Scientists have accidentally created a new hybrid species of fish called sturddlefish. It’s a cross between an American paddlefish and a Russian sturgeon. How did this happen?
The two fish species were not likely to pair. They don’t live close to each other —the sturgeon is native to Russia and nearby regions while the paddlefish lives in the U.S., in the Mississippi River Valley. They don’t eat the same things; sturgeon is carnivorous and likes to eat small fish and crustaceans, while the paddlefish filters zooplankton from water. Both species are large and belong to freshwater fish. This still doesn’t explain how they got crossed to create a new type of fish.
It happened at the Research Institute for Fisheries and Aquaculture in Hungary where scientists have been working on breeding two species of fish. However, one of them accidentally gave paddlefish sperm to sturgeon eggs which lead to hundreds of baby hybrid fish with combined attributes of their parents. If you’re interesting to learn more about the new species they created this way, a study about it has been published in Genes recently.
“We never wanted to play around with hybridization,” the co-author of the study, Dr. Attila Mozsár, told The New York Times. “It was absolutely unintentional.”
