The Zebrafish Family

The zebrafish (Danio rerrio) is belonging in Cyprinidae family. It is the largest freshwater fish family and vertebrate animals. This family is common called minnows or craps family. The minnow’s family has about 3032 species and 371 genera. Some of the key characteristics to define this family are toothless jaws, teeth in throat only, cycloid scales, single soft-rayed dorsal fin and a pair of abdominal pelvic fins. They also have large eye, scaleless head and body with conspicuous scales. The mouth is usually small and pointing forwards or downwards. Minnow’s family is diverse family includes goldfish, shiners, and carps. It ranges from small to huge fish (up to 3 meter length). Their feeding is wide variety that some are filter feeders, others predators.
Due to the fact that zebrafish have about 12,000 genes in common with humans which is about 70% of the total. While 70% of human genes are found in zebrafish these include 80% of human disease causing genes. Therefore, zebrafish is a key to understand human development. The fish got its name from the stripes on the side of the body that looks alike the stripes of a zebra. It can be found in the rivers of northern India, Bhutan, Nepal and northern Pakistan. The zebrafish can grows to a length of 6.4 cm but mostly we found them in size of less than 4 cm. We can identify their sex by looking at the color of the their stripes. The female zebrafish has silver stripes between its blue stripes. On the other hands, the male zebrafish has golden stripes between its blue