Friday Fishy News - September 15

[Flattieman]

Ugly Fish Gets Surgery

Washington Post

September 12

Emil Steiner

Typically unnecessary surgery and elective surgery are reserved for movie stars and Defense Secretaries, not aquatic life. But a certain goldfish, on display at the Royal Museum of Scotland, has given it's right eye in the pursuit of beauty. After many complaints from visitors about a harmless lump, scientists decided to remove it in an operation paid for with the coins (or wishes if your a "Goonies" fan) people have tossed into its pond. During the procedure vets were forced to cut out its eye along with the cyst (curse of One Eyed Willie?) raising a whole mess of moral questions about beauty being in the eye of the beholder.

Fish aren't thick: scientist

David Braithwaite

SMH.com.au

September 12

Having a memory like a goldfish could actually be a good thing, says a Sydney scientist who has spent 10 years proving fish are not as dumb as we think.

Fish are not the bowl-circling dimwits we imagine and could be as socially able as monkeys and elephants, Dr Culum Brown of Macquarie University says.

The biology lecturer has spent the past decade putting fish through learning and memory tests, which he says shows they are much deeper thinkers than they look.

For a start, Dr Brown says the three-second memory of goldfish is a myth: "It's completely ridiculous that an animal could survive without a memory."

Fish are so clever, Dr Brown says, that those schooled in survival skills can even teach their captivity-raised peers how to get by in the sea.

To help prove his theories, Dr Brown put rainbow fish into a tank with a mock trawler net with a single hole and watched how long it took them to find an escape route.

"Without any prior experience the fish learned where the hole was in about five runs," he says.

A year later, the same fish managed to find the hole on their first try, which Dr Brown says shows they easily recalled the skills they had learned.

In another study, Dr Brown scared intertidal gobies from a rock pool and as they dived for safety found they plopped precisely in surrounding pools.

"This suggests that fish are able to form mental maps similar to those people use when planning a route to a familiar destination," he says.

Dr Brown also studies "social learning" among fish, where fish trained to recognise predators and wild food teach captivity-bred fish how to survive.

"Fish can be trained en masse and then used to train other fish," he says.

"What we've found is the latter groups of fish learn more rapidly when ... placed with trained fish."

The research could prove useful to the aquaculture industry, Dr Brown says.

Fish swap sex depending on mates: study

September 11

theage.com.au

It's the ultimate in peer group pressure - coral reef fish that can change their sex depending on who they hang out with, scientists have discovered.

A recent study by a team of Australian and American scientists have found changing sex is common among coral reef fish such as the juvenile bluehead wrasse.

Dr Philip Munday, from Townsville's James Cook University, said the wrasse had adopted the unusual strategy so that each fish could increase its chances of breeding within a complex social structure.

"It turns out that social effects are really important to whether a bluehead wrasse becomes a male or a female when it is young," Dr Munday said.

"These fish are very sensitive to their social surroundings, which ultimately determine whether they will become male or female."

The study, by Dr Munday and colleagues from the University of California, Santa Barbara, was published last month in the science journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Dr Munday, a researcher at the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and JCU's School of Marine and Tropical Biology, said the fish began life as tiny larvae, which had neither male nor female characteristics.

He said tests found young fish raised in groups of three were more likely to turn into a male than those raised alone.

Turning male at such a young stage - when there were few other fish around - was rare because they are less likely to breed than females due to larger males that monopolise the reef's breeding pool, he said.

"This shows that sex is not genetically predetermined, as it is in mammals and birds," Dr Munday said.

He said the wrasse could even change sex as an adult.

"When these fish alter their sex from adult female to adult male the change is very dramatic," Dr Munday said.

"They look completely different, their sex organs transform, their behaviour changes - their whole life story changes."

£10,000 for takeaway fish curry

Hindustan Times

Vijay Dutt

London, September 14, 2006

It is probably the most expensive takeaway in the world.

A New York music producer spent almost £10,000 to fly down fish bhuna, a curry dish from an Indian restaurant in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for a private party he was throwing in mid-town Manhattan on Thursday.

The producer, Steve Francis, first tasted the curry when the restaurant chain Indie Spice catered for a musical festival in Dartmouth, England.

The taste clearly lingered.

Arif Ahmed, the 40-year-old owner of the chain with six outlets in Northern Ireland and one in Dublin, couldn’t believe his ears when he got the order for the transatlantic takeaway.

