fish « Tikkunista!

Bird’s Eye: More horrible (though not surprising) news of the long term effects of corexit, the BP oil dispersant on the fisheries that once lived in the Gulf. Some glorious photos of tropical fish, and a marvellous BBC video of an osprey on the hunt.

* Gulf Seafood Deformities Alarm Scientists Al Jazeera

“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.” …Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.

Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.

Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp. “At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.

According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”

* The Most Beautiful Fish In The World Buzzfield

* The Osprey – The Ultimate Fisher The Presurfer

June 18th, 2010 Year 7, Issue 20

Jun-18-2010 | Comments (0)

Followups

* Fewer followups, as three major stories from last week return this week. But as a summary of the economic problems we focussed on in Europe, it would be hard to beat this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.

* Recovering Fish Stocks? The pirates off Africa’s Eastern coast have driven away illegal fishing trawlers, so fish stocks are recovering. In past years, illegal commercial trawlers parked off Somalia’s coast and scooped up the ocean’s contents. Now, fishermen on the northern coast of neighboring Kenya say, the trawlers are not coming because of pirates.“There is a lot of fish now, there is plenty of fish. There is more fish than people can actually use because the international fishermen have been scared away by the pirates,” said Athman Seif, the director of the Malindi Marine Association. Every cloud…

8. Naturally Creepy

Jun-11-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s-Eye: A newly discovered species, the handfish, seems halfway between fish and dry-land creatures. Caterpillars invade a British cemetery, for your viewing pleasure, and the nose leech will become the creature you’d least like to encounter personally. And though they’re not natural, 75 monsters have been hanging around the potential Tikkunista! list for way too long, and we’re getting scared, so they’re in here too.

* Nine Fish with Hands National Geographic

* Caterpillars Invade the Cemetary

* Nose-Dwelling Leech boingboing

* 75 Scariest Monster Artworks forCG

6. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

Jun-04-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s-Eye: As increasing evidence emerges of how endangered fisheries are worldwide, the World powers decide they want to continue to eat sushi. And for those of us who think that at least farmed fish are ok environmentally, Jonathan Safran Foer illuminates a few things.

* Fall In Fish Stocks Far Worse Than Feared The Independent

The dramatic decline of fish stocks around the British Isles is highlighted by a study showing that fishing fleets today have to work 17 times as hard to catch a given amount of fish than the largely sail-powered vessels of the late-19th century.

* Bluefin tuna ban collapses at UN AMERICAblog News

The EU became wobbly and Canada teamed up with Japan to knock this back….The arguments against the bluefin ban are ridiculous because the industry is already shattered. They’re arguing that it will damage a business that hardly has any life left because they’ve overfished and overfished leaving a fraction of the bluefin tuna left to hunt. Commercial fishing fleets never know when to stop fishing so it tends not to happen until nothing is left. At least in the past we could expect more common sense policies from Canada but those days seem to be gone as well.

* Consuming Blue Fin Tuna Is Like Barbecuing Pandas: Interview – Bloomberg.com

In her new book, ‘The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One,” Earle explains how close we are to a tipping point.

Lundborg: You say that consuming blue fin tuna is like eating snow leopards and pandas, so no one should eat tuna anymore?

Earle: Blue fins are the most at risk partly because they are the most desired. Yellow fins and others aren’t as depressed, but it doesn’t mean they’re not in trouble.

Lundborg: So what can we eat?

Earle: Think about the economics. To make a pound of chicken, it takes about two pounds of plants, sunlight and 7 months. Tuna is at the top of the food chain so it takes 10 to 100,000 pounds of plants for a pound of tuna. That’s not a good deal. Farmed catfish, tilapia, carp and certain mollusks are the best choices.

* The Truth About Fish Farming Jonathan Safran Foer Vegitarismo

Factory-farmed chickens, turkeys and cattle all suffer in fundamentally similar ways. So, it turns out, do fish. We tend not to think of fish and land animals in the same way, but “aquaculture” – the intensive rearing of sea animals in confinement – is essentially under- water factory farming.