Do Not Mess With Fish 258,

and you though fish were fun!

but it was not fun when scientists at the Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture in Hungary, who were just trying to boost production of Russian sturgeon, started experimenting, using hi-tech reproduction technology and an American sperm donor fish, and ended up with a fish that isn't supposed to exist. This story brings to mind two pertinent quotes from Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park: "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should," and "Life, uh, finds a way." what could possibly go wrong when doing this with fish? above in picture A, a normal Russian sturgeon, (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii), let researcher Attila Mozsár described the experiment and what happened next,

Russian sturgeons (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii) are critically endangered and also economically important: They're the source of much of the world's caviar. These fish can grow to more than 7 feet long (2.1 meters), living on a diet of molluscs and crustaceans. American paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) filter-feed off of zooplankton in the waters of the Mississippi River drainage basin, where water from the Mississippi and its tributaries drain into. They, too, are large, growing up to 8.5 feet (2.5 m) long. Like the sturgeon, the have a slow rate of growth and development puts them at risk of overfishing. They've also lost habitat to dams in the Mississippi drainage, according to the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. The two species last shared a common ancestor 184 million years ago, according to the Times.

Nevertheless, they were able to breed —— much to the surprise of Mozsár and his colleagues. The researchers were trying to breed Russian sturgeon in captivity through a process called gynogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction. In gynogenesis, a sperm triggers an egg's development but fails to fuse to the egg's nucleus. That means its DNA is not part of the resulting offspring, which develop solely from maternal DNA. The researchers were using American paddlefish sperm for the process, but something unexpected happened. The sperm and egg fused, resulting in offspring with both sturgeon and paddlefish genes.

above B, C, of the hybrid offspring, D is a normal paddlefish, (Polyodon spathula), all looking quite different from each other, about 100 of these hybrids, which the scientists call sturddlefish, now live at the institute, and it is not clear whether they can reproduce on their own, rather like a horse/donkey cross where the result a mule typically can not reproduce, you can read more about the sturddlefish at Live Science, image credit: Jenő Káldy et al/CC BY 4.0, it is starting to look like a Frankenfish is possible!