PZ Myers. 2006 Jan 11. Cyclopia. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/cyclopia/>. Accessed 2006 Feb 13.

Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Cyclopia

Apostropher mentions that some people find this picture of a one-eyed kitty unbelievable. Should I mention one of my little hobbies?

I do some work on holoprosencephaly. That kind of cyclopia is fairly common, and here are a few pictures to back that up.

image

At the top left is a zebrafish larva with ethanol-induced cyclopia, and a control below it. Top right are some sheep skulls—the top one is a case of natural holoprosencephaly, induced by a teratogen found in plants of the genus Veratrum (Mama Sheep ate some bad weeds during her pregnancy). The bottom picture is a row of rabbit pups that were intentionally exposed to that same teratogen, and all were born with that weird one-eyed look.

I've got a set of procedures that allow me to generate one-eyed fish at will. The agents responsible seem to muck up signal transduction at the midline in early development; my particular interest is in tracking down the patterns of cell death and aberrant cell migrations that produce the final phenotype. So, the one-eyed baby animal is a common sight around here, and the kitten is actually a rather uninteresting example: I like animals where I have access to the whole process of eye and face development in a petri dish, without have to chop into a bloody messy uterus to see it.

Oh, and my one-eyed fish don't make it to adulthood. Changes to the facial midline disrupt primary blood flow rather catastrophically, and they only last a week to ten days, with diminished circulation in the body and an unfortunately inflating heart and pericardium—their hearts actually explode.

Posted by PZ Myers on 01/11 at 02:13 PM
Science • Organisms • Research • 4 Trackbacks • Other weblogs • Permalink
  1. Oooo, I wouldn't tell the animal rights folks!!
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  01:26 PM
  2. Kittens are generally born with their eyes shut. Why is this one's eye open if it's only one day old?
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  01:32 PM
  3. And some people say there is no such thing as synchronicity. There I was, reading a Christmas present, Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful -- thanks, O Best Sister-in-Law in the World! -- and saw the piccie of the cyclops lamb on page 39. And that very same day I follow Norbizness's link to the cyclopokitty and read that people were all sceptical about it, and I was like, oh, so you've never seen pregnant mama cats eating V. californicum before???!!!

    Or maybe the cyclopokitties' mamas eat sheep who've eaten the weed; or maybe they are the offspring of Uranus and Gaia.
    #: Posted by Mrs Tilton  on  01/11  at  01:35 PM
  4. My old vet school had a large museum of preserved terratologies and cyclopsy was the most common one, found in pretty much all domestic animals. Really cool!
    #: Posted by coturnix  on  01/11  at  01:54 PM
  5. how about a cat or fish with three eyes? now that would be something.
    #: Posted by Caspar  on  01/11  at  01:56 PM
  6. I've got a set of procedures that allow me to generate one-eyed fish at will.


    This is the greatest sentance ever written in the English language.
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  01:56 PM
  7. PZ, does this condition invariably lead to death within hours or days for mammalian infants, as well? (Could this kitten possibly have survived for any length of time, in other words?).
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  02:03 PM
  8. Kittens are generally born with their eyes shut. Why is this one's eye open if it's only one day old?


    from snopes.com:

    Eyelids are also generally absent in such births, which explains why the eye of the one-day-old kitten pictured above is open even though cats are usually born with their eyes shut and remain in that condition for the first week or two of their lives.


    Weird.
    #: Posted by Evan Murdock  on  01/11  at  02:22 PM
  9. Frumious- the condition generally results in the eyelid being absent, so the kitten's eye would be permanently open.
    #: Posted by flyingcamel  on  01/11  at  02:23 PM
  10. Is this a two-day-premature Friday Cat Blogging? Modulator is going to love it for the Friday Ark, too, I bet...
    #: Posted by coturnix  on  01/11  at  02:33 PM
  11. Show this picture to all those Intelligent Design idjits...how would Dembski et al. explain away developmental mistakes like this poor little kitty?

    "If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."--Woody Allen
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  03:14 PM

  12. PZ: I've got a set of procedures that allow me to generate one-eyed fish at will.


    Epat: This is the greatest sentance ever written in the English language.

    It would go well with: "I have a large supply of fissionable materials" (from SF short story Who Can Replace a Man)
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  03:49 PM
  13. how about a cat or fish with three eyes? now that would be something.

    You've never visited Springfield, I take it.

