Fishy miscegenation

September 15, 2007 1:57 AM

More cuckoo than cuckoos: mate two salmon, get a... trout! Just give the parents a sperm transplant. And the sperm stem cells work in females too:

...Injecting the male cells into female salmon sometimes worked, too, prompting five female salmon to ovulate trout eggs.... The stem cells were still primitive enough to switch gears from sperm-producers to egg-producers when they wound up inside female organs....

posted by orthogonality (10 comments total)

Yeah, uh huh, and what sort of periodicals do we have to stock the sperm-bank "waiting rooms" with? I don't want my tax dollars going for subscriptions of Playkoi, Smeltsmut and Mullethead.
posted by rob511 at 3:22 AM on September 15, 2007 [2 favorites]

It's much easier to turn a trout into a salmon, or pretty damn close to one, by letting it out into the ocean.
posted by StickyCarpet at 5:23 AM on September 15, 2007

Playkoi, Smeltsmut and Mullethead.

Those are wicked awesome band names, dude.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:32 AM on September 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Playkoi, Smeltsmut and Mullethead

Very well played. I spit out my coffee on the keyboard upon reading this.

Then I started to over-think, as usual, and now I have these mentally tied to the article a few days back about the Japanese fisherman mating with stingrays...
posted by mystyk at 7:43 AM on September 15, 2007

Is Practical Fishkeeping a joke site? Because clicking on the link How to make your fishs (SIC) brain bigger gives you a story using the same picture with a different caption.
posted by spock at 8:24 AM on September 15, 2007

If Practical Fishkeeping isn't purposely competition for The Onion, then it is still pretty darn funny!
posted by spock at 8:26 AM on September 15, 2007

Thanks for solving a mystery for me. At my fishmonger they have signs that say in French "Saumon truité" and just "Salmon" in English. Oh, and in Quebec you can use "truite" as an insult, yay!
posted by furtive at 8:32 AM on September 15, 2007

hope they can do this with higher life forms soon...theres a LOT of species on the endangered list that could use some surrogate parents...
posted by sexyrobot at 1:05 PM on September 15, 2007

You know, big deal. I mean, trout and salmon are basically the same. What I would be interested in is if you mated to salmon and got a monkey. Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
posted by Eekacat at 3:54 PM on September 15, 2007

too to two, sheesh gimme some caffeine already
posted by Eekacat at 3:55 PM on September 15, 2007