A simple method for selecting spawning-ready individuals out from laboratorial cultured amphioxus population

Amphioxus is an emerging model organism for evolutionary developmental (Evo-Dev) studies owing to its key phylogenetic position in chordates. However, the rare supply of living embryonic materials is a major drawback for using amphioxus as a laboratorial model animal. Although the problem has been partially resolved in several recent reports, the spawning of amphioxus still remains unpredictable to some extent. In the present study, we reported an accurate method to distinguish spawning-ready and non-spawning-ready individuals of amphioxus Branchiostoma belcheri. In comparison with non-spawning-ready amphioxus, all spawning-ready individuals display following features several hours before their spawning: 1) for both males and females, the interstices between two adjacent gonads are obvious and relatively wide; and 2) the connections among eggs are loose and the crannies appear in each individual ovary of females. These morphological features were also observed in B. japonicum, indicating their conservation among different lancelet species. Based on this observable criterion, we made predictions on the spawning of about 600 ripe B. belcheri individuals and acquired an accuracy of 86.7% for females and 80.4% for males. In addition, we found that advancing or delaying onset of darkness has no detectable effect on the timing of spawning of B. belcheri. Our study makes amphioxus spawning more amenable for our experiments and will greatly facilitate its utilization as a laboratorial model animal. J. Exp. Zool. (Mol. Dev. Evol.) 324B: 629–635, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.