    Can't help you with the cat, though.
    #: Posted by Mrs Tilton  on  01/11  at  03:52 PM

  14. PZ: I've got a set of procedures that allow me to generate one-eyed fish at will.


    Epat: This is the greatest sentance ever written in the English language.

    It would go well with: "I have a large supply of fissionable materials" (from SF short story Who Can Replace a Man IIRC)
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  03:53 PM
  15. Show this picture to all those Intelligent Design idjits...how would Dembski et al. explain away developmental mistakes like this poor little kitty?
    Well, you know, intelligent people make mistakes, so why not the designer? An omnipotent designer wouldn't make that mistake, but the idjits aren't talking about an omnipotent designer...at least not some of the time.

    Nope, the IDer is a screw-up just like you and me. You know, in his image and all that jazz...
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  04:09 PM
  16. God doesn't micro-manage his creation, he gave it all to us humans to manage from the start. This abnormality and all others reflect the managers more than the creator!
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  04:15 PM
  17. Nope, the IDer is a screw-up just like you and me. You know, in his image and all that jazz...

    So, can we start calling ID "Incompetent Design?"

    I'm sure someone's done this, but it still sounds good to me.

    CS
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  04:27 PM
  18. How about a cat or a fish with three eyes?

    I can show you a fruitfly with extra eyes:



    Turns out it is not so hard to make either...
    #: Posted by fish  on  01/11  at  04:49 PM
  19. God doesn't micro-manage his creation, he gave it all to us humans to manage from the start. This abnormality and all others reflect the managers more than the creator!
    Wait. So it's up to us to oversee the reproduction of, what, every organism on the planet? Why didn't the designer tell us? We could've gotten a jumpstart on this biology thing millenia ago. But I guess there's been a communication breakdown from the start...
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  05:02 PM
  20. This post has been a treasure chest of great sentences. The one-eyed fissionable material, of course. And my current fave, "Holy fuck, there's an Ediacaran chordate!"

    You folks make my day. Oh, and parting thought--the person who posted the cyclopokitty pic called it adorable? Not even. I haven't seen a...nah. I won't cheapen this fine site.
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  05:09 PM
  21. A Morpholino oligo can induce a nifty phenocopy of the zebrafish one-eyed pinhead (oep) mutation. Since the oligo can knock down maternal transcript as well as zygotic transcript, you can get a more extreme phenotype than a natural mutant, with functional its maternal transcript, can produce. For an image, see slide # 32 in the PowerPoint presentation available at:
    http://www.gene-tools.com/files/China2005NoAnimation.ppt
    #: Posted by Jon D. Moulton  on  01/11  at  05:44 PM
  22. If this is the best God can do, I'm not impressed.
    -- George Carlin, Napalm & Silly Putty (2001) ††
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  06:06 PM
  23. Poor little fella. Got a real lousy hand from the bottom of the DNA deck. Oh well, another nail in the ID coffin...no wait, it's not! Apparently it's all our fault! Gee, thanks for clearing that up, Wiselder!
    #: Posted by Martin Wagner  on  01/11  at  06:28 PM
  24. What a pitiful, sad, creature. I am glad that some people (like PZ) are working on understanding such sports of nature, though.
    #: Posted by Keith Douglas  on  01/11  at  07:15 PM
  25. I dunno, the sentence that really grabbed me was:
    Should I mention one of my little hobbies?

    That one had sinister chuckle all over it!
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  08:26 PM
  26. To answer Polyphemus question:
    Cyclopia is a well-recognized human congenital condition, and the poor infants are either stillborn or live only a few hours or days after birth. This is due to the usual host of associated anomalies such as a unilobate brain (holoprosencephaly), malformed heart, abnormal blood circulation. They have a characteristic appearance, with a normal appearing body, but a face with a single midline fused orbit and a variably fused eye, and a proboscis (non-functioning nose) ABOVE the eye. They are doubtless the source of the legendary Cyclops of the ancient Greeks.
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  08:54 PM
  27. Here's a dishy piece of utterly speculative gossip for you all: Tom Cruise might have holoprosencephaly! A neurologist muses aloud: http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/45654#1066483

    Midline incisor, family history of retardation, dyslexia, small stature, history of stillborn babies... the signs are there. And Tom recently bought Katie an ultrasound machine. To monitor facial development of the embryo, perhaps?

