Hello It Me

Next, "die" does mean "day," though nominative singular is "dies," i.e. "dies irae." It could be conjugated "die" if it was in ablative or locative case, but "die ad die" would mean something more like "day to day." "Ad" is in a "to" direction and "ab" is from, i.e. "ab urbis," and ablative case is used to indicate the movement of a thing. In short, "by" is not really a way to translate "ad"; we might want "per" here? (Through, by means of, etc.)

Rocky: "why Grace so 🎶🎶🎶 stupid. Question."

Grace: "Excuse me buddy?"

Rocky: "...🎶🎶🎶 stupid. Hmm. Need word."

Grace: "...what does it mean?"

Rocky: "Meant add strength to word. But some Eridians think also .....rude"

Grace: "So a swear word. I'm not giving you the human word for that."

Rocky: "Why not. Question."

Grace: "Because this human thinks they are rude too."

140 MILLION YEARS BACK.

If you don't know how far that is, that's basically the start of the cretaceous. Let me simplify that for you even further. Chimpanzees and humans seperated, what, 5 or 6 million years ago?

This is basically like if humans could hybridise with THESE THINGS.

This is the sort of thing that should be impossible. They used those eggs to be ABSOLUTELY 100% SURE NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN.

And then THEY GOT FISH OUT OF IT.

Like. You can quite clearly understand why they didn't think anything would happen. WE ARE MORE RELATED TO BLUE WHALES THAN THESE THINGS.

THE AMERICAN PADDLEFISH AND THE STURGEON ARE SO COMPLETELY UNRELATED THAT THIS IS NOT PLAYING GOD. IF ANYTHING THIS IS AN ACT OF GOD.

THE SCIENTISTS HAD NO BLAME IN THIS BECAUSE NOTHING LIKE THIS HAD EVER HAPPENED BEFORE

THESE THINGS, FOR HYBRIDS, HAD A REALLY HIGH SURVIVAL RATING. LIKE 70% OF THEM SURVIVED.

To put that into perspective, getting a blue whale and a squirrel and trying to hybridise them is more sensible, and that wouldn't produce anything but getting you banned from science. Most animals that aren't plants can barely hybridise two degrees away from each other.

BUT THESE TWO ENTIRELY UNRELATED FISH create PERFECTLY HEALTHY HYBRIDS.

And this is a Russian Sturgeon:

(glances at fish)

before the sturddlefish, a purple squale would have seemed more likely- and since that's ridiculous and obviously no one would think that's possible except as a joke, that should speak to HOW impossible this situation seemed, and why they thought obviously this will be perfectly fine. If you took squirrel eggs (the gamete) and tried to use whale sperm to fertilize them, you could reasonably expect that to not work. That should be a good control. The eggs would definitely not actually be fertilized, and even if sperm somehow made it into the egg and some kind of development started, you would expect them to not make it to term and definitely not make a whole ass new animal that's perfectly fine actually.

anyway did you know there's another one of these? it's not as easy to appreciate as the fish since it's a kind of animal most people have never heard of but i have immeasurable affection for them so please be nice to them

there's two species of lancelet, branchiostoma floridae and asymmetron lucayanum, whose last common ancestor was between 120 million years ago and 160 million years ago and can nevertheless interbreed:

holland et al, 2015. hybrids between the florida amphioxus (branchiostoma floridae) and the bahamas lancelet (asymmetron lucayanum): developmental morphology and chromosome counts. the biological bulletin, volume 228, issue 1, pages 13–24. found at https://doi.org/10.1086/BBLv228n1p13. paywalled but there's researchgate and sci-hub to the rescue.

they don't actually live that far apart; b floridae lives in florida and a lucayanum lives in the bahamas. but that is a long way for a lancelet, who is the size of a grain of rice…

i could explain here how lancelets are among the cutest and most perfect creatures ever but i think it is important not to stray from the point. lancelets are more or less what your common ancestor with hagfish looked like. or for that matter your common ancestor with tunicates. back then you hadn't evolved a spine yet, just a rubbery rod, and you used your gills for filter feeding instead of breathing. and you didn't have blood, just dissolved food. and you didn't have fins except for a bit on your long tail. and you didn't have eyes, just eyespots, so you occasionally bumped into things

anyhow for some reason breeding these two lancelets together blends. like lancelets are a hardcoded animal from world testing. or like you're not mixing two different animals, just mixing lancelet with lancelet

the paper downplays it, but like the sturddlefish, this was also accidental. they kept them in the same tank, because why bother separating them if they can't interbreed? that way you have to set up less tanks. then they tried to do anatomical studies on them, and after some frustration that their studies didn't make sense, found the hybrids

visually it is unfortunately not very impressive. here's a two day old b floridae:

and a three day old a lucayanum:

(this one hasn't had its eyespot grow in yet.) and here's two hybrids, with a b floridae mother and an a lucayanum father:

the one on the left is three days old, and the one on the right is 24 days old.

the weird part in this case is that the hybrids tend to stop growing at a couple days old? (4 days if the mother is b floridae, 2 if it's a lucayanum.) you can see that the two hybrids in the last picture are pretty much the same. that's not supposed to happen

the two species have different amounts of chromosomes. 38 for b floridae, and 34 for a lucayanum. the hybrids in either direction have 36 chromosomes, but the researchers didn't check which ones. it's a funny mix and match. imagine half your chromosomes coming from a platypus, and the effect being that you cannot advance to adulthood

the hybrids died early but then so did the purebreds so there's little to conclude from it. lancelet husbandry is a difficult field, after all. (that paper cites this one but incorrectly gives a time depth of 40 million years instead of 120–140 million)