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spilopterus, ni siquiera los huevos tienen que ser todos de la misma madre. Esto significa que la madre que está incubando gasta sus esfuerzos en crías que no son suyas. Usando una técnica molecular conocida como análisis de microsatélites, Karen pudo identificar qué alevines de cada una de las seis puestas examinadas pertenecía a la madre que lo estaba cuidando.
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Karen Kellogg and colleagues (1998) have added a new twist to the puzzle. They had previously documented that females in several species of Lake Malawi cichlids had multiple paternity in their broods (Kellogg et al., 1995), meaning that not all eggs were fertilized by the same father. Now, she has good evidence that in at least one species, Protomelas cf. spilopterus, not all the eggs necessarily have the same mother! This means that the brooding female is wasting her parental effort on unrelated fry. Using a molecular technique known as microsatellite analysis, Karen identified which of the fry in each of six broods belonged genetically to the mother that was mouthbrooding them. In four of six cases, broods contained foreign fry. How the foreign fry get in there, particularly at early developmental stages, is still a mystery. This species lives at the rock/sand interface in Lake Malawi and typically mates at low densities, i.e., females do not spawn in clusters as in some other cichlid species. Frenzied mass spawning could explain a female occasionally picking up a foreign egg, but that doesn't appear to be happening in this case. There are still plenty of mysteries to be revealed about mouth-brooders.
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Karen Kellogg and colleagues (1998) have added a new twist to the puzzle. They had previously documented that females in several species of Lake Malawi cichlids had multiple paternity in their broods (Kellogg et al., 1995), meaning that not all eggs were fertilized by the same father. Now, she has good evidence that in at least one species, Protomelas cf. spilopterus, not all the eggs necessarily have the same mother! This means that the brooding female is wasting her parental effort on unrelated fry. Using a molecular technique known as microsatellite analysis, Karen identified which of the fry in each of six broods belonged genetically to the mother that was mouthbrooding them. In four of six cases, broods contained foreign fry. How the foreign fry get in there, particularly at early developmental stages, is still a mystery. This species lives at the rock/sand interface in Lake Malawi and typically mates at low densities, i.e., females do not spawn in clusters as in some other cichlid species. Frenzied mass spawning could explain a female occasionally picking up a foreign egg, but that doesn't appear to be happening in this case. There are still plenty of mysteries to be revealed about mouth-brooders.
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