    If true, I think it's wonderous. Somehow, a little mutant troll, stunted both genetically and culturally, has become America's sweetheart. It's like a fairy tale.
    #: Posted by  on  01/11  at  10:30 PM
  28. When I was stationed at Fort Sam Houston, TX I worked at Brooke Army Medical center. One of the strange "details" i got stuck with was going down to the histopathology department and getting rid of about a years worth of old anatomical pathology specimens. Mainly stuff like leftovers from autopsies. However, there was an entire room filled with preserved specimens, such as conjoined fetuses ect. The oddest one had four legs, two arms,and a big old head that had two big lobes in the back, and a weird mashed together face. There were other specimens of note, but no cyclopeans......
    #: Posted by Bryan Trim  on  01/12  at  05:51 AM
  29. Two from Mrs Tilton:
    Or maybe the cyclopokitties' mamas eat sheep who've eaten the weed;

    Oh yah! We can all benefit from that warning! {-;


    or maybe they are the offspring of Uranus and Gaia.

    I thought those were called butt-puppies??? er... yikes!

    Either way, I'm taking No Wallpaper from this post. LOL!
    #: Posted by MBains  on  01/12  at  07:35 AM
  30. PZ Myers Perhaps you should have mentionned that holoprosencephaly happens (not on purpose, though) in humans. Aha and now the horde of IDiots will tax you of non scientific propaganda because it does not fit with the view of God creating us ressembling his image...
    #: Posted by  on  01/12  at  09:20 AM
  31. PZ Myers Perhaps you should have mentionned that holoprosencephaly happens (not on purpose, though) in humans. Aha and now the horde of IDiots will tax you of non scientific propaganda because it does not fit with the view of God creating us ressembling his image...

    Who says JHVH doesn't have one big ol' lidless eye in the middle of his/her forehead?

    That'd be scary as shit. Wouldn't you be intimated into compliance by that?

    After all, look at all those arms Vishnu has...
    #: Posted by  on  01/12  at  09:41 AM
  32. Who says JHVH doesn't have one big ol' lidless eye in the middle of his/her forehead?

    That'd be scary as shit. Wouldn't you be intimated into compliance by that?


    A burning lidless eye? Oooh!
    #: Posted by  on  01/12  at  10:04 AM
  33. In the kitten, how is the brain development affected? Is it a single hemisphere in front, and split further back? Does the optic nerve split on the way back to the brain, or is it connected at all?

    I'm curious, but - ick!
    #: Posted by  on  01/12  at  10:58 AM
  34. When I was a kid, my father was the curator of a small museum with specimens of nature's jokes. There were several (human) cyclopeans amongst them, as well as fetuses with their organs on the outside, two-headed animals and other interesting things (and a skeleton by the door whose hand you could shake). The interior of the museum was still the same as it had been in the 19th century, when the collection was first started.

    My sister and I loved that museum.
    #: Posted by  on  01/12  at  11:11 AM
  35. PZ, you need to link to your new site (which looks nice BTW)

    Best
    #: Posted by Leftist Boddhisatva  on  01/12  at  11:53 AM
  36. PZ: I've got a set of procedures that allow me to generate one-eyed fish at will.

    Epat: This is the greatest sentance ever written in the English language.

    It would go well with: "I have a large supply of fissionable materials" (from SF short story Who Can Replace a Man)

    I'm thinking it could be the first lyric of a Joe Walsh song.
    #: Posted by  on  01/12  at  03:06 PM
  37. The book:
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0142004820/sr=1-1/qid=1137164380/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-1681113-4781561?%5Fencoding=UTF8
    has a good discussion of various freakishly weird birth conditions and genetic defects in humans, including cyclopia, with accompanying pictures. It's for a non-science audience. I found it enlightening.
    #: Posted by  on  01/13  at  09:04 AM
  38. I'm curious about the blood-flow issue. Mammalian cyclops don't have this problem. Is the aortic arch misshapen in the zebrafish, too?
    Also, do you get to pick the "submit the word you see below" list? because it's awfully embryological this time.
    #: Posted by Alethea  on  01/25  at  03:34 AM

  39. So, can we start calling ID "Incompetent Design?"

    I'm sure someone's done this, but it still sounds good to me.

    CS -- This has been done, complete with a song. Find it here:

    http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2005/11/the_other_id.php

    -- Wil
    #: Posted by Wil Nusser  on  02/01  at  07:17 AM