Make you Fink on Friday

We often hear only part of the story. Sometimes because we want to, other times because the truth has never been told.

GM Salmon have made a big splash, But what about GM Grouper…

Never heard about it!

Why we should be worried about ‘Frankenfish’ in south-east Asia

Unlike GM salmon, hybrid grouper gets little attention but they potentially pose a greater threat to marine ecosystems

The market for grouper is huge – in Hong Kong alone, an estimated 3.6 million grouper are consumed each year. Photograph: ALEX OGLE/AFP/Getty Images

The fast-growing super salmon produced by American biotech company Aquabounty Technologies are poised to become the first genetically modified animals to hit food markets in the US, with approval from authorities widely expected later this year. But AquAdvantage® salmon has made headlines because of the potential risks to wild stocks in the Atlantic should they escape and breed.

Hybrid grouper, on the other hand, gets almost no media attention, yet they potentially pose a greater threat to marine ecosystems because they’re farmed at sea, not inland like salmon. Hybridisation through in-vitro fertilisation is big in south east Asia, where aquaculture businesses are interbreeding valuable grouper species in a bid to create a fast-growing super fish.

Live grouper and other reef predators are highly-prized food in Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan and other parts of south-east Asia. They crowd tanks in seafood restaurants and are ubiquitous at Chinese wedding banquets and other formal occasions, where tradition demands they are served. Grouper can sell for well over US$100 (£59) a kilo, with very large or rare specimens selling for much more.

The market is huge. In Hong Kong alone, an estimated 3.6 million grouper are consumed each year. Demand has led to rampant overfishing across South East Asia’s Coral Triangle, a million square kilometre bioregion that’s home to more marine species than anywhere else on earth. Fishermen often use cyanide to stun grouper, destroying coral reefs in the process. According to a recent University of Hong Kong study, one in ten grouper species face extinction if current trends aren’t arrested.

In theory, advanced aquaculture techniques offer a way of fulfilling demand while reducing the pressure on wild populations. In reality, aquaculture has simply added a new market, with additional sealife being taken from the ocean to feed farmed fish in Malaysia, China and Taiwan.

Grouper are nurtured first in hatcheries from cultivated eggs and then in coastal cages or factories. Hybridisation aims to achieve the holy trinity of rapid growth rates, resilience and superior taste.

“Hybridisation of grouper isn’t new,” says Dr. Geoffrey Muldoon, a fisheries economist with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). “As far back as 1996 the University of Malaysia produced a giant grouper/tiger grouper hybrid, dubbed the Sabah Grouper specifically for live reef fish food markets in Hong Kong,” he explains. The hybrid was popular with consumers and a boom followed. “Two decades on and the science of grouper hybridisation has exploded,” says Muldoon.

In the early days, scientists only experimented with cross breeding natural grouper species. But then researchers in Taiwan began breeding hybrids with naturals and then different hybrids with each other. According to Irwin Wong, a live fish trader in Sabah, at last count, there were at least 12 new hybrid grouper variants and research is continuing in what has become a race to create a super grouper. But what if they escape?

“The fact is, hybrids have already escaped,” says Wong. “If there’s a storm, fish often get free from coastal cages.”

His fear is that two hybrids will breed in the wild. “If that happened, the effects on the ecosystem could be severe.” Because captive hybrids are fed a mix of protein rich pellets and fish, they need to consume less than their wild counterparts to add weight, according to Muldoon. If they escaped and proliferated, there could be a dramatic knock on effect in terms of demand for prey species.

Grouper are hermaphrodites – or monandric protogynous hermaphrodites to give them their full title. Early in their growth cycle they are females, but in adulthood they can change into males. No one knows the precise trigger for this transformation, though size, age and environmental factors all play a part. Hybrid groupers in captivity are all female – but in the wild they could easily change sex, according to Wong. Which brings up the possibility of a sort of “X-Grouper” wreaking havoc with the food chain.

Source: The Guardian Read more

Opinion:

Once again man is meddling with nature, and we don’t have any idea what we are doing.

Food for Thought

Nature Ramble

Today, the Lake District, and a problem.

People out grow pets, fads bring on new pets, people can’t cope with the grown animals, fads disappear leaving an unwanted animals in their wake.

Often as not, this creates a problem, because you release the animal into the wild far from its natural habitat where things are different and it has to adapt, often at the expense of other animals that were part of the original scheme of things.

