Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
A company called Aqua Bounty is developing advanced-hybrid fish. ‘Average’-Hybrids just aren’t good enough anymore. The new ‘avanced-hybrids’ come in the form of salmon, trout, and talapia broodstocks.
These fish are “engineered to grow faster than traditional broodstock. The Patented fish, called AquAdvantage ™, were developed to reach market size twice as fast and convert their feed into body mass 10-30 times more efficiently than normal fish.
Aqua Bounty thinks their new ’super fish’ will decrease fish waste and use their food more efficiently. Less time in the tank automatically means less waste in the water. The faster the fish grows to market size the fewer meals it needs to eat. With luck they will also grow faster than those pesky diseases known to affect aquaculture’s farmed, pen grown fish.
These fish can be grown efficiently inland which will also mitigate the need for more expensive “consequential ocean pens.” The fish are also neutered so there is no threat of interbreeding with native populations. I wonder if each little fish gets a vasectomy or a tubal ligation. That sounds pretty labor intensive. Maybe these fish are ‘engineered’ to be sexless. Maybe engineering creates a ‘happy accident’ of non-gendered fish.
At any rate, finding faster ways to provide food for an ever expanding population will turn out to be part of our salvation or part of our destruction.
Maintaining the status quo won’t solve the increasing problem of how to feed the world’s increasing population. It isn’t clear yet what increased and unintended problems we will be creating. Only time will tell and time is running out on a hungry world.
Labels: Aqua Bounty, Salmon, aquaculture, genetically altered fish, gentically modified, trout
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Touting the Virtues of Trout. Super fish may become the new Super Hero.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Would you eat a salmon that grows 10 to 30 times faster than a normal one? How about a nice piece of fried chicken that was grown from cells in a lab?
PETA is offering $1 million dollars to anyone that is able to produce an in vitro chicken meat product and sell it to the public by June 30, 2012.
Is it any wonder the Mayan calendar stops in December of 2012? Maybe the Mayan had a vision of what was to come and decided it just wasn’t worth going on to 2013.
In the PETA competition, the challenge is not only to grow the meat, but it must taste good and sell for a competitive price when compared to real chicken. If you’re interested in tossing your skillet and your gene splicers into the ring, you’ll need to also obtain the fried “chicken” recipe from the vegcooking.com website.
Your in vitro stem cell chicken meat will have to taste great bathed in this batter and submitted to the judges! No doubt, using the same ‘fry’ recipe is meant to put everyone on an even playing field. Most of us however don’t have the first clue as to how to splice a gene or harvest a stem cell from a chicken; average Joe need not apply.
In vitromeat uses animal stem cells placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. According to the PETA website, some promising steps have been made toward this technology.
Whether or not the public will eat meat grown in a dish from a few cells, would perhaps depend on how hungry they become. It may also depend on whether or not they would ultimately know the origins of the meat.
Art Thanks: Lauren Barnes
Labels: PETA, genetically altered fish, gentically modified, in vitro meat, meat stem cells, million dollar meat
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Would you eat a steak grown in a petri dish?
Monday, June 11, 2007
What’s in the fish you’re eating?
In aquaculture antibiotics have been used for therapeutic purposes and as prophylactic agents. Nearly all aquaculture operations use antibiotics in some amounts to limit the growth of fungi and bacteria.
Many bacterial species are able to double in numbers every 20-30 minutes. This gives the bacteria a huge advantage when it comes to adaptation. The results are mutations that enable them to survive therapeutic doses of antibiotics, thus becoming resistant. In turn, higher levels of these antibiotics are required to maintain the health of the farmed fish.
Catfish imported from China has been found to contain ciprofloxacin and enrofloxacin. These are two powerful antibiotics banned by the FDA for use in human foods. The use of these powerful drugs is playing a major role in the transmission of resistant microorganisms from animals to humans through the food chain.
The US Department of Commerce states, 10 million pounds of Chinese catfish have been imported to the US alone in the fist 6 months of this year. This is up from 4 million pounds to date last year. It would be nearly impossible to check all fish being imported from all over the world.
According to FDA records, ciprofloxacin and enrofloxacin have been found in shipments of catfish and basa from China and Vietnam. Shrimp from Vietnam, Venezuela, Thailand and Malaysia have tested positive for the antibiotic chloramphenicol.
Gentian violet and malachite green, anti-fungal or anti-bacterial agents applied to fish grown in tight quarters have also been found in shrimp from Mexico, eel from Taiwan, Vietnamese basa, Chinese eel, talapia and catfish.
A Canadian study in 1992 determined that people who eat fish contaminated with malachite green are at risk for liver tumors. Gentian violet has been linked to mouth cancer. Malachite green is used as a fabric dye as well as a fungicide. The United Kingdom and the US have denied entry of farmed salmon from Chile and Scotland after finding high levels of malachite green in their farm raised salmon.
More inspectors, better laws over imports and the aquaculture business using better practices is not going to be the answer to the growing hazards to our health and the health of our oceans.
We need to restore the health to our Oceans. We need to stop over fishing and give the species that are surviving in the wild time to rejuvenate and replenish.
Advances in commercial fishing techniques have created the unintentional catch of approximately 27 million tons of fish and sea life in the wild that never makes it a table. 27 million tons of unintentional ‘bycatch’ simply discarded.
Food for thought.
Labels: Ciprofloxacin, Enrofloxacin, Malachite Green, Ocean Habitat, antibotics, aquaculture, catfish, genetically altered fish
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Malachite Green, Ciprofloxacin, Enrofloxacin.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Is the common sense of a fifth grader what we are lacking?
Has the time come to ask our elected officials “are you smarter than a fifth grader” finally arrived?
It may be obvious to a fifth grader that eating genetically altered fish is probably a bad idea. The introduction of non-native species of fish into local habitat might sound like a bad idea too. It also seems that trying to keep fish contained in open water might be an expensive and dangerous folly.
Florida has taken steps to protect its coastal waters against the damaging consequences of accidental introduction of non-native, and genetically altered fish from Aquaculture.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services last week finalized some strict rules governing non-native, genetically altered and open water aquaculture. Florida has already felt the sting of non-native fish escaped from aqua farms in the past. Now well-established, non-native species such as the spotted talapia, some types of catfish and the oscare are only a few species that have established themselves in the coastal waters of Florida.
Farming non-native and genetically engineered fish in the open waters of our oceans should never be allowed. Regardless of what type of pens or nets the aqua farmers install, there is no foolproof way of containing fish. Some of these fish will always escape. Non-native fish will forever alter the Eco-systems and damage natural, local fish populations.
Lack of common sense is running ramped regarding aquaculture in open waters across the globe. Hazards to the Eco-systems of the oceans are well documented, but little is known of the future potential hazards of consuming genetically altered fish by humans.
As the population of the earth burgeons, feeding that population becomes a huge challenge. However large that challenge, there is no reason for common sense to evacuate the planet.
If you have, or know someone with a fifth grader at home ask him or her their opinion on this subject. We just may find out the only thing smarter than a fifth grader is another fifth grader.
*photo:www.olemiss.edu
Labels: Are you smarter than a fifth grader, aquaculture, genetically altered fish, open water aquaculture
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
