Friday Fishy News

[Flattieman]

Happy New Year, Raiders!

It's not 2007 'til the fish flies

By Lisa Wagness

theage.com.au

January 1

AS A 485-kilogram Waterford crystal ball begins its descent in New York's Times Square to mark the new year, a few hundred souls in Eastport, Maine, 900 kilometres to the north-east, will lift up their eyes to watch their own harbinger of 2007: a seven-metre sardine.

The sardine is a symbol for the easternmost city in the US, where canneries were once a booming industry.

The canneries are gone, and Eastport is known as an artsy seaside community. The sardine is a new New Year's Eve tradition.

"We thought it was intriguing enough, bizarre enough, that it might catch some interest," said Hugh French, director of Eastport's Tides Institute & Museum of Art, which was to lower the sardine for the countdown.

Eastport is not alone. Across the country, civic cheerleaders have come up with all manner of local versions of the Times Square countdown.

In North Carolina, Brasstown drops a live possum in a cage from the top of a country store.

In Pennsylvania, Lebanon drops a massive bologna.

In Florida, Key West boasts three drops — a conch shell, a pirate wench, and a drag queen named Sushi, who is ensconced in a red high-heeled shoe.

The ball-drop tradition harks back to the early 19th century, when a ball on top of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich dropped every day at 1pm, allowing ship captains to set their chronometers.

Times Square lowered its first New Year's ball in 1907.

In recent years, as First Night celebrations have flourished across the country, locals have infused the ball-dropping with local pride. The traditions often seem to make sense only to the people who live there.

"We are known for our bologna, so it's a real good fit," said Jody Kasperowicz, co-ordinator of Lebanon, Pennsylvania's Bologna Drop, which will feature a 68-kilogram, three-metre bologna.

To lower Eastport's fish, local artist Chris Barry and a colleague engineered a boom of welded steel pipe with a pulley system. Thursday's trial run went swimmingly, to Mr Barry's relief. "We would hate to have anybody decapitated by a sardine," he said.

Lightning, sea snakes and a fish in the face - just another day at sea

By Sunanda Creagh

smh.com.au

26 December, 2006

ICHI Ban skipper Matt Allen is no stranger to the hazards of sailing but nothing prepared him for the cold slap in the chops that floored him during last year's Rolex Trophy Series.

"All of a sudden, I was just laid flat on the deck. I didn't see anything coming at me," he says. The next thing he noticed was a terrible smell. "I opened my eyes and there was this enormous flying fish. It had jumped straight out of the water and hit me. There was blood everywhere but fortunately most of it was his."

Copping a fish in the face earned Allen a black eye but there are more perilous aspects of yacht racing.

"People have been picked up by ropes and thrown up in the air," he says. "We've often been sailing along with [deadly] sea snakes in the water, which is not scary until you start getting waves over the boats. You think, 'This wave may have a sea snake in it'."

On his first Sydney to Hobart race, a lightning strike knocked the skipper off the helm. Allen has even dislodged sharks from boat keels. And in the 2001 race, unusual atmospheric activity produced giant water spouts that shot up out of the sea.

"You wouldn't believe it could happen until you see it, it's like something straight out of Dorothy from Kansas," he says, adding that the spouts move along on unpredictable paths. "You think you're going to miss one and then all of a sudden it changes course. It can pull anything off the deck, including people."

Sunfish, which weigh up to 2300 kilograms, can cause serious damage to any boat that hits them, and collisions are all too common.

Ocean Skins, a Victorian yacht, went one better in the inaugural Melbourne to Vanuatu race this year, retiring with a damaged rudder after hitting a whale.

"It was a funny feeling; it was very soft," says skipper Tony Fowler. "We cut into him and just saw this huge tail splash out. He'd gone but it stopped the boat dead."

So he was understandably nervous when the yacht found itself sailing among a pod on the way up from Geelong for this year's Sydney to Hobart. "It looked like we were in the middle of the whale highway. I have never seen so many whales in my life," he says.

Fowler has also had waves dump dozens of squid on the deck, and watched his boat turn black with ink. But most terrifying are the two rogue waves he once encountered in Bass Strait.

"Just out of the blue it picks up from nowhere. You can feel the water sucking out from under you, building the momentum. We reckon the waves were as big as the boat, which is 47 foot (14.3m)," he says.

The waves didn't break and the boat managed to sail over them.

"It still put the fear of God into us," Fowler says.

Rogue waves are most dangerous when they break onto the boat, releasing huge amounts of energy and potentially smashing gear. Even sailing over them presents the possibility of falling into the trough behind.

