Friday Fishy News - 2 For 1

[Flattieman]

Hi Raiders,

I just got back from 9 days of fishing on the Central Coast where I incidentally had some horrific internet access problems. Hence, I'm going to have to catch up on the Fishy News with this post. Apologies to anyone who was wondering what had happened to Fishy News - it's still alive and kicking! As far as the fishing went on the Coast, at The Entrance, I personally caught 30+ keeper flatties on SPs to 56cm, about 20 legal whiting to 30cm and 5-10 legal bream to 30cm. Anyway... here's the news:

Week Ending Friday September 29:

Killer teddy bear leaves 2,500 fish dead

Concord Monitor

September 25

MILFORD, N.H. - A teddy bear has been implicated in 2,500 deaths. Of trout, that is. State officials say a teddy bear dropped into a pool at a Fish and Game Department hatchery earlier this month clogged a drain. The clog blocked the flow of oxygen to the pool and suffocated the fish.

Hatcheries supervisor Robert Fawcett said the bear - who was dressed in yellow raincoat and hat - is believed to be the first stuffed bear to cause fatalities at the facility.

"We've had pipes get clogged, but it's usually with more naturally occurring things like a frog or even a dead muskrat," he said. "This one turned out to be a teddy bear and we don't know how it got there."

The deaths prompted Fawcett to release a written warning: "RELEASE OF ANY TEDDY BEARS into the fish hatchery water IS NOT PERMITTED."

He said it's not known who dropped the bear, but urged anyone whose bear ends up in a hatchery pool to find a worker to remove it. "They might save your teddy bear, and keep it from becoming a killer," he said.

"It's kind of a cute little teddy bear and people wouldn't think that a cute little teddy bear would be able to kill fish."

Firefighters to the rescue - of fish

Gosport News

September 22

FIREFIGHTERS saved up to 40 lives in a single hour, but it wasn't people they rescued – it was fish.

The fire crew from Gosport rushed to the aid of oxygen-starved fish as the water in a pond became so low they started floating belly-up. The carp and rudd in Elmore Lake, Lee-on-the-Solent, started dying as the water in parts was reduced to nothing but a muddy layer of silt.

Firefighters were called because the council is not allowed to remove any fish that are still alive – even if it means saving their lives.

After speeding to the scene, the crew attached a hose to a nearby hydrant and spent about an hour pumping hundreds of litres of fresh water into the pond in the hope of keeping the remaining 40 fish swimming.

Kevin Butcher, head of operations at Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service, said: 'We assisted in filling up this pond as a humanitarian service, although it does not form part of the service's statutory obligations.'

None of the fish have died since the water was topped up, but the Environment Agency is still monitoring the water level at the pond every day.

Israelis, Palestinians team up to make fatter fish

Reuters

September 26

By Corinne Heller

JERUSALEM, Sept 26 (Reuters) - Researchers in Israel, the Palestinian territories and Germany are pursuing a project to transform female freshwater fish into males, a sex change they hope will put bigger fish on the dinner table.

Male fish are larger, grow faster and weigh about a third more than females, Mutaz Qutob, a Palestinian researcher involved in the experiments, said on Tuesday.

As part of a project with Hebrew University and Germany's University of Hohenheim, Qutob and his colleagues will inject compounds from plants found in the occupied West Bank and often used as seasonings into food fed to newborn Nile Tilapia fish.

"This will have an effect on the fish's metabolic (structure) -- it may shift from female to male," said Qutob, a chemist at al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.

"This is a very important project. We are introducing a new food source for the Palestinians."

Scientists at Hebrew University had previously used synthetic steroids, which are regarded as less healthy, to create male fish, said Berta Sivan, a researcher at the Israeli school who helped found the project.

Palestinians in the West Bank import most of their fish from Israel and the coastal Gaza Strip.

But their consumption of fish, especially those from fresh water sources, has fallen in recent years due to rising costs and tighter Israeli travel and trade restrictions on Palestinians.

"We wanted to solve a fish-breeding problem in Israel and help bring in and promote fish consumption in the Palestinian Authority," Sivan said.

While Israel has been building a controversial separation barrier in the West Bank, cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian academics has been growing over the past few years despite a Palestinian uprising that began in 2000. "Israelis and Palestinians who cooperate on research tend to try to work harder during politically critical times," said Hassan Dweik, a co-director of the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organisation, which helps find funding for such studies.

The IPSO this year received 74 proposals for academic projects to be conducted by Israeli and Palestinian researchers on topics related to agriculture, education, the environment and and medicine.

