Bizarre Egg/Fish Thing

[Art]

Tschai: Perhaps this is a common thing-but this is just the first time it has ever been discovered.

Oh com'on! This is not common by any means at all!

***

The only soft chiken-egg-sized egg i had ever seen are tortule eggs.

Ben: The major flaw with the duck-eating-fertilised-fish-eggs theory is that the minnows were ADULTS, minnow fry are miniscule and I doubt that they coud survive and grow to adulthood inside a duck egg!

Ok... er... well this is a good point. I guess they cannot live inside of the egg, eating the egg, to adulthood. That is rediculous of course. So I still go for the hoax solution: Somebody put them there.

Please keep us posted on your lecturer finds.

 

[the rabbit]

The group found the duck egg in a small pond on a field trip to the French Alps and noticed something moving inside it.

When they cracked open the shell, three live minnows were inside.
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MY question here is Why did they open it,did they open it straight away..if so not very professional of biologists is it.

 

[brainwave]

I work with birds, australian zebra finches to be exact and they do become egg bound occasionally. Glycerol is used to make it easier for the finch to expel it.


I tried to imagine a 3d way for the minnows to get in there. I know the eggs are permeable to oxygen and very small molecules. There are experiments where substances are injected into or extracted from eggs and they go through the incubation process just fine. I thought that if someone injected a solution with fertilized minnow eggs into the duck egg but the molecules are too large to make it I think. I also thought that maybe the fertilized egg solution was injected in the duck's reproductive tract between ovulation and pre-calcification. Don't know of such a delivery mechanism for getting a larger molecules into the egg and if anyone would know, it would be the biologists. If they can inject hormones and other substances into bird embryos in ovo then who knows what else can be done? I just have a limited knowledge of the what else. I can imagine the minnows developing inside because they could feed on the duck egg yolk and albumen until it is done. In some species the fry feed on the dead parent body so why not bird yolk?
Maybe they were moving around vigorously because they were out of food and wanted out of the egg. They were afterall in a semi liquid environment with access to oxygen and food so I can see them developing to adulthood, though with some deficiencies. What would be interesting is to see tests done on the minnows to see the differences between them and those that develop in a normal environment.

Ingrid

 

[Ben]

The group found the duck egg in a small pond on a field trip to the French Alps and noticed something moving inside it.

When they cracked open the shell, three live minnows were inside.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MY question here is Why did they open it,did they open it straight away..if so not very professional of biologists is it.

Well I doubt they were expecting to find anything other than a duckling struggling to break the shell, certainly not this! It was probably found by the students (not always 'professional' in my experience) since they form the majority of the people in the area, and they are the ones conducting experiments outside. I'm fairly sure that this egg came from the duck pond near the Gite, as I remember it. The lab equipment available in this remote area is basic and is more geared towards behavioural studies than detailed analysis.

nktulloch - it is conceivable that minnow fry would receive sufficient oxygen and food to develop within the egg but as adults it seems unlikely that they would be able to obtain sufficient oxygen (although they would not be expending much energy).

 

[Hermit Brad]

This whole thing is questionable. Interesting, but questionable.

 

[tschai]

Tschai: Perhaps this is a common thing-but this is just the first time it has ever been discovered.

Oh com'on! This is not common by any means at all!

***

The only soft chiken-egg-sized egg i had ever seen are tortule eggs.

Ben: The major flaw with the duck-eating-fertilised-fish-eggs theory is that the minnows were ADULTS, minnow fry are miniscule and I doubt that they coud survive and grow to adulthood inside a duck egg!

Ok... er... well this is a good point. I guess they cannot live inside of the egg, eating the egg, to adulthood. That is rediculous of course. So I still go for the hoax solution: Somebody put them there.

Please keep us posted on your lecturer finds.

I said "Perhaps" it is a common thing-not a definite it is common thing. How do we know this kind of thing does not happen more often than not? Can we for certain? No.There are a good many things which have been found that are supposed to be impossible-such as bacteria living under conditions that were thought hostile to all life. We cannot take anything for granted-we find every day in our world things which behave in manner which is thought to be impossible or highly improbable-do we attribute these things to "glitches" in the Matrix or just to our monumental ignorance of the true nature of our reality? Probably a dose of both. Like my statement about the eggs being soft- a half dozen people tell me I am wrong and that is so. Ignorance.

Whether the egg thing is real or not it has provoked thought about how this could occur- a lesson as the C's might say (and a monumental waste of time by others) so it has proved useful in that aspect.

 

[brainwave]

Ok so maybe the adults would not survive. It is strange no matter how you look at it. Ingrid

 

[Beau]

This whole thing is questionable. Interesting, but questionable.

Again, more noise. To say it is questionable and not provide any elaboration on this point is just being a distraction from the thread.

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