Professor Michael Banner from the school of mathematics at UNSW has been developing a system that would allow meteorologists to forecast rogue waves. He knows about the damage they can do. "Have you ever seen The Perfect Storm? That's an exaggerated example of what could happen," he says.

Allen says danger is one thing but weird astral activity like the southern lights can really give seamen the spooks. "It really looks like the sky has turned all red, and sailors often worry about red skies," he says.

Superstition aside, Allen says the sight is surreally beautiful. "You might think it was quite romantic, if you weren't on a boat with 13 sweaty blokes."

Little fish, big medicine

Laboratories turn to the zebrafish for faster, cheaper drug research

By Stephen Heuser

Boston Globe, USA

December 25, 2006

CAMBRIDGE -- In a two-decade career in science, biologist Demian Park has prodded chicken embryos and manipulated the nerves of a fruit fly.

But for the last two months he has burrowed into a lab in an unmarked brick building, using $70,000 worth of equipment to perform complex heart exams on tiny silver-sided fish.

"This is completely unexpected," he said of his new project.

If it works, Park's heart test could help change the billion-dollar journey that pharmaceuticals take from research lab to medicine cabinet. With big-ticket drugs getting ever more expensive to develop, firms are pushing for new ways to sort good drugs from bad in a hurry. Park's employer, Phylonix Pharmaceuticals Inc. , is one of a handful of small biotechnology companies working not with lab rats or mice, but faster-growing, cheaper organisms that can be tested by the thousands.

At Phylonix, that creature is the zebrafish, a freshwater fish two inches long with glistening black-and-silver stripes. The zebrafish registers the effects of potential drugs, good or bad, much more quickly than lab rats or other more traditional test animals.

Park is trying to do something new: generate a complete electrocardiogram from a fish, a feat recently reported for the first time by Massachusetts General Hospital scientists. If it works, it could help Phylonix reveal a drug's troubling heart effects long before they show up in humans.

"I've always been interested in the heart," Park said. "But when I saw this, I thought it was great."

In rows of crisp blue tanks in a lab near Inman Square, Phylonix breeds thousands of zebrafish for its customers, feeding them a mixture of brine shrimp and fish flakes. Some employees sort tiny fish embryos into the wells of testing plates; others match males and females in breeding tanks, then pluck out the nearly invisible eggs after they settle to the bottom. Because zebrafish breed and develop quickly, Phylonix scientists can see results in days. In mice, it can take months.

Animal testing is a crucial, if controversial, part of drug research. Before it can be given to humans, every drug to reach the market is first tested on rodents, and often up the ladder to beagles and even monkeys. It is an expensive and time-consuming process, adding years to the decade-plus of development time that a new pill requires. It also exposes companies to the ire of animal-rights activists.

"Animal research is expensive, it's slow, and it requires a tremendous amount of regulatory compliance, but there's nothing that replaces a living system," said Alan Dittrich , president of the Massachusetts Society for Medical Research , which supports the use of animals in labs.

Some lab animals, such as mice, are so common that entire companies have sprung into being simply to breed and supply them. Charles River Laboratories International Inc., of Wilmington, sells millions of dollars' worth of research rodents a year, including a mouse that develops diabetes and a rat bred to have strokes.

But even smaller animals offer the promise of quicker answers to how well a potential drug might work. A number of large pharmaceutical companies have internal labs that use fish, fruit flies, and other creatures popular in research, but just a handful of small companies are trying to turn the tests into a viable business on their own.

One firm in Atlanta, Zygogen LLC , sells zebrafish that have been genetically altered to fluoresce as their bodies react, allowing quick automated testing of chemicals. A British company, DanioLabs , sells similar testing services. In Woburn, Cambria Biosciences LLC is using roundworms and fruit flies to test drugs for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurological diseases.

"Now that the genomes have been sequenced for all of these organisms, including humans, we've really been impressed by how similar they are to each other," said Leo Liu , a former Harvard researcher who founded Cambria in 1999.

Russ Lebovitz , a Houston medical entrepreneur who contracted with Phylonix to test drugs at his previous firm, said a drug developer can "literally save years" by using zebrafish for early tests of a potential pill.

"When we started with this in 2003, the people at the pharma companies mostly thought we were insane," said Lebovitz. "But as they began to see the results we were getting, I think they were impressed."

Partisans of the zebrafish, a growing cohort in academic research, point out its many advantages over other animals. A zebrafish is a vertebrate, more closely related to humans than faster-breeding worms and flies. Unlike a mouse, a young zebrafish is completely translucent. Scientists can look straight through its body and check out the organs without harming the fish. They can even take its pulse by counting heartbeats through a microscope.

