A different sort of hatching

My bald sculpins have begun hatching! Their egg mass has been disintegrating over the past few days and I couldn’t tell if that was because they were dying or hatching. Yesterday I was able to spend some time looking at them and was surprised to see that a few little pink blobs had wiggled their way out of the egg mass while I was manipulating it. Baby fishies! Well, they’re still mostly yolk, but each yolk has a baby fish attached to it. They flit around quite a lot and are difficult to photograph. I had to put this trio in a depression slide, the macro photographer’s trick of making the universe smaller so the creature can’t swim too far away.

This little fish was cooperating with me, so I carefully placed a coverslip on its drop of water and took some video. The first part was shot through the dissecting microscope with epi-illumination from a fiber-optic light, which shows the surface details. The second clip was taken through the compound microscope with trans-illumination; this kind of lighting doesn’t show any of the three-dimensional structure of objects but does a wonderful job with transparent objects like larval fish.

I like that the baby fish have spots on their yolk sacs as well as the top of the head. And from the second half of the video it appears that they don’t yet have a gut, at least not one that I can see. For the time being they don’t need a gut, as they’re surviving off the energy stored in the yolk sac, but once the yolk has been absorbed they will have to start feeding. At that point they’ll need to have complete guts. I imagine they will be hungry, and hope I have something they’ll be able to eat.

How big are these baby fish, you ask? The smallest ones were about 2 mm long, and the biggest one was twice the size, with a correspondingly smaller yolk.

And yesterday I caught some time-lapse video of a baby hatching from its egg. Why have I never played with the time-lapse function on my phone before? It’s really cool.

For now I’m keeping the babies in a mesh container, separated from their father so he cannot eat them. I don’t think I’ll end up with more than a couple dozen hatched larvae, as the egg mass has begun to decompose and many of the embryos have died inside their eggs. And no doubt some of the larvae that I’ve rescued already will die. I figure I have a few days before I need to worry about feeding the survivors. After that, who knows? Your guess is as good as mine.