I've been looking forward to seeing these little jewels in print since I saw Kuratani talk about them at the SICB meetings in January. Hagfish are wonderfully slimy jawless chordates that have been difficult to raise in the lab—although if you poke a whale corpse rotting in the cold deeps you'll find them swarming everywhere. The Kuratani lab has managed to keep animals of the species Eptatretus burgeri alive and healthy in a lab aquarium maintained at cold temperatures (16°C), and has even had success in breeding them. That object to the right is a single hagfish egg, brown and leathery-shelled and surprisingly big—it's an inch and a half long!
They collected 92 eggs, and then another limitation emerged: it took 5-7 months for embryos to develop in a small number of the eggs. Hagfish aren't going to be your typical fast-developing model system, I'm afraid, but they are extraordinarily cool animals, and it's good to see work beginning on them.
Continue reading "Hagfish embryos!" (on Pharyngula)
4 Comments
the pro from dover · 6 April 2007
if I am not mistaken when you buy fine leather goods made of "eelskin" it is actually hagfish that this comes from. I have seen hagfish on display only at the aquarium in Vancouver, so they're uncommon to see in captivity under any circumstance. The pro sez check 'em out.
fnxtr · 7 April 2007
pfd:
How'd you get past all the No Hagfish In Captivity protesters???
the pro from dover · 7 April 2007
It's Canada, nothing but backbacon eating toque wearing moosehead drinking bilingual socialized medicine loving incisor missing defensemen.
bob · 2 May 2007
boring