Baselines, Baselines, Baselines

Three shifting baselines to note today:

1) An article in today's New York Times by Andrew Revkin discusses how "scientists are setting baselines to gauge future effects on the seas." The article is a nice summary of some of the latest attempts to document the decline in ocean health even if it's not brimming with lots of new facts. This example Revkin cites is a perfect shifting baseline:

In the 1970s, I worked summers for the Rhode Island marine fisheries agency. At one point, I was tagging lobsters as part of an effort to find ways to revive depleted populations. A crusty old custodian in the laboratory, Jim Pimentel, reminisced about how different things had been a few decades earlier.

"We used lobsters for cod bait," Mr. Pimentel said.

2) In other news, PLoS Biology just published a paper by husband-wife team and Shifting Baselines favorites Jeremy Jackson and Nancy Knowlton called Shifting Baselines, Local Impacts, and Global Change on Coral Reefs. Unlike terrestrial ecosystems, particularly forests, which have been the subject of decades of study,...

...the situation is very different for the oceans, because degradation of entire ecosystems has been more pervasive than on land [3] and underwater observations began much more recently. Monitoring of benthic ecosystems is commonly limited to small intertidal quadrats, and there is nothing like the high-resolution global monitoring network for tropical forests for any ocean ecosystem. This lack of a baseline for pristine marine ecosystems is particularly acute for coral reefs, the so-called rainforests of the sea, which are the most diverse marine ecosystems and among the most threatened.

3) (Thought I'd save the weirdest for last:) According to last week's Fish Radio with Laine Welch from Seafood.com News, we're reminded that making farmed fish taste like the wild thing is the latest investment by the seafood industry. HQ Sustainable Maritime Industries, one of the largest tilapia growers, has created sea-flavored tilapia with a secret mix of flavoring compounds and other high tech methods to manipulate its farmed fish to taste like wild pollock. The company wants to break the hold that Alaska pollock has in the fast food and fish stick markets by better imitating the taste of wild fish. What's more, is that pollock is only in fish sticks because cod collapsed! (Pollock also took over for haddock and redfish.) Tilapia to taste like pollock to imitate cod and crab, just another shifting baseline...

More like this

There are a bunch of new papers in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine and, somewhat out of usual schedule, in PLoS ONE. So, check out these and then look around for more: Does Mutation Rate Depend on Itself: Many a research paper, textbook chapter, and grant proposal has begun with the phrase "…
In today's New York Times Magazine, there is a great short article on Fish-Flavored Fish to confuse your logic and your tastebuds. To feed demand from the fast food industry (who needs the fishy flavor before they deep fry) one aquaculture company has come up with a way to put the fishy flavor in…
...make that baselines. Check out these stories from the last week alone. A perennial favorite: high hopes for hagfish Fishermen on Canada's East Coast are now considering harvesting hagfish and sea cucumber. Once the center of the cod industry, East Coast fishermen have already turned to sea…
Earlier this year supermarkets removed monkfish from their menus admist concerns about depleted populations. Now, thanks to shifting baselines, monkfish is not overfished after all. According to an article at Seafood.com News published on Friday: A new monkfish stock assessment has concluded that…

Andy Revkin also links here from a post on his blog dot earth last night tied to the sci-times piece. The post, entitled 'Our Exhausted Oceans' specifically mentions shifting baselines in terms of fisheries.

Any news on when it will taste like chicken?

The authors found that the frequencies of allergic and IgE-associated allergic disease and sensitization were similar in the children who had received probiotic and those whoâd gotten placebo. Although there appeared to be a preventive effect at age 2, there was none noted at age 5. Interestingly, in babies born by cesarean section, the researchers found less IgE-associated allergic disease in those who had received the probiotic.

The authors found that the frequencies of allergic and IgE-associated allergic disease and sensitization were similar in the children who had received probiotic and those whoâd gotten placebo. Although there appeared to be a preventive effect at age 2, there was none noted at age 5. Interestingly, in babies born by cesarean section, the researchers found less IgE-associated allergic disease in those who had received the probiotic.

The authors found that the frequencies of allergic and IgE-associated allergic disease and sensitization were similar in the children who had received probiotic and those whoâd gotten placebo. Although there appeared to be a preventive effect at age 2, there was none noted at age 5. Interestingly, in babies born by cesarean section, the researchers found less IgE-associated allergic disease in those who had received the probiotic.