Israelis and Palestinians usually conduct their research separately and discuss it by phone or online due to the Israeli travel restrictions that also ban most Israelis from entering Palestinian-controlled areas.

Europeans urged to think twice before eating fish

BBC News... ABC Online

September 27

The conservation group WWF is calling on European consumers to think twice before they eat fish.

A report by the group says much of the fish on the European market is the product of illegal, destructive or wasteful fishing.

The group's Justin Wolford warns that many fish stocks are on the brink of extinction.

"What we're asking now is for consumers to really vote with their wallet, to go and ask their local restaurant, their local supermarket for marine stewardship council certified fish - that's environmentally friendly fish, if you like, and then go an enjoy a well caught, delicious fish," he said.

Toxic-sensitive bluegill fish pull duty in war on terror

John Ritter

USA Today

September 23

SAN FRANCISCO - One of the latest weapons in the war on terror is the common bluegill, a freshwater fish found in lakes and streams across the United States.

Three of the nation's most inviting terrorist targets - New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco - are using a system that deploys these small edible fish to detect toxic substances in municipal water if sabotaged by terrorists.

Bluegill are sensitive to traces of pesticides, cyanide, mercury, phosphates and other poisons and react in ways that can be monitored. If computers, wired to sensors in the water, record elevated heart rates or note fish swimming erratically in their tank or showing other signs of stress, the system triggers water sampling and e-mail alerts to water-quality officials.

They do have limitations. While the bluegills have successfully detected at least 30 toxic chemicals, they cannot reliably detect germs. And they are no use against other sorts of attacks - say, the bombing of a water main or an attack by computer hackers on the systems that control the flow of water.

People familiar with the technology, developed by the Army, compare it with the old-fashioned use of canaries in coal mines to warn miners of danger.

"It's a winning combination of nature and high technology," said Susan Leal, general manager of San Francisco's Public Utilities Commission, which delivers water to 2.4 million Bay Area customers. "Anti-terrorism is a reality today, and it's going to be a reality for the foreseeable future."

New York has been testing the system, on loan from the Army, since October 2002.

"We are seeking to expand it," said Ian Michaels, a spokesman for the city's Department of Environmental Protection, manager of the water consumed by 9 million people. "Because it's a security issue, we would not have sought publicity about this."

The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments confirmed that the system is being used in the region but couldn't provide details, said Jim Shell, a water-resources planner.

More than a dozen other cities have ordered the Intelligent Aquatic BioMonitoring System, which starts at $45,000, says Bill Lawler, co-founder of the Poway, Calif., company that helped design and now manufactures it. San Francisco has ordered two more, Leal says.

"Nature's given us pretty much the most powerful and reliable early warning center out there," Lawler said.

The system is one of many means cities use to monitor water quality, "part of a layered defense," Lawler said. "The fish start alarming at such minute amounts of toxicity that it gives utility operators a big jump."

Since Sept. 11, the government has taken very seriously the threat of attacks on the U.S. water supply. Federal law requires nearly all community water systems to assess their vulnerability to terrorism.

Big cities employ a range of safeguards against chemical and biological agents, constantly monitoring, testing and treating the water. But electronic protection systems can trace only the toxins they are programmed to detect, Lawler said.

Bluegill are ideal "canaries" because they're hardy, prolific and eat almost anything, says John McKosker, a senior scientist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Link between Fish and Mammal Immune Systems Revealed by Killer B cells

Medindia.com... sourced from Eurekalert

September 24

An evolutionary link between the immune systems of fish and mammals in the form of a primitive version of B cells, white blood cells of the immune system has been discovered by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

Their studies link the evolution of the adaptive immune system in mammals, where B cells produce antibodies to fight infection, to the more primitive innate immunity in fish, where they found that B cells take part in phagocytosis (literally: cell eating), the process by which cells of the immune system ingest foreign particles and microbes.

The finding, which appears in the online version of Nature Immunology and will be featured on the cover of the October issue, represents a sizeable evolutionary step for the mammalian immune system and offers a potential new strategy for developing much-needed fish vaccines. "When examining fish B cells we see them actively attacking and eating foreign bodies, which is a behavior that, according to the current dogma, just shouldn't happen in B cells," said J. Oriol Sunyer, a professor in Penn Vet's Department of Pathobiology. "I believe it is evidence for a very real connection between the most primitive forms of immunological defense, which has survived in fish, and the more advanced, adaptive immune response seen in humans and other mammals."

About 400 million years ago, the earliest ancestors of modern fish split off of the evolutionary pathway that became the earliest ancestors of modern mammals. In modern mammals, the B cell is a highly adapted part of the immune system chiefly responsible for, among other things, the creation of antibodies that tag foreign particles and microbes for destruction. Mammals have phagocytic cells, but they are a specialized few cells identified apart from the complex interactions that drive other white blood cells.

