Zebrafish
Danio rerio
— Where the name comes from
Danio comes from dhani, the Bengali name of these little paddy-field fish; rerio is of uncertain origin, perhaps another local name gathered by colonial naturalists. The common name, in every language, looks at the five horizontal blue stripes running along the flanks of an animal four centimetres long.
— Facts
- Group
- Fish · Actinopterygii · Chondrichthyes
- Order
- Carps and minnows
- Habitat
- Rice paddies, canals, slow muddy streams
- Range
- India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar
- Size
- 3–4 cm, 0.5–1 g
- Diet
- Zooplankton, insect larvae, algae
- Lifespan
- 3 years, up to 5 in captivity
— Characteristics
- 01
It spawns every few days and produces thousands of eggs a year.
- 02
The embryos are transparent and develop outside the mother’s body.
- 03
It regenerates its heart, its retina and its spinal cord after injury.
— What sets it apart
It is one of the most important animals in modern biology, for a mundane reason: the embryo is transparent. You can watch a heart form under a microscope, live, in a living animal — impossible in a mouse. Seventy per cent of human genes have a counterpart in this little fish, and over the last thirty years organ formation, leukaemias, deafness and retinal diseases have all been studied in it. In 1976 it was also among the first vertebrates taken into space.
