Scientists don’t usually set out to create new species of, well, anything. Generally speaking, creating new species is thought to be a risky endeavor and, of course, there are the ethical hurdles to scale as well. It’s just not a good idea, but as Ian Malcolm once said, life finds a way, and researchers in Hungary seem to have spawned an entirely new fish hybrid completely on accident.
In a new study published in
Genes, the researchers describe how they accidentally created a hybrid of two endangered fish species: the American paddlefish and the Russian sturgeon. The team was trying to get the sturgeon species to reproduce asexually, but that’s when things went a bit off the rails.