Since it was founded in 1999 , Phylonix has grown slowly and still has only 20 employees. Its offices are part biotech company, part aquarium, with tanks of live brine shrimp and a charcoal filter system to bathe the fish in purified Cambridge city water.

Colleen Boggs , the chief caretaker, has worked with zebrafish since the early 1990s, and spent a decade at New England Aquarium before that. She estimates the tanks hold about 5,000 adult fish on a normal day, and the company can breed 8,000 to 10,000 a week if needed.

Once hatched, fish are painstakingly counted with tweezers under a microscope. If they're going to be part of a drug test, they're dropped into tiny wells in the sort of plate used for testing chemicals in batches, a process called "high-throughput screening." As fish are exposed to different amounts of a chemical, Phylonix can monitor how they respond.

Industry standards require the company to have an animal-welfare board, including a veterinarian, that meets to review experiments and determine if they're ethical. Sometimes the questions can be tricky, such as: Will the fish feel unnecessary pain?

Cofounder and chief executive Patricia McGrath said the company has had between 50 and 100 customers, and books about 60 percent of its revenue from commercial clients. The remaining 40 percent is from government grants. The company just won a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant to test the toxicity of industrial chemicals.

McGrath said it's too early to know if Phylonix has helped one of its clients identify a successful drug yet, but the fish have definitely caught some problems.

One company, for instance, had a potential drug to block blood-vessel growth in tumors, but it turned out to be a bit too effective. "It worked great," said McGrath, "but you killed all the fish."

Scientists uncover fish species

Galapagos sharks' evolution branched off 320 million years ago

By Matt Krupnick

Media News

December 30, 2006

It's amazing what you find lying around the bottom of the ocean, as St. Mary's College professor Douglas Long has discovered.

Long was part of a team of researchers who this year identified two new species of deep-sea fishes, unusual-looking sharks that set out on their own evolutionary path more than 320 million years ago.

The creatures — named the Galapagos and whitespot ghost sharks — were found more than 1,200 feet underwater near the Galapagos Islands in 1995, sucked through a vacuum tube into a research submarine. Long and his team spent more than a decade making sure they were new species before publishing their results in the journal Zootaxa in October and December.

"They've been on their own branch of the evolutionary tree since well before the dinosaurs," said Long, who has taught biology at St. Mary's since 1994. The 40-year-old Oakland resident also has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and researches at the California Academy of Sciences.

Even though he also has discovered several other species, identifying the new ghost sharks was a thrill, Long said

"You're looking at something that no one's ever seen before."

Among the first to actually see both new species was Long's Academy of Sciences colleague, John McCosker, who found the Galapagos ghost shark on his 50th birthday in 1995. Long, who examined both animals back in the Bay Area, honored his friend by giving the fish the Latin name Hydrolagus mccoskeri.

McCosker, 61, also found the whitespot ghost shark during the same expedition, along with more than a dozen other new species. The trip was funded by the Discovery Channel, which filmed the voyage for a 1996 documentary on the Galapagos Islands.

The funding allowed the crew to search parts of the ocean never seen before, turning up cat sharks, slime eels and other unusual animals.

The newly found ghost sharks differ in size and appearance from related species. The Galapagos ghost shark has an elongated body and a face resembling a rabbit's, while the whitespot ghost shark has distinctive spots above its fins.

"For an ichthyologist, it was like a kid at the candy store," McCosker said of his submarine trips. "It will be years before all those species are described."

Scientists who believe they have found a new animal often travel around the world to inspect similar specimens, Long said. Researchers worldwide generally find at least 75 new species of fish each year, and each one must be confirmed through careful research, he said.

"It takes a while to figure out if they are new species. There's a series of steps you have to go through."

The intervening years have not diminished the excitement of the first glimpses of the new species, McCosker said.

"It was a remarkable serendipity and it tickled me pink. I thought, 'What on earth is this doing here?'"

Fish Starving in Changing Reef

The Border Mail

December 28, 2006

FISH species on the Great Barrier Reef are starving to death because climate change is killing off their food source, an environmental study claims.

Rising sea temperatures have bleached more than 30 per cent of the world’s coral reefs, a five-year study by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies says.

As a result, smaller fish which would normally feed on live coral are dying off, which could throw the fish food chain out of balance, and consequently hinder local fishing and tourism operations.

The coral damage is predicted to double by 2030 if sea temperatures continue their warming patterns, the centre says.

The starving fish fail to breed and fail to migrate to thriving reefs.

The centre was set up last year in Townsville, Queensland, to study coral reefs over a five-year period.

Flattieman.