Today.Reuters.com – By Corinne Heller
Jerusalem (Reuters) – Researchers in Israel, the Palestinian territories and Germany are pursuing a project to transform female freshwater fish into males, a sex change they hope will put bigger fish on the dinner table.
Male fish are larger, grow faster and weigh about a third more than females, Mutaz Qutob, a Palestinian researcher involved in the experiments, said on Tuesday.
As part of a project with Hebrew University and Germany’s University of Hohenheim, Qutob and his colleagues will inject compounds from plants found in the occupied West Bank and often used as seasonings into food fed to newborn Nile Tilapia fish.
“This will have an effect on the fish’s metabolic (structure) — it may shift from female to male,” said Qutob, a chemist at al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.