One general requirement of individual laboratory animals is that they have known genetic backgrounds. However, ensuring such genetic similarity is difficult, and can be facilitated by breeding a full strain for experimentation. To this end, the authors bred 34 full-sib families of amphioxus larvae/embryos. Due to the high mortality of the embryos and larvae, only seven full-sib families of juvenile amphioxus
Branchiostoma japonicum
were obtained. Among them, the highest and lowest survival ratios were 32.4% and 1.67%, respectively, whereas the shortest metamorphosis and longest larva duration were 24 d and 42 d, respectively. These results demonstrate the feasibility of establishing full-sib families of amphioxus, and provide fundamental data needed for the future breeding of amphioxus strains.