“At first I thought someone was playing a prank. But it turned out that wasn’t so,” Ahmed, originally from Bangladesh, told HT. “We said, ‘We could do it, but what about the logistics?’ And they said, ‘Don’t worry, we can sort that out’.”

Francis, a founder member of the Soul II Soul music group that recorded two 1989 hits — Keep on Movin’ and Back to Life — was willing to pay for the curry, side dishes and two chefs to be flown first class across the Atlantic.

Fish bhuna is made of bugayire, a sweetwater fish imported from Bangladesh, Ahmed said.

Part of the dish was prepared in Dublin after which Ahmed’s business partner, Tariq Salahuddin, and his wife, Kamrun, flew to Belfast in a chartered jet to pick up the rest of the banquet. They then flew to London to catch a flight to New York.

A takeaway from Indie Spice normally costs £20 (Rs 1,700). Though Francis would have paid £1,400 (approx. Rs 1.2 lakh) for his order, the cost of transporting the fish, hosting its bearers and flying them back to Belfast would have set him back by more than £8,000 (approx. Rs 6.9 lakh).

Fast-living fish swims into record books

ABC News

September 8

Queensland marine researchers say there are good reasons for the frantic lifestyle of the world's shortest-living fish.

The Guinness Book of Records has recognised the Australian coral reef pygmy goby, which lives for about 59 days, as the fish with the shortest lifespan on the planet.

James Cook University's David Bellwood submitted the goby for world record scrutiny.

Professor Bellwood says it spends only 21 days as an adult fish and lives a fast life mainly because of predators.

"These things are being eaten, something like 8 per cent disappear every day," he said.

"If you have got a gang of 10 of them each day pretty much you lose one of them.

"They only really get for a female three goes at it, so for a female will lay three batches of young and that's if they manage to make it for their full life span."

Marine Field Station shows off fish-tracking program

Asbury Park Press

September 9

BY TRISTAN J. SCHWEIGER

MANAHAWKIN BUREAU

LITTLE EGG HARBOR — Allen Price of Manchester had never been to the Rutgers University science facility at the end of Great Bay Boulevard.

Until last week, the 70-year-old said he didn't even know it was there. But he read about Saturday's open house at the Rutgers University Marine Field Station and decided to check it out.

He said he was fascinated by the talk on the station's tracking program for striped bass and other fish and said he was interested in future programs on fluke, which he fishes recreationally.

"I think this is very informative, and when the fluke thing comes up, I'll mention it to the club," said Price, who is a member of the Leisure Village West Fishing Club.

The field station holds an open house each year for people like Price and other members of the community. Station staff say it gives local residents the opportunity to learn about the work that goes on at the facility, once an abandoned U.S. Coast Guard building that the university took over in the 1970s.

Much of the work at the station would seem to be of interest to recreational fishermen in the area. For instance, as he explained the tracking program, Jay Turnure, a station technician, said data collected has shown the impressive movement of striped bass and other fish.

Fish are caught in the waters near the station — which is situated on Great Bay — and tagged with devices that emit a sound. Underwater listening devices then monitor the movements of each individual fish.

Turnure said a fisherman might catch a striped bass off the coast of North Carolina and see the tag from New Jersey. But Turnure said it's likely the fish has covered a much wider area.

"We'll show you data that shows the fish went to Maine, and was then captured off the coast of North Carolina," he said.

In addition to giving visitors a glimpse of the various operations at the research facility, station officials were also hoping they would take away a better understanding of how human behavior can affect the environment. Stacy Hagan, a senior technician at the station, said that Great Bay is one of the most pristine bays in the Northeast and lacks the industrial pollution of many waterways.

But Hagan also told a group of visitors that smaller-scale things individuals do can negatively affect water quality. She used the example of someone spilling oil while working on a car and then not cleaning it up properly.

"It goes into your sewer drain, and you don't ever see it again, but it goes into the bay," she said.

Many visitors at the open house said they come back each year. Teri Martucci, 41, of Little Egg Harbor brought her son Nick, 10, and daughter Katie, 14.

Nick Martucci said he liked the microscope displays the best, while Katie Martucci said she was interested in an exhibit that allowed people to feel various marine specimens.

"I think I liked the touch tank most of all," she said.

Their mother said the open house is an opportunity to see the scientific work being done in the family's town.

"Since we live very close, we go by here all the time," Teri Martucci said.

Flattieman.

Edited September 15, 2006 by Flattieman

[domza]

a great read, and your right-i havent heard that news yet