new research
kbonham | February 19, 2013One of the things that bugs me most in pop-sci and woo-woo science is the obsession with "boosting" the immune system. The immune system is in a constant balancing act - tip it too far one way and even normally harmless bacteria become life-threatening. But tilt it too far in the other direction, and you can end up with things like allergies and autoimmunity. And some pathogens have learned to take advantage of your normal immune responses, meaning that "boosting" your immune system can sometimes do more harm than good. A good case-in-point is a recent paper published in PLoS Pathogens:
IL-7…
jjacquet | January 13, 2009We need to pay closer attention to how hunting and fishing regulations are set or we may end up with unintended negative consequences for the species we are trying to protect. This according to new research reported in The New York Times. We know that target species can react to increased predation by humans (which is far different from the type of predation that occurs in the wild, where predators prefer the young and dying). We saw this in the cod fishery when cod evolved to reproduce at younger ages and smaller sizes. Daniel Pauly, the father of shifting baselines, is also quoted in…
jjacquet | November 28, 2008Food is the name of the game this week (well, food, and trampling store employees on Black Friday). And friend and fellow Ph.D. student here at UBC, Jeremy Goldbogen (photographed with a minke whale jaw bone), has some new research out this week on the feeding habits of humpback whales and it dons the cover of the current issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology. Jeremy and his colleagues found that lunge-feeding requires a large amount of energy compared to other behaviors--humpback whales breathe three times harder after returning to the surface from a foraging dive than from singing…
jjacquet | October 30, 2008"A new global deal on climate change will come too late to save most of the world's coral reefs...major ecological damage to the oceans is now inevitable." This according to The Guardian, which reports the finding of a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. The authors of the study found that the risk posed by carbon pollution to coral and marine life could justify a carbon stabilisation goal "lower than what might be chosen based on climate considerations alone". I feel paralyzed by this type of news. The only thing I feel I could do is abandon all responsibility and spend the next…
jjacquet | October 16, 2008Say hello to delecata, a high grade specially filleted piece of North American farmed catfish. This new name was created with hopes of boosting the profile and profits of a struggling industry. In The New York Times Magazine, Paul Greenberg tells the story of U.S. southern fish farmers competing in a global marketplace and a catfish by any other name.
You can put lipstick on a catfish but it's still a catfish. A new name, though? That's another matter...
jjacquet | October 14, 2008Pollock, the poster child for sustainable fishing, appears to be on the brink of collapse. I have more on the state of Bering Sea pollock fishery in my guest post at the Gristmill...
jjacquet | October 12, 2008In 1992, Consumer Reports published an article titled, "The label said Snapper, the lab said baloney". Fifteen years later, the mislabeling of red snapper is, if anything, more widespread. A 2004 study in Nature showed 75 percent of red snapper sold in the U.S. is some other fish.
Menus offer up red snapper despite that it has been overfished for the last half-century. Red snapper mysteriously existing in restaurants but not in the sea is resolved by mislabeling, which prevents us from perceiving red snapper is actually in trouble. It's as if we are eating some ghost of bygone years, when…
jjacquet | October 8, 2008A lowdown of what's happening with the oceans and the people that care about them:
1) Dr. Jeremy Jackson delivers a lecture on the Brave New Ocean tonight at Harvey Mudd College.
2) Oceana is again running their Freakiest Fish contest. Check out their site and vote for your favorite freak fish. Currently the vampire squid is in the lead.
3)Another deep-sea dwelling fish that is "surprisingly cute" (and thus not up for freakiest fish) has been filmed for the first time by a Japan-UK team. It is suspected Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis is the deepest living fish found to date. Watch footage…
jjacquet | October 1, 2008I recently bought a new wooden toilet seat at Target for five dollars. Five dollars! It wasn't even on sale and I thought to myself, "What a steal!" I should have known that was probably, literally the case. My toilet seat was probably illegally logged in Russia. In this week's issue of The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian (who also wrote the great profile of Paul Watson) writes about the illegal logging market. The article is not quite online yet, but check out this short video where he discusses how a tree illegally logged from halfway around the world becomes a toilet seat at your…
jjacquet | September 28, 2008With jellies on the rise and overlapping with more and more people, it is good to know how they got their sting. According to some new research, it seems ancestor jellies might have gotten their defense capabilities from a bacterium via horizontal gene transfer. Read more at Nature.
jjacquet | September 13, 2008Focusing on subsidies rather than consumers likely to be better for fish and for small-scale fishermen
A couple weeks ago, Daniel Pauly and I got the paper Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-scale Fisheries published in the journal Conservation Biology. In our analysis, we try to demonstrate that conservationists attempts to encourage sustainable fisheries at the market level should place at least equal emphasis on eliminating harmful fisheries subsidies as on consumer-based approaches (e.g., wallet cards that advise on which fish to eat).
