The reason why we can’t eat “state banquet dishes” is because the ingredients are too “abnormal”?

The state banquet dish "Shangri-La Conch in Soup" and the Chaoshan dish "Charcoal-grilled Conch" are both world-famous for their deliciousness, and are dishes that we usually cannot afford.

Charcoal grilled conch | Image from the Internet

Conch in soup | Image from the Internet In addition to the advanced cooking skills, the scarcity of ingredients is an important reason why it is rarely seen on people's tables.

So can’t the wise Chinese people (foodies) artificially cultivate conchs?

Yes, but it is difficult because it is so abnormal that we cannot breed enough snail seedlings!

01

Mu·Walking the sword across the world but encountering a wall Pervert·Oyster

Metamorphosis is not uncommon in the shellfish world.
Take the nutritious oyster, a relative of the conch.

Oyster parents release sperm and eggs into the water to form fertilized eggs, which undergo continuous cell division and differentiation and become trochophore larvae that live a planktonic life. At this time, they do not eat and only rely on their own yolk nutrition to survive.

After becoming a velarva, it still lives a floating life, but it begins to use its own velar to feed, and gradually looks like a mature oyster. Under the wind and waves of the sea, it gradually develops eyesight, and produces a large and round thing - the "eye spot", and the idea of ​​metamorphosis begins. When it hits a wall for the last time when it was young, it finally gives up its dream of traveling the world with a sword, abandons its floating habits, and fixes itself on hard objects such as reefs and the bottom of ships, metamorphosing into a juvenile oyster, and never moves a step for the rest of its life.

The "noodle plate" that once combined multiple functions such as eating and exercise has also been ruthlessly abandoned. The filter-feeding tool has become gills, and the exercise tool has been discarded.

This story may sound a little perverted, but it is psychologically acceptable. After all, many of us live our mediocre lives like this.

But the conch (scientific name: Horned Conch) is different. The degree of its metamorphosis is so severe that even humans find it difficult to understand, and it even has problems reproducing its offspring.

02

Xiang (incense)·Niu Hulu·Snail

It is difficult for conches to be as detached a parent as oysters.

Like most of us humans, snail parents give birth to their young in a cozy house called an egg sac, leaving enough nutrients in the house for the young to grow up and leave thousands of brothers and sisters to grow up with them.

They hope that their children can spend the dangerous trochophore and veliger larvae stages in the house, so that they don't have to endure the same hunger and cold as oysters during their childhood, and don't have to be torn apart by the water.

Conch shells laying eggs (the caterpillar-like ones are clusters of "houses") | Image source: Professor Li Ronghua of Ningbo University

But things did not go as smoothly as their parents had arranged. Perhaps the little snails had watched too many palace fighting dramas, and the brothers and sisters in the same egg sac had been scheming against each other since they were even fertilized.

Only about 2/5 of the eggs in the same house are successfully fertilized and qualified for metamorphosis. The others lose their competition tickets before they even see the starting line. Among these lucky ones that become fertilized eggs, only 10 to 30 of them will successfully metamorphose.

Like oysters, the process of conch from fertilized egg to juvenile snail is also called metamorphosis, and it also goes through the important veliger stage.

But the obvious difference is that the conches lack the courage to cross the mountains and the sea, and they spent their entire childhood in the house provided by their parents.

Moreover, each young snail that eventually metamorphoses will kill an average of 124 of its brothers and sisters, and use their corpses as nutrition to complete its own metamorphosis.
The mussels, which are in the same gastropod class as the conchs, are even more cruel. Except for some cases of twins, each mussel that has successfully metamorphosed will kill all the thousands of other brothers and sisters in the egg sac, which is simply amazing. We rarely classify the similar development of mussels and mussels as cannibalism, because the eggs that are transformed into nutrients usually stop cell division in the early stages of development and are not classified as living organisms.

We call this mode of development the trophic egg strategy, and many aquatic animals adopt this abnormal approach.

But we can’t understand: you can be perverted, but you can’t let your offspring be so few because of your perversion! The key is that now you are too perverted and we can’t eat the state banquet dishes!

Therefore, many scientific researchers began to try to find ways to make them less perverted, and strive to make state banquet dishes enter ordinary people's homes sooner.

After investigation, some scholars found that not all of them adhere to this strategy unswervingly. For example, some individuals of Crepidula dilatata, a kind of snail produced in Chile, South America, adopt the same direct metamorphosis form as the conch, while some individuals develop into disc larvae in the sac, break out of the sac, experience a period of planktonic life, and finally metamorphose into juvenile snails.

This provides some ideas for our research. Can we let the conch and the fragrant snail also have the courage to venture into the world? This is also one of the directions of our next work.

On this planet, human beings are undoubtedly advanced creatures who can use a variety of scientific and technological means to control the life and death of many other creatures.
But the significance of our advancement should not be to utilize them, but to protect and help them.

We study the breeding of organisms, the vast oceans, dense forests and broad skies, not just for our own appetites.

More importantly, we hope to use breeding to understand them, help them reproduce and reduce harm to them. This is our responsibility and mission as an advanced species.
May our planet be a better place.

Source: Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Author: He Jiabei, Wang Han