Now that we’re regularly getting small numbers of eggs and embryos every day, we thought we’d test out all the other gear by making an extended timelapse video, letting it run overnight. Unfortunately, in the wee hours of the morning, God apparently struck and slaughtered the little baby fish in its chorion, and embryo went splat. We’ll show it anyway.
This happens spontaneously a few percent of the time, a bit more frequently in embryos we’ve poked and jostled and plopped into a stressful environment, so don’t be alarmed. Nature is not kind to embryos.
It is interesting to observe the battle of the yin with the yang.
Question? Do fish foetuses go to purgatory?
I’ll admit, I jumped a bit when it popped.
Ye gods and little fishes!
Its always amazing to see things like this. Everything (interesting) in the universe is in a metastable state, from atoms, to proteins, to whole cells, to planets and to stars. Even societies are metastable. That entropic transition can be hard to predict but when it happens it can be spectacular so long as you are a witness only.
Pray harder, PZ.
You know what’d be cool in that video? Sound effects.
Huh. How does that work?
Anyone else seeing that the link behind everyone’s ‘nym points to this page, except the second one, Avicenna’s? I’m using an old version of Safari (5.06).
A tad off topic (sort of, anyway): are there any hard data on spontaneous abortions in humans?
I have poked about on the I’net and everything I have turned up seems to be “estimates” of one sort or another. I realize it is a tough question to get at but I live in hope…
Thanks
@10 – The stats I’ve found to date indicate that about 1/3 to 1/2 of impregnated embryos are aborted one way or another (usually just not embedding in the uterus). I think the monitoring requirements make this difficult to pin down precisely.
It’s pretty clear that the embryo was gay. God lovingly did it a favor by preventing it from living a life that was bound to suffer from God’s hate.
Yeah, the conservative estimate is one third; the estimate from the known distribution of chromosomal abnormalities (that is, if you find a certain percentage of aborted fetuses with trisomy 11, you can infer that there were an equal number of monosomy 11 cases that were aborted so early that they weren’t reported), you get up close to 50%. Even that is a little on the conservative side.
@ Avicenna:
No, but close:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo
This is doubtless God’s response to legalized gay marriage in the UK.
That appears to be the default now if you don’t provide your own URL, instead of not having a link at all.
I’m not normally given to sentiment when watching videos of animals, but when this fish went ‘Splat!’ I was saddened.
I think I’d started to bond with it.
This is doubtless God’s response to legalized gay marriage in the UK.
What? Never! God just needed another adorable little angelfish in Heaven…
PZ:
UW scientists are on it: trisomy removal!
http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/abstract/S1934-5909(12)00482-1
“This demonstrates the value of not being seen.”
Quantum zebrafish?
Freshwater fish go to Limnbo.
God aborted a wee baby fish! The bastard!!
He blew up good. He blew up real good.
Still refusing to take his meds, I see.
“Spontaneous Abortion Explosion” would be a good name for a metal band or at least a song.
can I have my embryos scrambled with some bacon and toast ?
Is there any correlation with cosmic ray flux?
(I worked on the development of a magnetron sputtering system that had an irritating and apparently random habit of striking a parasitic plasma in glass envelope ionisation gauge. The speculation was that the plasma was initiated by the (random) arrival of a cosmic ray)
This could be tested by repeating the experiment here
Can we get some technical details for perspective?
How long does this whole process take, what is the time between exposures?
We started the recording around noon, it blowed up probably around 6am. 2 minutes between frames.
The next video shows an embryo developing and twisting around.
Boom! Headshot!
See comment 16 – it’s a new quirk of FtB.
Full of win.
Guess you are lucky you are not in Texas with all that abortin goin on.