More emphasis on eliminating subsidies might…
jjacquet | September 1, 2008According to the BBC, a team of researchers discovered a new giant clam species in the Red Sea that may have been one of the first marine species over-exploited by humans. The team discovered fossil evidence to suggest the giant clam population plummeted at the same time humans appeared in the Red Sea area--125,000 years ago. Read the full story here.
jjacquet | August 26, 2008
Yep. Read up on the latest research on how we're wasting fish on snobby, fat cats in Australia's Herald Sun.
josh donlan | August 22, 2008Who killed the megafauna is one of science's greatest debates. Starting roughly 50,000 years ago, where and when humans show up around the globe, large animals disappear. First in Australia, later in North and South America, and finally on islands in the Pacific and New Zealand. Whether the main driving factor was man or climate has been a long-standing debate ever since Paul Martin put forth the overkill hypothesis in the late 1950s. Actually, there are two debates. First, were the megafaunal extinctions caused by humans, climate, or some combination of factors? Second, if humans did play a…
jjacquet | August 18, 2008Overfishing, eutrophication, acidification, and climate change are leading to what Dr. Jeremy Jackson describes as the rise of slime in the oceans. For some recent evidence, check out this invasive algae in Crystal RIver or this recent story about increase in jellyfish on the Jersey shores. According to the research published last Friday in Science, there are now more than 400 dead zones worldwide, double the number reported by the United Nations just two years ago. Ugh.
A new article by Dr. Jeremy Jackson, Ecological extinction and evolution in a brave new ocean, was published early…
jjacquet | July 24, 2008Check out some research that was presented (that I unfortunately did not get to see) at the Society for Conservation Biology conference in Chattanooga, TN. Here is what the scientist did: he gave consumers the option of eating caviar from a "rare" species of sturgeon or a "common" species of sturgeon. Most consumers, even before trying it, imagined they would like the "rare" eggs best. After eating it, 70% of consumers preferred the "rare" species. But here's the kicker: all the caviar was from farmed sturgeon. This means that certain rare species that are desired in luxury markets--…
jjacquet | July 16, 2008As Josh just mentioned, overfishing is an underestimated problem. Furthermore, new research from UBC Fisheries Centre economist Rashid Sumaila (and one of my esteemed committee-members!) shows that rising fuel costs may not keep fishers, big or small, off the water, to the extent that governments continue to subsidize fuel costs (which account for 60 percent the cost of fishing).
At present, fuel subsidies account for roughly 20 percent of the $34 billion in annual fisheries subsidies. These subsidies are taxpayer monies redirected to fishermen often in the form of grants, loans, tax…
josh donlan | July 15, 2008Nature reported last week about more bad news. Daniel Pauly along with SB's very own (Jennifer) and others reported on their new research that documents the underreported fishing impacts of artesianal fisheries around the world. The results are not pretty: the amount of overfishing is very often underreported, sometimes as much as three or four times. One aspect that is contributing to the problem is the fisheries agreements that high-income nations often have with low-income nations. Jennifer describes it as a Robin Hood in reverse, "Instead of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, it'…
jjacquet | July 11, 2008I am here in Ft. Lauderdale at the 11th International Coral Reefs Symposium, which only happens once every four years. It's a big deal and more than 3000 scientists have gathered to discuss coral reefs for the week. The news for coral reefs, as you might suspect, is grim (one scientist described them as the living dead--the zombies of the sea). But there is good news about the scientists involved in reef research.
Given that this is my first coral reef conference, my baseline is this week. But for scientists such as Jeremy Jackson from Scripps and Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller from the…
josh donlan | June 6, 2008550 cites will have populations of more than 1 million by 2015. 58% of the known human pathogens are zoonotic - they can jump between humans and animals. 371 people have been diagnosed with avian influenza as of March 2008, including 235 deaths. 5,000 western lowland gorillas have died from Ebola virus over the past several year. Visit Wildlife Conservation Society's State of the Wild website (or buy the book) to learn more about the state of the wild. You can also watch video presentations of the recent event in New York City.