The Cure for Planetary Amnesia
Jennifer Jacquet is a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. She works closely with Dr. Daniel Pauly, who coined the term Shifting Baselines, the syndrome on which this blog focuses.
Josh Donlan is a conservation scientist and a Visting Fellow at Cornell University. He often hides out in the backcountry of the Teton Mountains, pondering bygone giant beavers and ground sloths. He also is also the founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and has a habit of restoring remote islands.
April 2008: Randy Olson and the Puget Sound Partnership release the flash video Shifting Baselines in the Sound.
April 18, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Market Inefficiencies: Why Do We Waste Good Fish on Pigs?" at a forage fish workshop hosted by the Marine Fish Conservation Network.
April 15, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a invited talk in New York at Wildlife Conservation Society's annual meeting, Gateways to Conservation 2008: The State of the Wild.
April 5, 2008: Randy Olson delivers the Claude Bernard Distinguished Lecture at the American Physiological Society meeting in San Diego, titled, "Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking substance in an age of style."
March 15, 2008: Josh Donlan is selected as a 2008 Kinship Conservation Fellow. He will join 17 others from around the world to explore business and economic tools for biodiversity conservation gains.
March 6-13, 2008: Josh Donlan co-directs a working group at the US National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara. The group is exploring biodiversity offsets and market-based instruments as solutions for biodiversity-fishery bycatch offsets.
Mar. 25-27, 2008: Randy Olson presents his films and his "Don't Be Such a Scientist" lecture on science communication at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
Mar. 2008: Dr. Josh Donlan joins the Shifting Baselines blog.
Jan. 2008 Jennifer Jacquet launches the Eat Like a Pig Seafood Wallet Card
May 9, 2008
Category: Ocean View
Check it out! A researcher at the New England Aquarium was the first human known to witness a right whale birth. Read all about her experience and some of the conservation efforts to save this endangered species here.
Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 3:43 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Losing Track
Fishermen off of Oregon's coast could go broke sitting, or could go broke working, which is why they're trading in their salmon fishing gear and began outfitting their boats for prawns. This is a classic case of overfishing (as well as other factors that play into the salmon shortage, such as climate change and habitat degradation) and fishing down marine food webs--and the Oregon fleet is trying to diversify under the new regime. Read more on the conversion of a fishing fleet and hard times at the New York Times.
Steve Wilson refits his salmon boat to fish for prawns destined (hopefully) to high-end restaurants. Photo by Leah Nash for the NYTimes.
Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 7:26 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 7, 2008
Category: New Research • New Research • Seafood • Solutions • What the...?
We know fishmeal has problems. After posting an article back in January on the potential for bugmeal to replace fishmeal in farmed fish production, several readers asked some hard questions and wanted more information. I like readers to get what they want, so I spoke with Dr. Lou D'Abramo, who has a doctorate from Yale University and has been working to create more sustainable aquaculture systems for freshwater prawns. He is also the lead scientist studying how striped bass are responding to insect meal at Mississippi State University and got encouraging results. I pointed Dr. D'Abramo toward the original blogpost on the subject and he answered your thoughtful questions (and some of my own), which I have summarized here:
What are the insects raised on?
They were grain fed, probably with corn but they are looking to other waste materials to create a different fatty acid profile. You can't feed the corn directly to fish because carnivorous fish cannot deal with plant-based proteins as well as animal-based proteins.
Do the farmed fish grow as quickly?
Higher fat lipid contents (which tends to be the profile of grain-fed animals and insects) in formulated diets can retard growth rates. But we did get 80% of the growth rate that you would get with fishmeal.
Would bugmeal work for any species of fish?
It seems so.
What about bugmeal's Omega-3 content?
The insects in the experiment were chosen for their relative amino acids but, since you are what you eat, the insects were low in Omega-3 content due to their grain diet. However, the experimenters did add fishoil derived from menhaden to compensate for the lack of Omega-3s on the bugmeal. This is not ideal, however, since the industry suspects a shortage of oil (due to competing interests by cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and the pet industry) before fishmeal.
How will the price of bugmeal compare to fishmeal?
They hope to do more work on the economic analysis of mass culturing insects but D'Abramo believes bugmeal will be competitive even if it's more expensive due to its relationship to sustainability.
Areas of future research?
D'Abramo's lab would like to experiment with partial substitution of insect meal for fishmeal and see the results. They would also like to begin feeding the insects waste material from fish processing (which they cannot do currently because it's not in a form that would make operation successful, e.g., there would be issues with water quality). Dr. D'Abramo is very encouraged by the results so far and hopes to continue this research as well as his other work on fishmeal-free freshwater prawn systems.
Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 8:05 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 5, 2008
Category: Solutions
That's all there is to it. Check out the 60 Minutes profile on him that aired last night:
Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 4:58 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: What the...?
Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 3:17 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 3, 2008
Category: New Research • What the...?
What a rogue. An Antarctic fur seal was caught in the act trying to have sex with a king penguin. The incident wasn't too unlike a Paris Hilton escapade--the act lasted for 45 minutes, was caught on camera, and then sleazy still photos were strewn about by the press (but rather than US Weekly it was the Journal of Ethology and BBC News). It's not clear the attempt was successful but at least the penguin survived. Marine life these days... Read more on sexual coercion in animals here.
Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 7:49 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 2, 2008
Category: Ocean View
Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 4:00 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 1, 2008
Category: Losing Track
For a baseline to shift, there must be an element of amnesia. To be forgotten, you must first be acknowledged as existing. What of the unlucky mollusks then? Few people know much about these slimy, slow movers. A new article discusses the vertebrate bias in conservation and the grim future for mollusks, particularly terrestrial species.
The decline and loss of mammals, birds, and other vertebrate species is well documented and often brought to public attention as a consequence of recent human impact on environment. It is indeed alarming to realize that we have lost 135 bird species, 70 mammal species3, and that so many more are under threat because of human activities. However, as guilty we should feel for their loss, vertebrates represent less than half of the documented extinctions. Comparatively, invertebrate species (without a backbone) receive much less media attention, even though they comprise nearly 99% of all animal diversity4 and occupy a central role in the survival or maintenance of most ecosystems.
There are an estimated 80,000 to 150,000 described molluscan species and they are the 2nd most diverse animal group (after arthropods), thus representing a large part of evolutionary history that happened on our planet. But their extinction rates are not widely known mostly because if you don't know a mollusk population exists, it's even more difficult to know when it has declined or perished.
Luckily, there are several mollusk maniacs here at ScienceBlogs. Check out more about mollusks and the threats to their survival (such as invasive species) here.
Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 11:27 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: What the...?
There is evidence of hominids collecting seafood for at least 164,000 years. And then there is evidence (fishing spears found during a dig in the Congo) to suggest that humans began fishing at least 90,000 years ago. This week, there is new evidence to suggest orangutans are joining us in this occupation. Read the full article here.
Posted by Jennifer L. Jacquet at 12:26 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
