Tag Archives | Fish

Study Suggests Psychiatric Drugs In Water Supply Are Altering Fish Behavior

By JacobSloan on February 23, 2013 in News 6

Anxiety medications flushed down toilets in our pee causing heightened appetite and boldness in fish. Soon the global water supply will be a giant soup of antidepressants. Via the Los Angeles Times:

Pharmaceuticals may be affecting the behavior of wild fish as [the drugs] filters out of our bodies, through our toilets and into treated wastewater that is released into natural water sources, according to a new study.

The findings, which examined the effect of trace levels of the anti-anxiety medication oxazepam on wild European perch, have implications for the survival rates of fish and the delicate food web in aquatic ecosystems.

Scientists have known for years that such “micropollutants” end up in natural waterways like streams and rivers after being flushed through human systems into wastewater. But current research hasn’t really looked at whether psychotherapeutic drugs can affect the behavior of aquatic creatures.

The researchers’ findings could well reflect reality in waters worldwide: Their low concentrations in the lab were roughly equivalent to levels found in wild fish in the River Fyris in Sweden.

… Read the rest

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Global Warming May Shrink Size Of Fish 24% By 2050

By majestic on October 1, 2012 in News 12

Should we expect fishermen to try to find ways to stop greenhouse gas emissions from their boats? Doubtful, but if the warming trend continues, the average size of their catch is going down, down, down. Via Live Science:

Warming temperatures could lead to smaller fish in the world’s oceans, according to new research.

Based on a study of more than 600 species from around the globe, researchers from the University of British Columbia found that many fish won’t be able to keep up their body weight as the water warms. The scientists projected that the average maximum body size for the world’s fish could decline by up to 24 percent by 2050.

“We were surprised to see such a large decrease in fish size,” the study’s lead author, William Cheung, said in a statement. “Marine fish are generally known to respond to climate change through changing distribution and seasonality. But the unexpectedly big effect that climate change could have on body size suggests that we may be missing a big piece of the puzzle of understanding climate change effects in the ocean.”…

[continues at Live Science]… Read the rest

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Fukushima Tuna Sushi Now Being Served?

By majestic on May 29, 2012 in News 10

In 2008 the New York Times reported that

“laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.”

If you’re still eating tuna, you can also now start worrying about radiation poisoning, courtesy of the nuclear geniuses from Fukushima, Japan. Report via Reuters:

Low levels of nuclear radiation from the tsunami-damaged Fukushima power plant have turned up in bluefin tuna off the California coast, suggesting that these fish carried radioactive compounds across the Pacific Ocean faster than wind or water can.

Small amounts of cesium-137 and cesium-134 were detected in 15 tuna caught near San Diego in August 2011, about four months after these chemicals were released into the water off Japan’s east coast, scientists reported on Monday.

That is months earlier than wind and water currents brought debris from the plant to waters off Alaska and the U.S.

… Read the rest

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Mutant Fish From The BP Oil Spill

By JacobSloan on April 19, 2012 in News 14

Two years later, scientists say they have never seen anything like the creatures swimming in the Gulf of Mexico, Al Jazeera reports:

“I’ve never seen this,” he said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities. Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.

“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities.

… Read the rest

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Rising CO2 ‘Driving Fish Crazy’

By Good German on January 19, 2012 in News 20

Photo: Nick Hobgood (CC)

Via Common Dreams:

New research shows the disastrous consequences the world’s rising carbon dioxide levels are having on ocean life.

A team of researchers from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University published their findings in the journal Nature Climate Change. They document how elevated CO2 is “driving fish crazy.”

The Australian Associated Press reports that the new research point to ocean problems beyond acidification. From Professor Phillip Munday, one of the researchers:

”We’ve now established it isn’t simply the acidification of the oceans that is causing disruption, as is the case with shellfish and plankton with chalky skeletons. But the CO2 itself is damaging the fishes’ central nervous systems.”

Agence France-Presse reports:

The team began by studying how baby clown and damsel fishes performed alongside their predators in CO2-enriched water.

They found that while the predators were somewhat affected, the baby fish suffered much higher rates of attrition.

… Read the rest

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Three-Eyed Fish Caught Outside a Nuclear Power Plant

By ralph on October 28, 2011 in News 8

The Simpsons called it … via Geekologie:

Seen looking like about 40 fish sticks, a group of fishermen caught this three-eyed Simpsons ‘blinky’ fish in a lake near a nuclear power plant in Argentina. Jealous cyclops shark is jealous! Per Babel Fish (how appropriate!) translation:

“We were fishing and we took the surprise to remove this rare unit. As it were at night then we did not realize, but later it watched it to one with a lantern and it saw that it had a third eye”, elated Julian Zmutt, one of the fishermen. Zmutt assured that it is the first time that happens to him and that the finding began to worry to the population because “it begins to speak of the nuclear power station.”

