AS Alice in Wonderland said, things gets "curiouser and curioser" and she was "so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English".
Alice might well have been tongue-tied had she come across the see-through goldfish which a correspondent tells me Japanese scientists have recently developed to follow the see-through frogs developed in 2007. This planet, always a wonderland of nature, now, more than ever, becomes a wonderland of science too.
Transparent frogs were developed in order to preclude the blood-and-guts dissection of frogs in schools, and the taking of frogs from the wild for that purpose. These specially-bred frogs, kept in vivariums and taken out for biology class, would save schools the cost of buying frogs while letting students observe organs, blood vessels and eggs under the skin without employing scalpels. Also, as their developer, Professor Masayuki Sumida at Hiroshima University’s Institute for Amphibian Biology, says "Transparent frogs make it easier and cheaper to observe the development and progress of cancer, the growth and aging of internal organs, and the effects of chemicals on organs."
Derived from the common brown Japanese frog, they are transparent even as tadpoles and organ changes can be observed as they develop. So commercially valuable are they that patents have been applied for. However, they reproduce for only one generation. The grandchildren do not survive.
While such advances are laudable, nature, ironically, seems to have done it already. New Scientist of January 15 reports that scientists lately discovered a so-called ‘glass frog’ that has a transparent chest in the cloud forests of Ecuador. The beating heart can be clearly seen. Thirty new species of frog, along with new reptiles and insects, were found in an area catastrophically threatened by deforestation and climate change. How many more species invaluable to our own survival will be lost before we can harvest the knowledge they can teach us? It is our blood on the chainsaws.
Meanwhile, innovative see-through goldfish were developed by a Professor Yutaka Tamaru at Mie University. "You don’t have to cut it open." he says, "You can see a tiny brain above the goldfish’s black eyes. As it grows bigger, you can watch its whole life."
If pigment is all that conceals our organs, the breeding-out of human pigment would make diagnosis of physical or mental malfunction a piece of cake. However, our transparent ET-like descendants would have to wear constant protection against sunlight. The threat of terrorists concealing weapons beneath the skin would be obviated – but we would hope that, before reaching that advanced stage, we’d have evolved beyond terrorism.
As for our non-transparent but disappearing Irish frogs, my correspondent tells me she recently saw adults swimming under the ice, with males embracing females as if waiting for them to spawn. "Or maybe they were holding together just to stay warm!" Here in west Cork, while the nights have been frosty we have enjoyed 14 days without rain. The sun shines and the sky is blue. These mornings, when we step out, a robin is singing, daffodils and snowdrops are opening and gorgeous crocuses, deep purple and bright yellow, have popped up in places we certainly didn’t sow them.
Near where the ravens nest on the Seven Heads, and where our poor old dog came a cropper and lost her life two years ago, I climbed down to the sea and sat with my back against the cliff face. The rocks are flat as the slate bed of a billiard table, and incline at about 70º – they are, one might say, made for leaning against, sitting or standing. They catch the full force of the sun and are warm as toast by eleven in the morning. The view is magnificent, with the Old Head of Kinsale off to the east, the lighthouse white and shining against the clear blue of sky and water. Family members tell me it’s been nonstop rain in Andalucía, miserable in Hertfordshire and minus 11 at noon in the Czech Republic. How lucky we are!
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, March 08, 2010
