Category: Uncategorized
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Nauplii is not an Artemia species name!
I took four years of Latin in high school, tested out of the first two Latin courses in college, and took one Latin course during my freshman year in college. So, as anyone who has had me edit a paper for them knows, I am a bit of a stickler when it comes to language.…
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Is Hydra attenuata still a valid Hydra species name?
No, it is not. The widely used laboratory Hydra strain previously called Hydra attenuata is actually Hydra vulgaris. The history of the species name attenuata is quite convoluted and is described in detail by Dr. Richard Campbell in a paper published in 1989 (Campbell, 1989). At the Hydra meeting in Günzburg, Germany in 1989, Campbell presented a poster on Hydra taxonomy in which he showed that the…
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What can you feed Hydra besides Artemia?
No Hydra food comes even remotely close to Artemia for ease of culture, and ease of feeding Hydra. However, there may be times when you can’t use Artemia for some reason. What else can you use? Here are the alternatives I’ve tested. There may be others as well. Moina Moina is a freshwater crustacean related to Daphnia. Hydra loves Daphnia, but culturing Daphnia in the lab is a pain.…
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What is the Origin of the AEP Strain of Hydra vulgaris?
The AEP strain of Hydra vulgaris is used to generate embryos for production of transgenic Hydra (Wittlieb et al., 2006). AEP produces both sperm and eggs, and does so regularly if it is fed on an appropriate schedule. Most of the time a given sexual polyp contains only testes or eggs, although occasionally a polyp is seen which contains…
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Cloning the First Hydra Genes
One of the obvious things that needed to be done if we were going to study Hydra biology at the molecular level was to clone genes from Hydra. Thus, my lab and Hans Bode’s lab set out to do this. Upon joining Hans’ lab as a postdoc in the summer of 1986, Doug Fisher set as his first…
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How I became a Hydra biologist – Part 3
My hunt for a faculty position yielded just enough interviews to make me think that I might actually land such a position. I was thrilled when one of the places I interviewed at, the Department of Biological Chemistry in the UC Irvine School of Medicine (then called the California College of Medicine), offered me an…
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How I became a Hydra Biologist – Part 2
The first decisions I had to make after starting graduate school in the Biology Department at Yale in 1974 were what courses to take and what lab to join. Incoming students met with a faculty committee during orientation week to decide what courses to take. For reasons I still cannot fathom, one of my committee…
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How I became a Hydra Biologist – Part 1
I was born and raised on the south side of Indianapolis, Indiana. I attended the same elementary and high schools that my father and his siblings attended. I lived three blocks from my paternal grandparents, who lived down the street from the house my grandmother was born in. My maternal roots are in southern Indiana,…
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Why a Hydra blog?
For some time now, my colleagues have been telling me I should write a book containing all of the things I know about Hydra. That sounds like a lot of work. So I’m going to start with this blog and see how it goes.
The Hydra Blog 