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Meet the Sturddlefish

Harry Leferts

Harry Leferts

Suave Shadow Cabal Kaiju
This is... odd. Very, very odd. Long story short, they somehow bred two fish that should never have been able to create offspring, yet did.
Article:
Oops.

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Hungarian scientists say they accidentally played God with two endangered species of fish, breeding a Russian sturgeon with an American paddlefish to create something the world has never seen before: the sturddlefish.

The sturddlefish's parents are two extremely old, so-called "fossil fish" species that developed in different parts of the world and have never been bred before. However, they do have distant genetic connections as members of the order of Acipenseriformes, a broad category of ray-like fish that includes paddlefish and sturgeons.

The American paddlefish has a long, sensitive snout and typically eats plankton and microscopic plants, while the spiny-backed Russian sturgeon is known for devouring small fish and crustaceans found on the bottoms of rivers and lakes. The Russian sturgeon is also famous for its eggs, which make for delicious caviar and, apparently, viable Frankenfish.




The Russian Sturgeon is at top and the American Paddlefish at the bottom with the hybrids in the middle.
 
Is it bad that I'm wondering what it taste like after being cooked with butter and a bit of rosemary?....
 
:confused::facepalm:
While it's an amazing bit of cross-breeding work, I have to wonder how much vodka was involved in the decision to attempt this experiment in the first place? Are they trying to improve the sturgeon's range of living conditions or something?

That being said, I have to agree with @Itsune, if this turns out to be a stable species, I want a taste test.
 
I wonder if it can also be used for Caviar?
And if it can eat a wider variety of food than both its parents?
 
Trufla said:
:confused::facepalm:
While it's an amazing bit of cross-breeding work, I have to wonder how much vodka was involved in the decision to attempt this experiment in the first place? Are they trying to improve the sturgeon's range of living conditions or something?
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They were attempting to get the sturgeon to reproduce asexually via gynogenesis, which is exposing the egg to sperm that cannot fertilize it and causes it to start dividing as if fertilized.
 
Harry Leferts said:
They were attempting to get the sturgeon to reproduce asexually via gynogenesis, which is exposing the egg to sperm that cannot fertilize it and causes it to start dividing as if fertilized.
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Why do I hear a certain individual from Jurassic Park in my mind at this point? Granted, this hybrid is probably a mule, but there are a few cases where mules proved fertile, too. A new species might be useful with the way we seem to be killing off things.
 
So what do they eat? Paddlefish are filter-feeders and sturgeon aren't.
 
Man, the Russians sure are tripping on something fierce when they decided to do this.
 
Harry Leferts said:
They were attempting to get the sturgeon to reproduce asexually via gynogenesis, which is exposing the egg to sperm that cannot fertilize it and causes it to start dividing as if fertilized.
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Ordinarily you need a decent justification for creating genetically modified organisms in the lab.

If your statement is correct, that sounds like this is a total accident which could not be easily foreseen; it would be like exposing female dogs to mouse sperm and somehow getting offspring out of the deal.

Regardless, unless there's a good reason to continue breeding sturddlefish, I'd rather it be dropped out of an abundance of caution. And no, "checking how they taste with butter and a bit of rosemary" is not a good enough reason.
 
Given that there are native spieces sturgeons that exist along paddlefish in the US that this even happened is even more surprising this happened.
 
Starman4308 said:
Ordinarily you need a decent justification for creating genetically modified organisms in the lab.

If your statement is correct, that sounds like this is a total accident which could not be easily foreseen; it would be like exposing female dogs to mouse sperm and somehow getting offspring out of the deal.

Regardless, unless there's a good reason to continue breeding sturddlefish, I'd rather it be dropped out of an abundance of caution. And no, "checking how they taste with butter and a bit of rosemary" is not a good enough reason.
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It's not genetically modified, it's just a run of the mill hybrid like a mule, a liger, or a one of those apples that taste like a pear. No modifying genetics at all.
 
king208 said:
It's not genetically modified, it's just a run of the mill hybrid like a mule, a liger, or a one of those apples that taste like a pear. No modifying genetics at all.
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Personally, I'd argue that counts as genetic modification, as well as many other efforts, with "transgenic" being the more accurate word for what most people think of with "GMO".

That said, it's semantics, and the rules are generally pointed at targeted, small scale, planned gene insertions rather than mixing entire genomes together, because obviously the first is playing God.
 
Starman4308 said:
Ordinarily you need a decent justification for creating genetically modified organisms in the lab.
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I'm not sure you would. So long as you are treating the resulting organism with whatever level of ethical concern is appropriate (a genetically modified dog needs different care than a genetically modified protist) it doesn't seem especially morally fraught.
 
