product of oil. The oil occurs naturally in the water and breaks down to form algae that the fish eat. Such are the delights of living in the dark.
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