Deceptive Bitterling

Not quite two years ago physicians and prospective parents welcomed the news that a small, carp-like fish could tell whether or not a woman was going to have a baby (TIME, Jan. 7, 1935). Called bitterling, the female fish has a small tube protruding from her underside. When the bitterling is about to lay eggs, the tube lengthens and enables her to deposit her ova in the siphon of a fresh water mussel, among whose gills they ripen and hatch. Drs. Aaron Elias Kanter, Carl Philip Bauer & Arthur Herman Klawans of the University of Chicago discovered that a bitterling will stretch her ovipositor, whether or not she needs to lay eggs, if her bowl of water receives as little as one teaspoonful of urine from a pregnant woman. Female sex hormones apparently stimulate this indicator of pregnancy.

Subsequently the Chicago obstetricians discovered that male urine also caused the bitterling to project her ovipositor. This phenomenon was casually accepted at first as more evidence that males harbor chemical as well as emotional traces of femininity in their constitutions. When the urine of an occasional nonpregnant woman was discovered to be stimulating to the bitterling, experimenters admitted themselves bewildered. The bitterling lost her standing and the doe rabbit and mouse were reinstated as nature's best indicators of human pregnancy. But Obstetricians Kanter and Klawans pursued the matter with another research mate, Physiologist Broda Otto Barnes, secured further results which they detailed in Science last week.

They extracted juices from the muscles, heart, lungs, brain, kidneys, spleen, liver, pancreas, stomach, thyroid, testes, pituitary, thymus, and adrenals of dogs, cats, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, oxen, men & women. Unexpectedly, extract of the cortices of adrenal glands stimulated the bitterling precisely the way ovarian hormones did. None of the other tissue juices caused that effect.

Thus the bitterling's deceptive behavior in the presence of male and non-gravid female urine was laid at the door of the adrenal glands. Now the investigators have another problem on their hands. They want to know "the possible significance of this [cortical] material in human urine."

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