Not gonna lie, I’d probably err on the side of safety and just not fish in the lake by the nuclear power plant. Bathe, sure, but I’ve always wanting a glowing peen that could guide me to the bathroom at night without having to turn on any lights.

… Read the rest

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Earth’s Oceans On Brink Of Mass Extinction In One Generation

By JacobSloan on July 27, 2011 in News 72

Clear the ocean of all of those pesky fish, and then we can put all sorts of cool things down there. Via the Independent:

The speed and rate of degeneration of the oceans is far faster than anyone has predicted; many of the negative impacts identified are greater than the worst predictions; the first steps to globally significant extinction may have already begun.

The world’s oceans are faced with an unprecedented loss of species comparable to the great mass extinctions of prehistory, a major report suggests today.

The seas are degenerating far faster than anyone has predicted, the report says, because of the cumulative impact of a number of severe individual stresses, ranging from climate warming and sea-water acidification, to widespread chemical pollution and gross overfishing.

The coming together of these factors is now threatening the marine environment with a catastrophe “unprecedented in human history”, according to the report, from a panel of leading marine scientists.

… Read the rest

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Hey Smokers, You’re Killing The Fish

By majestic on April 29, 2011 in News 38

Photo: Sillyputtyenemies (CC)

It turns out that fish are also helpless victims of smokers. No joke, as reported by Jeffrey Kluger for TIME:

For smokers, the world has always been one big ashtray, with cigarettes flicked away pretty much anywhere. That’s especially true now, since smokers are increasingly forbidden to light up in restaurants, office buildings and even new no-smoking condos. In the great river of litter human beings create each year, so tiny a thing as a cigarette butt hardly seems to amount to much. But with the world’s smokers burning through a breathtaking 5.6 trillion cigarettes per year — 4.5 trillion of which are simply tossed away outside after they’re smoked — little things add up fast. That, as it turns out, can be especially dangerous for one type of nonhuman critter: fish.

About a third of all of the trash found on U.S. shorelines consists of cigarette butts.

… Read the rest

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Fish For Dinner? Bring Your Geiger Counter

By majestic on April 9, 2011 in News 2

Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times

I ate sushi last night at the extraordinary Japanese restaurant Sushi of Gari. Now that I’ve read this story by William Neuman and Florence Fabricant in the New York Times I’m wishing I’d brought along a Geiger counter. The photo is essential, so NYT, we hereby claim fair use:

Eric Ripert, the chef of Le Bernardin, the high temple of seafood in Manhattan, bought a new kitchen gadget a few days ago: a radiation detector.

“I just want to make sure whatever we use is safe,” said Mr. Ripert, whose staff is using the device to screen every item of food that enters the restaurant, regardless of its origin. He has also stopped buying fish from Japan, which means no high-quality, farm-raised hamachi and kampachi for raw seafood dishes.

“Nobody knows how the currents will carry the contaminated water,” he said.

Despite assurances by health officials that radiation from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan is unlikely to show up in the food supply, worries about contaminated foods are growing among consumers, businesses and governments across the globe.

… Read the rest

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As Fish Die Off, Jellyfish To Dominate Earth’s Oceans

By JacobSloan on January 14, 2011 in News 12

Around the globe, fish populations are declining while the number of jellyfish is exploding. Climate change may be “turning back the clock to the Precambrian world, more than 550 million years ago, when the ancestors of jellyfish ruled the seas,” writes Yale Environment 360. Bow down to our future gelatinous overlords:

The world’s oceans have been experiencing enormous blooms of jellyfish, apparently caused by overfishing, declining water quality, and rising sea temperatures. Now, scientists are trying to determine if these outbreaks could represent a “new normal” in which jellyfish increasingly supplant fish.

The Nomura’s jellyfish is a monster to be reckoned with. It’s the size of a refrigerator and can exceed 450 pounds. For decades the hulking medusa was rarely encountered in its stomping grounds, the Sea of Japan.

Then something changed. Since 2002, the population has exploded six times. In 2005, a particularly bad year, the Sea of Japan brimmed with as many as 20 billion of the bobbing bags of blubber, bludgeoning fisheries with 30 billion yen in losses.

… Read the rest

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