Sunyer and his colleagues discovered this previously unsuspected B cell activity while examining the immune cells of rainbow trout and catfish. The researchers determined that these attack B cells account for more than 30-40% of all immune cells in fish, while phagocytic cells only make up a small portion of the total number of immune cells in mammals. Further research also showed that a significant portion of amphibian B cells retained their digestive traits.

"The immune systems of amphibians and fish are far less advanced than ours," Sunyer said. "When you only have a rudimentary adaptive immune system, it helps to have more phagocytic cells to compensate, which is what has served fish so well over the last 400 million years." In the past, research on the immune systems of more primitive species has paved the way to the discovery of new molecules and pathways that are critical to the immune response in humans and other mammals. B cells themselves, for example, were first discovered in chickens in the 1960s. According to Sunyer, the Penn findings are not only important for understanding the evolution and function of immune cells in fish but also may point out to novel roles of B cells in mammals. At this point, we cannot rule out the possibility that small subpopulations of phagocytic B cells, perhaps remnants of those present in fish, are still present in mammals, Sunyer said.

Their findings also have an agricultural implication. The current vaccines given to farmed salmon, for example, appeal to the fish's adaptive immune response, which this research has now shown to be a smaller part of the overall fish immune system than previously thought.

"If we work to create vaccines that encourage phagocytic B cell to respond to infection, then we would play to the strengths of fish immunity," Sunyer said. "In the long term, farming is a better, more environmentally sound approach to fishing, so better vaccines may make the practice more financially attractive to fisherman and less destructive to fish populations."

There is little doubt that, despite the behavioral differences, the fish B cells represent a less advanced version of mammalian B cells. Sunyer found the very cellular structures that medical science has used to define B cells in humans to be present in fish B cells, which is why they are able to label them as B cells in the first place.

"Here we have a clear picture of where one part of the immune system, primitive phagocytes, adapted over time to serve a more complex role as part of the immune system that humans enjoy today, Sunyer said. There is still much we can learn about our own health through the ongoing study of immune system evolution among all organisms. Funding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation and United States Department of Agriculture.

Study shows consumers have difficulty judging fish quality

Fishupdate.com

September 25

MANY consumers think it is difficult to judge the quality of fresh fish, according to a study by Norwegian research institute Fiskeriforskning.

The findings show that consumers often don't know what characteristics they should look for to assess how fresh the fish is.

In the test, 45 consumers assessed tray-packed fillet products of salmon and cod, the way they are found in the grocery shops.

The assessments were done six times, from when the fish was two days old until it was 14 days old. For the assessments, the plastic film over the fish was removed so that the participants could also smell the fillets.

Fiskeriforskning's study shows that the consumers had very different perceptions about the quality. Some judged the products as inedible when they were only two days old. The test also showed that other consumers assessed the same fish as very good, even after 12 days' storage.

The results show that the average assessment corresponds well with the results from the technical measurements. But the strongly contradictory assessments show that fresh fish is a difficult area for many.

"The experiences from the test show that many consumers don't know what kind of criteria they should use to assess the quality of a fish fillet," says Senior Scientist Margrethe Esaiassen who, together with Scientists Sjurdur Joensen and Jens Østli, is responsible for the test.

Earlier research shows that consumers who don't know how they should assess a product's quality bring in other conditions of the product when they assess it.

"When the consumers are unsure, they can base their choices on conditions that really have nothing to do with freshness", Østli points out.

For example, the fish pieces in the packages can be of different size and there may be colour shades between the pieces. The consumers can also vote down the product because it has blood stains, bone remnants or scales from the fish.

"Precisely because the consumers are unsure, it becomes essential that the product stands out as flawless. It can be decisive for whether they buy fish or choose other foods," says Margrethe Esaiassen.

Supermarket chain launches fish traffic light scheme

Fishupdate.com

September 26

THE supermarket group J Sainsbury has joined the list of giant UK retailers supporting fish sustainability - with a novel scheme of their own.

The company is reported to be ready to adopt a traffic light scheme on all its fresh fish products to tell customers that buying them will not harm stocks.

A green, amber or red tag will be used to indicate the scarcity or over supply level of a particular kind of fish and whether any of them are endangered species.

Sainsbury's sources much of its fish from supplies on both banks of the Humber and their big sellers in store are Icelandic or Norwegian caught cod, and haddock, along with prawns and farmed salmon- off of which should carry a green tag.

