A lot of fish may carp about this:
Researchers in Israel, the West Bank and Germany are pursuing a project to transform female freshwater fish into males, a sex change they hope will put bigger fish on the dinner table.
But researchers aren’t working on creating gender-bending fish just for the halibut:
Male fish are larger, grow faster and weigh about a third more than females, Mutaz Qutob, a Palestinian researcher involved in the experiments, said on Tuesday.
They also don’t stop and ask directions when they get lost. AND:
As part of a project with Hebrew University and Germany’s University of Hohenheim, Qutob and his colleagues will inject food fed to newborn Nile Tilapia fish with compounds from plants found in the West Bank and often used as seasonings.
“This will have an effect on the fish’s metabolic [structure] — it may shift from female to male,” said Qutob, a chemist at al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.
“This is a very important project. We are introducing a new food source for the Palestinians.”
Scientists at Hebrew University had previously used synthetic steroids, which are regarded as less healthful, to create male fish, said Berta Sivan, a researcher at the Israeli school who helped found the project.
The steroids failed because, when people ate the fish, they grew muscles on their tongues and were expelled from the Olympics!
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.