More than 10,000 people worked to clean up the worst oil spill in South Korean history after a crane punched a hole in an oil tanker, releasing 2.7 million gallons of crude. A 63-year-old shellfish farmer wept as she showed dead tar-coated oysters to a reporter ...
... a study published in Science suggested that leaving more fish in the sea leads to higher profits than the traditional target known as maximum sustainable yield. "We like to say it's a win-win," said one of the study's authors ...
... a detailed new study of salmon farming found that farmed fish spread sea lice, which killed juvenile wild salmon ...
... U.S. fisheries regulators considered a program allowing 10-year permits for companies interested in offshore aquaculture. "We are already consuming a tremendous amount of farm-raised fish," said Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. "We might as well do it ourselves under our terms, under our conditions, under our standards, and take the market"...
... a NASA climate scientist said that, based on new data, the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by 2012, much faster than previously predicted. "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warning," he said. "Now, as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died" ...
... scientists studying swordtail fish found that entire blocks of genes in the brain turn on and off when a female is attracted to a male, with more being turned off than on ...
... a red algae bloom in Florida was blamed for a number of sea turtle deaths ...
... high levels of mercury were found in fish off the coast of northern California ...
... Wyoming announced a statewide warning on consuming mercury-contaminated fish. It was the last of the 48 contiguous states to do so ...
... and a surfer in New Zealand encountered two sharks in one day. She was unhurt.
Ask Umbra on ditching dirty things
‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science
Comments
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caniscandida Posted 5:37 pm
16 Dec 2007
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What effect locally farmed fish would have on the New Orleans area's discriminating seafood palate is a matter of opinion.
Longtime seafood dealers such as Cliff Hall of the New Orleans Fish House have grappled with declining Gulf catches for years. Diners in the restaurants to which he sells demand certain fish, whether the weather cooperates or not. Often if swordfish or yellowfin tuna is getting short, he'll have to fly in fish from South America to fill orders.
"Sometimes we'll get lead time. Sometimes they'll call that morning," Hall said. "We're lunatics around here. There's no other city where you could order the same day and get that product on the same day. It's a lot of pressure to pull that off, but you know, we've got to do it."
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No, I don't know: Why have they "got to do it"? Are family members of theirs being held hostage?
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 6:36 pm
16 Dec 2007
This is from the Wikipedia article on "sea louse":
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Sea lice are also economically damaging to the fish farms themselves; in one recent year, sea lice cost salmon farmers more than US$100 million for treatment and lost production, which represents about 20% of their total costs.
Currently, fish farmers rely heavily on the chemical emamectin benzoate (SLICE) for controlling sea louse infestation rates. Many governments now impose limits on sea louse infestation levels on fish farms. The adequacy of existing regulations, and the environmental impacts of the use of SLICE are highly controversial. Public opinion is particularly polarized in the northeast Pacific where a moratorium on expansion has been lifted by the British Columbia government while the Alaska government is maintaining a total ban on salmon farming in its waters.
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Once again, we see that we would be wrong to extend our general admiration for our often enlightened Canadian neighbors to the way they manage their extraction industries. Or rather, fail to manage them.
It should be recognized that aquaculture, as it is currently practised, is a serious matter of concern not only to conservationists, e.g. those worried about the health of populations of wild salmon, but also to promoters of animal welfare.
Fish are sensitive vertebrates. The manner of their sensitivity and perceptivity is superficially different from our own, and so we do not always recognize that they are as capable of suffering as terrestrial vertebrates, with whose experiences we can more readily sympathize.
Apparently, fish farms are just another kind of concentrated animal feeding operation. Just as we protest the inhumane confinement of, say, cattle and chickens in factory farms, so we should understand that the confinement of such wild fish as salmon is if anything even more inhumane.
Not surprisingly, one aspect of their confinement is their inevitable exposure to dangerous opportunistic organisms, such as the parasitic sea lice. In CAFOs on land, the "solution," highly problematic and controversial, is to supplement the animals' diet with antibiotics. It seems that fish farmers as well are just as short-sightedly thinking along those lines.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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caniscandida Posted 7:04 pm
16 Dec 2007
The workers' suggestion that an analogous genetic expression, as part of the behavioral process associated with feeling sexual attraction, is common to all vertebrates, sounds like a very plausible hypothesis.
But I wonder how they conduct the experiment. How do they extract the RNA from the fish, in so unintrusive and carefully timed a manner, that they can relate what the RNA looks like to what the fish were perceiving and feeling at that moment?
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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