Starman4308 said:
Personally, I'd argue that counts as genetic modification, as well as many other efforts, with "transgenic" being the more accurate word for what most people think of with "GMO".

That said, it's semantics, and the rules are generally pointed at targeted, small scale, planned gene insertions rather than mixing entire genomes together, because obviously the first is playing God.
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If this is an example of a GMO organism so is every banana that has ever existed. Bananas are not inherently GMOs, but they are all hybrids like is this abomination of a fish. :V

To be clear no genes were altered in any way by humans, there was no modification of anything at all. Just perfectly natural sperm and eggs that normally wouldn't ever naturally interact due to geography mushed together that wound up with a surprisingly viable fish.

The term genetically modified organism really should require some actual modification of genes somewhere along the line. In conclusion Mules are not GMOs.
 
mesonoxian said:
I'm not sure you would. So long as you are treating the resulting organism with whatever level of ethical concern is appropriate (a genetically modified dog needs different care than a genetically modified protist) it doesn't seem especially morally fraught.
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I'm running on half-remembered scientific ethics classes from years ago (these days, I do computer simulations and do not deal with transgenic organisms), but I was under the impression that transgenic organisms in labs require at least some justification these days. I forget whether that also goes for other forms of genetic experimentation. I could be wrong about needing justification for

king208 said:
If this is an example of a GMO organism so is every banana that has ever existed. Bananas are not inherently GMOs, but they are all hybrids like is this abomination of a fish. :V

To be clear no genes were altered in any way by humans, there was no modification of anything at all. Just perfectly natural sperm and eggs that normally wouldn't ever naturally interact due to geography mushed together that wound up with a surprisingly viable fish.

The term genetically modified organism really should require some actual modification of genes somewhere along the line. In conclusion Mules are not GMOs.
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Indeed; bananas, wheat (a hexaploid freak hybrid!) and all sorts of other organisms are GMO, with modifications far more substantial than a single transgene.

That's a lot of what bugs me about "anti-GMO" nonsense; crops we eat every day have been engineered far more heavily by selective breeding than by insertion of a transgene to create a transgenic organism. It's just that one form of genetic modification (selective breeding) is already accepted where another form (transgene addition) involves scary test tubes.

It's part of why one of my old Botany professors hated how "GMO" was used in modern parlance, and instead used "transgenic" to refer to the scary-test-tube plants.

Admittedly, some recombinant/transgenic lab organisms do have potential consequences (e.g. experimental pathogen strains used to investigate the behavior of wild pathogens), but those are generally in higher biosafety level laboratories for good reason, and not out in the fields.
 
The real holy grail would be creating a sturgeon that can be induced to lay its eggs without compromising their usefulness as caviar, thus allowing us to harvest caviar without either piscine C-sections or killing the breeding population.
 
Starman4308 said:
I'm running on half-remembered scientific ethics classes from years ago (these days, I do computer simulations and do not deal with transgenic organisms), but I was under the impression that transgenic organisms in labs require at least some justification these days. I forget whether that also goes for other forms of genetic experimentation. I could be wrong about needing justification for


Indeed; bananas, wheat (a hexaploid freak hybrid!) and all sorts of other organisms are GMO, with modifications far more substantial than a single transgene.

That's a lot of what bugs me about "anti-GMO" nonsense; crops we eat every day have been engineered far more heavily by selective breeding than by insertion of a transgene to create a transgenic organism. It's just that one form of genetic modification (selective breeding) is already accepted where another form (transgene addition) involves scary test tubes.

It's part of why one of my old Botany professors hated how "GMO" was used in modern parlance, and instead used "transgenic" to refer to the scary-test-tube plants.

Admittedly, some recombinant/transgenic lab organisms do have potential consequences (e.g. experimental pathogen strains used to investigate the behavior of wild pathogens), but those are generally in higher biosafety level laboratories for good reason, and not out in the fields.
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Your definition is not what the term is generally understood to mean by the public, but at least it's consistent. ;)
 
Starman4308 said:
Personally, I'd argue that counts as genetic modification, as well as many other efforts, with "transgenic" being the more accurate word for what most people think of with "GMO".
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In the case that that counts as genetic modification, humans have been doing genetic modification for ten thousand years. That fucking genie is not going back in the bottle.
 
Starman4308 said:
If your statement is correct, that sounds like this is a total accident which could not be easily foreseen; it would be like exposing female dogs to mouse sperm and somehow getting offspring out of the deal.
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Isn't that how Chihuahuas originated? Because they look like some one tried to breed a dog with a rat.
 
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