Interesting article on CBC
Fish and many other marine animals have external fertilization, where eggs and sperm — known as milt — are released into the water at the same time in massive quantities during spawning, and some of them combine to produce offspring.
Graham noted that when herring spawn on Canada’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts, “you can actually see the ocean is sort of stained white from all of the milt that the male herring are releasing.”The sperm breaks apart after a few hours, releasing DNA into the water. And the researchers proposed that during one of these events, herring DNA may have found its way into rainbow smelt eggs or sperm.
These fish stole an antifreeze gene from another fish and became natural GMOs
First proposed in 2012
Smelt was the likely beneficiary of an antifreeze gene laterally transferred between fishes
Follow up paper from last month
Horizontal Gene Transfer in Vertebrates: A Fishy Tale