Word: quails
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BOSTON--Like many of the city's swank food emporiums, Savenor's Meat Market is well-stocked with organic aragula, shiitake mushrooms and the finest range-fed quail...
...scientific coup, demonstrating convincingly how instinctive ("hardwired") behavior can be shuttled from one species to another. The feat, moreover, was accomplished not by crossbreeding or genetic engineering but through the artful replacement of selected brain cells in a chicken embryo with those from the embryo of a Japanese quail, a fowl of a completely different sort...
...small bundles of fluff and feathers looked like any other freshly hatched chickens. But when these Plymouth Rock hatchlings began chirping, it was clear that they were rare birds indeed. Instead of launching into the usual chicken songs, they crowed and bobbed like baby quail. Some harkened to danger calls from adult quail but didn't so much as cock-a-doodle-doo when called by mama hens...
...force to explore one of developmental biology's nagging questions: Where in the brain are the cells controlling specific behaviors? Using delicate surgical techniques pioneered by Nicole le Douarin in Paris, with whom he worked for a year, Balaban cut tiny windows in the shells of fertilized chicken and quail eggs that had incubated for a couple of days. Guided by special stains developed by the French researcher, he probed the embryos' minuscule, 1-mm- to 2-mm-long neural tubes (out of which the brains develop), removing cells from the chickens and replacing them with corresponding cells from...
...like any baby chicks. Rather than sticking their heads rapidly upward and forward, then holding still while they squealed, they wobbled their heads up and down like quail. Or they postured like chickens but engaged in the distinctive three-note quail song. After much trial and error, Balaban--an amateur baroque musician who sometimes serenaded his chicks with his lute to stimulate their singing--traced the movements and sounds to two very different areas in the brain. "That's new. That's interesting," says Caltech neurobiologist Masakazu Konishi. "It means posture and sound that usually occur together in crowing...