this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Uh, my time to shine? Back in grad school I used to clone paddlefish (gynogenesis) by heat shocking freshly fertilized paddlefish eggs at the right time so that the egg is activated but the males dna is never incorporated. Paddlefish and sturgeon, while looking totally different, are actually fairly closely related (they had a common ancestor like 200 mya) and so the chemical reactions take place to get everything going. But they are also distinct enough that if the timing isn’t right and the father’s dna accidentally gets incorporated, they create these hybrids. The hybrids are important because its the only way to identify males, which this whole process is designed to exclude. The reason you’d want to do this is the production of caviar in which males are of no value and cannot be easily identified for years.
Now, I was in Kentucky, and we were breeding paddlefish (the colbert report had a segment on ‘kentucky tuna’ that the economics professor terribly tried to promote if you can find it) for the non-existent paddlefish caviar market as opposed to breeding sturgeon like they did in this study, but its the same general principle at play. The inly real difference is that unlike these hybrids that could apparently grow to juvenile or adult status, the paddlefish mother hybrids were very much dead within a week of hatching and were obviously deformed at hatching.