The past month has seen some positive news on this front (aside from our recent grouper story), but we’re not advocating going fish-crazy! In fact, the first article we’re pointing to shows a disturbing graphic of changes in fish biomass in the northern Atlantic from 1900 to 2000. But as NPR’s Robert Krulwich says, perhaps we’ve already adjusted to these changes:

Maybe, deep down, we sense that some foods are no longer plentiful so we make it the fashion to eat less of them? Do we reset our appetites from generation to generation?

He illustrates the behavior change with two very different menus.

Speaking of menus and NPR, we recently found this Dan Barber TED Talk through NPR’s TED Radio Hour. If you haven’t watched it, you’ll never believe how absolutely beautiful fish farming can be. The Spanish fish farm he describes also purifies water and provides a sanctuary for birds!

DNA Fish Tales

A recent study in Current Biology used DNA to explore the effectiveness of marine reserves at protecting and sustaining fish. New Scientist has the details:

…with the use of new DNA profiling techniques, scientists have shown that by devoting less than a third of an area to a marine reserve network, you can double the number of juvenile fish that settle in the rest of the area.

These protected areas are actually replenishing other areas for commercial fishing. Do you think this study will affect policy to create more reserves?

Another recent study, this time in Nature Communications, describes using genetic markers to track down illegal catches in Europe. This technique can pinpoint the origin of fish so authorities know if similar-appearing fish are legal or illegal. ScienceNOW reports:

A €4 million pan-European project, launched in 2008 and called FishPopTrace, has devised a much-anticipated way to differentiate marine populations of the same species with up to 100% accuracy.

More Good News

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a report two weeks ago on the improvements of US fisheries. The news is mostly good: 86% of fishing stocks are not overfished. According to Discover’s 80beats blog, this is due to the Magnuson-Stevens Reauthorization Act of 2006:

The act states that each year NOAA must give status updates on all fish populations within 200 miles of the US Coast. If the fisheries are hurting, fishermen must stop catching those fish until their numbers recover.

Weird Fish Tale

Did you hear the one about the bottlenose dolphins that have helped Brazilian fishermen for over a hundred years? Weird, but true! They work together to gain a bigger catch! The research is published in Biology Letters; you can read more here or here.

Okay, with all of this research, we’ve finally made our seafood decision, but how shall we cook it? Luckily, the Pew Environment Group recently posted some “Recipes for Success” that share famous chefs’ takes on sustainable seafood. Num!

Do you have a fish tale? A good recipe? Please share it with us below!

Image: NOAA

Villy Christensen of the University of British Columbia (UBC) said, “Yes, there will be fish left, but it will be a very different ocean from the ones your parents and grandparents knew and even different from now.”

The biggest difference? Large, predatory fish will be gone.

In fact, over the last one hundred years, the population of these large, top-of-the-food-web fish has declined by two-thirds, half of that decline occurring only in the last 40 years. And that population continues to decline.

There will be many small fish left, but not necessarily the ones we eat.

He and his colleague, Reg Watson, also from UBC, are working with scientists, governments and NGOs to build a global database of fishing efforts to truly understand what’s going on in the world’s oceans.

Seventy-six million tons of fish are consumed each year, and Watson found that we are fishing harder for the same or less result. It’s possible that we’ve hit “peak fish,” according to Watson. Jacqueline Alder of the UN Environment Program in Kenya is working with the UBC group, looking at their models in terms of marine biodiversity and sustainability. She urged that we must reduce fishing efforts immediately to allow fish stocks to rebuild.

In addition, there was much discussion around the non-sustainability of using fish for feedstock in aquaculture and agriculture– fish we are not directly eating. The science and technology have to get better to use plant-based feedstock for fish farms.

Christensen stressed this is a large view of what’s going on in the entire ocean ecosystem, not just one area or species.

For more focused, local information, read our recent article on banning shark finning, and the San Francisco Chronicle had a devastating article last week stating that some of the fish in the Delta may be too far gone to save from extinction.

Image: Mila Zinkova/Wikimedia

Water on the Moon

NASA announced Thursday that not only did the LCROSS mission find water on the moon as was reported last fall, but it also found evidence that the lunar soil within shadowy craters is rich in useful materials, and the moon is chemically active and has a water cycle.

Some of the details from Universe Today:

The most abundant volatile in terms of total mass was carbon monoxide, then was water, the hydrogen sulfide. Then was carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane, formaldehyde, perhaps ethylene, ammonia, and even mercury and silver.

The silvery moon!

The crater examined contains more water than previously thought, too. From the New York Times:

If astronauts were to visit this crater, they might be able to use eight wheelbarrows of soil to melt 10 to 13 gallons of water. The water, if purified, could be used for drinking, or broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel — to get home or travel to Mars.

The many results are featured in six papers published in today’s issue of Science.

Fish in the Water

Eating seafood is getting trickier and trickier these days. (Have you ever tried to order sustainable sushi? Monterey Bay Aquarium’s excellent Seafood Watch has a great mobile app that can help you navigate these extremely rough waters.) But here’s some good news! Ordering seafood may get easier! Scientists actually want you to eat invasive species like Asian carp and lionfish in order to protect native species. Recipes, videos and info can be found within an article published this week in the New York Times.