The supermarket group has said it will only display green or amber-fish from later this year which could cost it over £1-million in lost sales of other species. To avoid confusion with a separate traffic-light scheme it uses to warn shoppers about the nutritional value of their purchases, the colour coding will appear on its website and on its fish counters rather than on the front of its packaging.

The environmental group Greenpeace, which yesterday criticised Unilever claiming that some fish used by Birds Eye could be illegally caught in the Baltic. has welcomed the move and said other supermarket groups should follow Sainsbury's example.

Both Waitrose and Marks & Spencer have adopted an ethical policy saying they only purchase fish from sustainable sources, usually Icelandic or Norwegian cod and haddock. And Young's have ordered their buyers not to purchase fish from trawlers that operate illegally and have linked up to a Norwegian coastguard black list of vessels to avoid such a possibility. And yesterday Wal-Mart which owns the Asda group in the UK and which is world’s biggest retailer, has just launched a programme to encourage and promote the sustainability of fisheries, forests and farmlands, as well as economising on energy use and reducing waste, in a bid to persuade its customers to go green.

Sainsbury's is thought to have devised the sector's most rigorous checklist to help it determine whether it was buying fish from sustainable sources. It came up with its new scheme after it had to drop its goal of selling only fish certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, the pressure group, by 2010 because it realised that not enough fisheries would carry the requisite certification in time.

Earlier this month, the National Consumer Council criticised supermarkets for not making it easier for shoppers to buy sustainable fish. The issue has become one of the hot topics in the battle to be Britain's "greenest" grocer.

Week Ending Friday October 6:

Invasive "Walking" Fish Not Wreaking Havoc Yet, Scientists Say

Brian Handwerk

for National Geographic News

October 3

The infamous snakehead, once dubbed the "Frankenfish," is in the U.S. to stay, experts say. Fortunately, the Asian import seems to be coexisting peacefully with native species—for now.

The Potomac River, which runs through West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., on its way to the Atlantic, has seen a thriving population of snakeheads arise after several of the fish were released into Virginia's Dogue Creek in Fairfax County.

But so far the snakeheads appear to have had little discernable impact on the native ecosystem, to the relief of scientists and anglers alike.

"We have not seen any adverse effects," said fisheries biologist Steve Owens, with Virginia's Department of Game and Inland Fisheries in Fredericksburg.

But surveys also show that northern snakehead populations are booming in the Potomac.

The aggressive predators are appearing in more locations and in far greater densities than they did just last year.

Snakeheads now occupy at least 15 miles (24 kilometers) of the Potomac River and its tributaries.

The fish frequent large swaths of weedy shallows—making eradication efforts almost impossible.

Steve Minkkinen coordinates the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's snakehead control and management plan from Annapolis, Maryland.

"In places where they've had an introduction and they've established a beachhead, like snakeheads in the Potomac, we don't have any track record for being able to eradicate aquatic species like that," he said.

Worrying for Nothing?

Alien species can wreak havoc in ecosystems that evolved without them by outcompeting—or outright eating—native inhabitants.

Early reports, which suggested that snakeheads could cover significant overland distances and spread from one body of water to the next, were especially worrisome.

But fears of the "walking fish" appear unfounded, experts say. Although snakeheads do breathe air and can survive several days out of the water, the species present in the U.S. cannot travel overland.

"They are either going to swim to where they are going to get to, or, unfortunately, people can end up putting them in other places. That's the only way they could have gotten into the Potomac," Minkkinen said.

Fears for the safety of the river's bass populations have also, so far, been unrealized.

Anglers prize Potomac bass (which are also a non-native species). The fish are top predators that scientists fear could suffer from direct conflict with snakeheads.

But fishers and scientists alike report no noticeable decline in bass numbers to this point.

Opportunity to Learn

Though snakeheads may be in the Potomac to stay, wildlife managers still hope to prevent the spread of the fish to other watersheds.

The key, they say, is understanding their quarry.

Much snakehead behavior and biology remains unknown, at least in the Western world, so the Potomac population serves as a live laboratory for research.

"I think we'd better use [the Potomac] as a place to learn what [the snakeheads'] impacts are going to be and learn about their general biology and behavior," Minkkinen said.

"Once we understand what their impacts are on the Potomac, we'll better understand what their impacts might be in other parts of the United States," he continued.

"Unfortunately they've been released in a huge watershed with thousands of acres of what looks like perfect habitat. I don't think we've begun to understand how well they are going to do.

"It will really be decades before we know the full impact."

Across the Ocean

Those control efforts appear to be too late for at least two other states.

Snakeheads, also known as mudfish, are an Asian delicacy. Live specimens, though banned in the U.S. since 2002, are treasured by customers at North American Chinese markets.

