Remember the good old days when salmon would court one another in the eddies of rivers? After a long song and dance, the females would flap their tales and dig their nests by moving the gravel (some as big as oranges) before releasing thousands of pea-sized orange eggs for the chosen male to fertilize them. Voila! Baby fish.
But more and more salmonids face extinction. Often, we preserve the genetic material from endangered species by freezing it. But salmon eggs are to big and fatty to freeze. So researchers have figured out a way to produce sperm and eggs of rainbow trout within a more common species of salmon. It has a feeling of Mad Scientist to me, but the article is published in this week's Science and a 'lite' version is in the New York Times.
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good old days when salmon would court one another in the eddies of rivers? After a long song and dance, the females would flap their tales and dig their nests by moving the gravel (some as big as oranges) before releasing thousands of pea-sized orange eggs for the chosen male to fertilize them.