Salmon give birth to trout, suspect paternity : Pure Pedantry

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Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NYC getting a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience. He holds a BS and MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. If a volcano were to erupt Pompei-style in Central Park, his body would be preserved in a scoliotic posture over his lab desk. Archeaologists would later conclude that he spent most of his day training rats to perform tricks, until he went blind building electrical equipment by hand using a dissecting microscope. But, still, he died happy...because science is cool.

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Salmon give birth to trout, suspect paternity

Category: Haha, a funny • Sex
Posted on: September 14, 2007 12:37 PM, by NotoriousLTP

Why must scientists play with salmons' heads like this:

Researchers have succeeded in making salmon couples give birth to trout -- using a technique that they argue could help to preserve rare species of fish.
Goro Yoshizaki and his colleagues at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology in Japan had previously shown that male salmon could be injected with cells from closely-related trout to produce viable trout sperm. When the sperm were introduced to trout eggs, healthy trout offspring were produced...

Now the researchers have taken the work a step further, showing that salmon can be not only the biological fathers but also the mothers of trout offspring. The new work, published in Science, shows how two sterile masu salmon (Oncorhynchus masou) can together produce nothing but healthy rainbow trout (O. mykiss).

The technique relies on the injection of trout spermatagonia -- the early, stem-cell stage of sperm -- into salmon embryos, so that the growing salmon produce trout sperm and eggs. The technique could be very useful for storing back-up genetic material of different fish species that are today under threat, because spermatagonia can be easily cryopreserved, says David Penman, a fish geneticist at the University of Stirling, UK.

Male salmon: "Honey, I have noticed that all of our children appear to be trout?"
Female salmon: "Yes, dear. I had noticed that as well."
Male salmon: "Do you have anything you want to tell me about that..."
Female salmon: "Um...no...can't think of anything..."
Male salmon: "Maybe you want to comment about how the mailman is a trout?"

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Comments

wouldn't that be "mailfish"?

Posted by: kate | September 16, 2007 11:50 PM

Umm... Jake... how can the male and female salmon know what their offspring are? Aren't salmon (even the O. masou species greatly semelparous (i.e., they die after reproducing)? In any case, aren't these two species both part of the same Oncorhynchus genus? (Not to berate their work, of course.)

Posted by: Umlud | September 17, 2007 10:17 AM