The fish that gave rise to the Potomac snakeheads, for example, may have been released after purchase from nearby Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown.

And similar acts may have spawned other snakehead footholds in the U.S.

A South Florida population of a different species of snakehead appeared during much the same time period as the Potomac invasion.

"The first bullseye snakehead showed up in a suburb of Fort Lauderdale in the year 2000," said Walter Courtenay Jr., a biologist and snakehead expert with the U.S. Geological Survey in Gainesville, Florida.

"They are in the canals and ponds—which spread all over Southeast Florida like a road map."

Courtenay reports that Florida populations, like their northern counterparts, appear to be growing in number, and their impact on native species remains unknown.

And the northern snakehead may be establishing another beachhead in Pennsylvania.

The fish are known to inhabit two south Philadelphia ponds that drain into the Schuylkill River near its confluence with the Delaware River.

One fisher has already reported a confirmed snakehead catch in the Delaware.

Rare desert fish appears to make comeback in Devil's Hole

Las Vegas Review-Journal

September 30

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Federal wildlife officials say the population of Devil's Hole pupfish appears to be rebounding.

After an all-time low count in April of 38 pupfish in the water-filled limestone cave near Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, biologists counted 85 of the rare desert fish on Sept. 23, officials announced Friday.

Devil's Hole, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only place on the planet that this population of pupfish is known to exist in the wild.

The increased count means the fragile population appears to be growing two years after a mishap involving fish traps killed about one-third of the population. It also comes two months after snails infested isolated reserve populations at a man-made habitat in the refuge and in a spring-fed concrete tank near Hoover Dam.

"We're not out of the woods yet, if you will," said Bob Williams, Nevada's field supervisor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"Eighty-five is still below where we'd like to be," he said. "We'd like numbers to be 200 to 250."

The higher figures are close to what divers routinely had been counting at Devil's Hole in the years before a flash flood on Sept. 11, 2004, washed a tub of glass fish traps into the hole, killing off 80 pupfish, or about one-third of the population at the time.

As for the continued work on propagating new stocks in captivity at Willow Beach National Fish Hatchery on Lake Mohave, Williams said there has been "limited success."

Four Devil's Hole pupfish larvae that were hatched at the Willow Beach facility have survived to the juvenile stage, he said.

"While this is a limited success in the rearing of Devil's Hole pupfish in captivity, it is one step closer to successful recruitment of adult fish," federal wildlife officials said in a prepared statement late Thursday.

As for the preserves, or refugia, that were affected by snails, Williams said both the Hoover Dam tank and the Point of Rocks habitat in Ash Meadows have been cleaned out and rehabilitated.

Diet of fish instead of meat found to lower risk of colon polyps

Mainichi Daily News - Interactive

September 29

People who are told to eat fish instead of meat and cut down on vegetable oil intake, consuming a more traditional Japanese diet, are 20 to 30 percent less likely to develop colon polyps, abnormal growths that can turn into cancer, a research team has found.

Nagoya City University professor Shinkan Tokudome and other researchers detected the lower rate of polyps in a study on 206 people between their 50s and 70s who had had colon polyps removed at the university between 1996 and 2004. The results of the study were announced Thursday at a Japanese Cancer Association conference being held in Yokohama.

Researchers divided the 206 patients into two groups using lots. The 104 people in one group were told every three months to eat fish instead of meat as often as possible and to avoid tempura and other fried food. The remaining 102 people were given only general instructions to cut down on the fat in their diets.

When examinations were carried out two years after the patients were first issued instructions, 27 out of 74 patients (36 percent) who underwent examinations in the general instruction group were found to have developed polyps. In comparison, only 26 out of 91 examined patients (29 percent) in the group that was told to eat fish instead of meat had developed polyps. When statistics for the people who didn't undergo examinations were included, researchers reached the conclusion that polyps could be reduced by 20 to 30 percent through the fish diets and other measures.

Examination of the polyps showed that there was a higher percentage of polyps close to malignant cancer in those who were given only general instructions to reduce the fat in their diets. After one year, however, examinations showed that there were no differences in the rate of polyps.

Many cases of colon cancer are caused by polyps, and Tokudome said the research could help reduce the number of cases.

"With proper exercise and diet improvements, cases of colon cancer could probably be halved," Tokudome said. (Mainichi)

Edited October 8, 2006 by Flattieman

[mrmoshe]

Keep 'em coming Flattieman.

I just love reading these wierd and wonderful fishy news bits.

You must be digging like a coal miner to find some of them.

A great new feature for Fishraider.

Pete.