Papa salmon plus mama salmon equals … baby trout?
Japanese researchers put a new spin on surrogate parenting as they engineered one fish species to produce another, in a quest to preserve endangered fish.
Idaho scientists begin the next big step next month, trying to produce a type of salmon highly endangered in that state — the sockeye — this time using more plentiful trout as surrogate parents.
The Tokyo University inventors dubbed their method “surrogate broodstocking.” They injected sterile Asian masu salmon with sperm-growing cells from rainbow trout — and watched the salmon grow up to produce trout.
The success, published in the journal Science, is capturing the attention of conservation specialists. Captive breeding of endangered fish is difficult, and attempts to freeze fish eggs for posterity so far have failed. [ ap ]