Poop in the Water

Finally, in case you missed this publication in PLoS ONE last week—researchers have found that whale poop acts as an important fertilizer for the world’s oceans.  Here’s the poop on the findings from LiveScience:

Whales, by virtue of their nutrient-rich feces, play an important role in transporting nutrients from where they feed, in deep waters, up to the surface, where they often do their business and fertilize tiny, floating plants called phytoplankton.

Kind of makes sense when you think about it, right?

What science news did you find fascinating this week? Let us know below!

Image credit: Brown University/Peter H. Schultz and Brendan Hermalyn, NASA/Ames Vertical Gun Range

Environmental Groups Need Reform

An independent review panel reported to the United Nations early this week that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) should be fundamentally reformed. According to ScienceInsider, the review gave the IPCC

a solid B+ for its two decades of assessments of the global climate system. But the panel assembled by the InterAcademy Council, which is made up of science academies from around the world, says that there are plenty of areas in which IPCC could do better. Its 113-page report, issued today, calls for a new leadership structure with shorter terms, tighter review procedures, and better lines of communication.

The IPCC shared the Nobel Peace prize with Al Gore in 2007, but errors in a report that year, per the New York Times,

threatened to overshadow the United Nations’ message that climate change is a significant threat requiring urgent collective action.

Another organization formed to protect the environment, in this case marine fisheries, came under attack this week in the journal Nature. You’ll need a subscription to read the article, but the New York Times has a great summary of how the Marine Stewardship Council is “giving its stamp of approval to industrial fisheries that some scientists say are anything but environmentally sustainable.”

Evolutionary Teamwork

There were two recent stories in the news about creature self-sacrifice and evolution.

The first to break was about the idea of kin selection—wherein certain species have sterile members who take one for their relations, such as ants and bees whose workers do everything for the queen’s offspring and have none of their own. Last week scientists, including the venerable E.O. Wilson, disputed the idea of kin selection in the journal Nature. This week, two articles in the New York Times and Science News had scientists taking sides and putting on their boxing gloves over this. Controversies keep science fun and interesting!

“Charitable” might not be the first word that comes to mind when you think of E. coli bacteria, but the second story describes how charitable bacteria share with others to become resistant to antibacterial agents. Studying E. coli, scientists found that “just a few drug-resistant bacteria can release a protective substance that makes a whole population resilient to drugs.” [Science News]  The protective substance is a molecule called indole, which is known to help E. coli handle stress. And as Ed Yong reports in Discover, even though it takes the E. coli a lot of energy to produce indole,

Having multiplied from common ancestors, the bacteria in the group are all related to one another and carry virtually the same genes. In this light, making a small sacrifice for the sake of genetically identical others is a good move.

I wonder where that puts them in the kin selection argument?

Sour Babies

This one is purely for fun but does relate to a Science in Action video we produced a while ago describing how facial expressions are innate and not learned. Scientists studying babies’ faces found that babies make the same expressions whether they are tasting something sour, sweet, salty, or bitter for the first time. This video of babies tasting lemons and limes on YouTube will probably make you laugh—and perhaps give you some observational data to judge whether the babies’ reactions seem innate or learned.  Or it might inspire you to perform the innocent experiment on a baby you know…

What did you find fun in science news this week? Share with us!

Baby image by Chris Denbow

It is an Atlantic salmon that contains a growth hormone gene from a Chinook salmon as well as a genetic on-switch from the ocean pout, a distant relative of the salmon.

That on-switch would allow the fish to grow year-round, something that’s usually hard for salmon to do, given the cold winter weather.

Now the FDA needs to “analyze whether the salmon are safe to eat, nutritionally equivalent to other salmon and safe for the environment…  A public meeting to discuss the salmon may be held as early as this fall.”

Genetically modified crops are a fact of life, but genetically-engineered animals have only recently come onto the scene. Some scientists are thinking about mad-cow resistant cattle and healthy bacon, and one Canadian company is trying to develop pigs that have less-polluting poop. If the FDA approves the genetically-modified salmon, it might open the door for other animals.

The “80beats” blog in Discover points out that with our eating habits, something has to be done to boost the salmon population—they’re just not sure that these GM fish are the answer:

…even normal farmed fish that escape can harm wild populations. It’s a good thing these new ones will all be sterile so they can’t interbreed, but they seem prime candidates for unexpected consequences.

Aaron Pope, Manager of Sustainability Programs here at the Academy, agrees:

The vast majority of current salmon farming methods are environmentally very damaging, and totally unsustainable. You can find more info at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch site, but major problems include the fact that it takes three pounds of caught fish to produce one pound of farmed fish (and we don’t exactly have lots of fish to spare in the ocean at the moment), and the diseases that are released into the wild from the farms. There are some promising advances happening in fish farming, but we are a long ways from large-scale, sustainable aquaculture at the moment.