Curious
Edited
It is Wednesday night and dinner is done. Some of the animals have left the dining room, stuffed. Others stayed behind to hear yet another tale of minds at work. They would have preferred an evening of music and dancing but….oh well as the Wobbly Fern Duck pointed out “we might learn something fun about how minds work and anyway my feet are sore”
The animals were going to hear about fish that are curious and some that are not. In the same fish some are explorers and others of the same species can’t be bothered.
The German Land Lizard introduced the evening speaker to the Pink Inflated Elephant who was going to tell the animals remaining in the dining room about curiosity in cichlids, fish that are found in East Africa. The Elephant started the evening tale by describing the difference between cichlid fish and those that are not. The Elephant, as usual, started by insulting his audience letting them know that must of them have the curiosity of a flea but maybe what he will tell them will change all that. That was enough of a provocation to have some of the animals to get up and leave the dining hall slamming the exit door on their way out.
The Randy Striated Goat shouted out, “OK let us know about what makes some fish curious and others not. Tell us highlights and skip some of the boring details. The Elephant started by tell the animals about an experiment in which scientists recorded videos documenting the behavior of roughly 700 cichlids that were captured from Lake Tanganyika in Africa.
The Dolly Goose got up and asked the elephant “Get to the point. Are cichlids good to eat and what is a good recipe to make them tasty?”
The Elephant didn’t answer but merely stared at the Dolly Goose.
The Elephant went on and it turns out told an extraordinary story about these fish and what was learned about curiosity in general and so much more.
As you would expect there are loads of individual differences between cichlids. By analyzing the videos of these fish swimming around it was clear that some were really curious and explored and others didn’t so much of that. They then looked at all sorts of their genes and found one that was active in the curious fish but not in the others. But that is just the beginning of the story. What the scientist then did was mind blowing. They used CRISPR-Cas9, a gene-editing technology, to change the genome of the fish that weren’t curious and wah la, wah la….they became curious fish. Isn’t that wild. The animals in the dining hall were stunned by that discovery and its implication. Could they change things about them, how they behave by editing their genome. The Purple squeaker got up and shouted, “Maybe by changing your genome, the genome of an Elephant you might even be able to fly or maybe gene editing can make some of our fellow animals on our Ark less boring.