Mystery embryos in a jelly sack

Nov 02, 2019 • 10:59 AM UTC

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Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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At a fountain inside the UNCC campus in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) – I found a floating jelly in the water. It was a big surprise to see for a simple reason – I have never seen an egg sack that feels like jelly that does not belong to a marine invertebrate. But here I was in a land locked city – how can a marine invertebrate deposit eggs in a fountain!
So I picked it up; and it was time to examine it under a foldscope.

The above is a 1/2hr time lapse with foldscope mounted on my iPhone. For time lapse, I use a software called lapseit.
I did a little more digging online, and found that caddiesfly lay eggs in a jelly like structure! So could this be eggs from a caddiesfly. So far that is the only rational explanation I have. Jelly can help reduce desiccation and also keep all the eggs together and might also have anti-bacterial properties. It’s a fascinating evolutionary arms race to keep your eggs safe for them to actually survive in the wild.
Keep exploring
Manu & Caroline (postdoc, University of Washington)
PS: please read the comments below – specially the fact that “chromonid” eggs can harbour and hence be a source of “Cholera”! Yes – you heard that right. See links below –
“ Here we show that egg masses of the non-biting midge Chironomus sp. (Diptera) harbour V. cholerae and act as its sole carbon source, thereby providing a possible natural reservoir for the cholera bacterium. ”
Now I wish I was handling the egg sack with more care!
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