A few buddhists bought $7000 worth of live eels, frogs, and turtles for sale in New York City's Chinatown today and set them free in the polluted Passaic River of New Jersey (not exactly seafood heaven). Read the full story here.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
.Imagine, you're standing in line at an airport security checkpoint, waiting for your shoes to be searched, when you notice something strange about the gentlemen in front of you. Their carry-on luggage is croaking It could happen. In fact, it did happen, as herpetologist Joseph R. Mendleson and Ron…
Who: Surimi
Here Spanish surimi poses as baby eels, which have been overfished (photo courtesy of M. Hirshfield).
What: A pulverized fish product that has been shaped, texturized, and flavored to resemble some other fish product. Gobal surimi production is estimated to be between 550,000 and 600,…
Image Source: UA News, Brian Curry, Rutgers.
It is easy to get lost in a crowd, especially in an area as densely packed as New York. Scientists from UCLA, Rutgers University, UC Davis and The University of Alabama have discovered a new species of frog in just that region! The frogs were found in…
The New York Times has a nice investigative piece on mercury levels in your local urban sushi parlors that briefly restored my faith in mainstream science journalism. The Times performed what you might call a guerilla science action, hiring a pair of local professors to help to analyze bluefin tuna…
This was a national concern when I was in Singapore too - this ritual is a bit of an invasive species minefield.
There could be problems with invasive species, but I think most of the creatures would die or just become a stinking mass of fish food. What a wasted effort.
I live in Taiwan, and there's actually an industry of people who capture wild birds (many of whom die in the process) so Buddhists can release them.
What I'm wondering is where these eels, frogs and turtles were originally caught, and whether there are any regulations about that. What the buddhsts did, bless their hearts, is a wasted effort, and a sad one, but it sounds as though the animals have a chance of living. hopefully they won't cause ecosystem chaos, but since the polluted Passaic River is such a shifted baseline already, my thoughts are that we'll just wait and see what happends since no major ecosystem crisis is at hand. At least the article didn't make it sound that way. Come on, you never wanted to buy a fish at the fish market and set it free when you were little? I actually "raised" clams in a bowl with morten-salt water- for a couple of days...
The biggest problem with this is that it actually encourages the market for live animals. If you don't want people to sell them, the trick is to get people to not buy them. That said, I wish I was there; I'm sure it was a beautiful moment.
The anecdote about Taiwan is really interesting...
Having just gone to Vancouver's Chinatown last night, I can attest to the strong market for live animals. I watched (guiltily) as the woman behind the counter bashed in the head of the sole I had to buy for a fishprinting demonstration today and thought: maybe it's better consumers watch life disappear before their eyes (in the live fish market or otherwise) because perhaps the value and reality of life is then greater (rather than the disattached purchase of frozen chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs).
What the buddhsts did, bless their hearts, is a wasted effort, and a sad one, but it sounds as though the animals have a chance of living. hopefully they won't cause ecosystem chaos, but since the polluted Passaic River is such a shifted baseline already, my thoughts are that we'll just wait and see what happends since no major ecosystem crisis is at hand.