Abandoned terrapins stalk Lake District

Pets bought in the wake of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze have been let loose and now pose a threat to wildlife and children

Terrapins can grow to the size of dinner plates, and are aggressive and smelly Photograph: Graeme Robertson

The ducks at Tebay services in Cumbria have a pretty good life. A cracking view of the Pennines on one side and the Lakeland fells on the other; a lovely pond by the northbound restaurant and a diet supplemented by organic leftovers from the award-winning farm shop inside. Just don’t mention the terrapins.

A few years ago something odd befell these otherwise lucky ducks, according to Terry Bowes, director of Wetheriggs Zoo and Animal Sanctuary up the M6 at Clifton Dykes near Penrith. “I had a call from Tebay and a lady there said: ‘We’ve got a problem here. Some of our ducks only have one leg. I think they must have some sort of disease.’ I went down there to have a look, and what did we find? Three red-eared terrapins the size of dinner plates! They’d been chomping the ducks’ legs off!”

Last week Bowes caused a ripple of alarm when he warned parents in the Lake District to look out for marauding terrapins, which have been dumped in the national park’s waters after becoming too big for their owners to cope with. “If you have kids paddling in a river the turtles could easily snap off a toe or a finger. They can become quite aggressive when they have grown,” he said.

So should holidaymakers panic at the growing terrapin threat? Bowes wouldn’t go quite that far. It turns out his intervention was more a cri de coeur. He was exasperated at the routine abandonment of creatures that suffered the misfortune of becoming fashionable at the time of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze.

“I was just a bit fed up with the situation,” he said on Friday as he showed the Observer around his charmingly ramshackle sanctuary. “The other Monday we had 14 terrapins come in on one day – by the end of the week we had more than 20. In the last year we’ve had more than 100 from 15 different species of freshwater terrapins. I was thinking what we could do about them all and then I heard about another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle film coming out soon and steam came out of my ears. I was thinking, ‘Oh no, this is only going to get worse.'”

Read more

Opinion:

Before getting pets for your kids, have a good think about the future and the consequences.

Change the World Wednesday – 19th Sep

Oh no, headache.

I don’t get them often, but when I do, they’re beauts. First coffee didn’t help much; water is on for more.

Last week I continued to NOT buy stuff in plastic at the supermarket where possible but in the end I failed, I succumbed to temptation. You can read about that in the UPDATE to the CTWW post. While it wasn’t such a transgression as to send me rushing off to confess on Sunday, it did sort of take the edge of the challenge.

After my Moan on Monday about tampering with genetics & DNA in humans, CelloMom mentioned the film Gattaca, I am downloading it now, it’s slow because it is competing with bandwidth for several episodes of Gabriela, a fantastic Brazilian series. I read the synopsis and it’s a powerful message that we shouldn’t tamper with things we don’t know about, even though we think we do; the results could be catastrophic.

Second coffee, and the world is looking rosier.

This week’s CTWW challenge on Reduce Footprints is a chance for ‘soul searching.’

I’m not good at this, mainly because I am biased. It’s a bit like a father saying his daughter is so lovely, when in fact she is a candidate for one of the ugly stepsisters. It’s difficult to be objective, especially about oneself.

This week, perform a SWOT analysis (modified for green living). Looking at your own green living efforts, analyze the following:

S	=	Strengths
		(your own strengths)
W	=	Weaknesses
		(again your own)
O	=	Opportunities
		(external factors that might allow you to be even greener)
T	=	Threats
		(external factors that threaten your green living)

And then …

Report back with your results. Did the analysis surprise you? Will you be making any changes based on the results? We’d like to know all!

That’s heavy.

My strengths – The desire to make the world better, I really want to because I can see so much wrong in the way we are doing things. Things I watch for at home and successfully adhere to; water usage, power, usage of bad chemicals around the home, growing a few things, unnecessary paper products, recycling everything that can be.

My weaknesses – I am human, that in itself is a failing. I enjoy ‘easy.’ I must confess that ‘easy’ doesn’t always involve ‘green’ thinking, however, I get twinges of guilt that set me back on track at times. While I try, I am not perfect.

Opportunities – These abound, although we rarely see them. More supermarkets are offering alternatives to the plastic bag, but how many really avail themselves of the idea? I have, when I see it as convenient, but that is not all the time (see my weaknesses above).

Threats – Are presented at every turn in our day to day living. Everything today has plastic, whether part of the product or the packaging. I see that as a threat, and it’s difficult to escape from. This I consider to be the biggest threat to any effort to be green. Advertising is a threat.