Saving Seafood

Europêche hits back at Pew response

November 23, 2015 — In a further letter to Pew, Javier Garat, President of Europêche and Pim Vasser, President of EAPO, said: “It is disappointing that your response fails to address the issues that we have raised. We drew attention to the startling divergence between the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES) view and Pew’s claims about fishing pressure and the state of the stocks off North Western Europe.”

Just last week an initial open letter to Pew, Europêche accused the report of making the assertion that fishing in pursuit of food and profit off North West Europe in recent decades has dramatically expanded.

Read the full story at World Fishing & Aquaculture

Iran seeks revival of caviar industry in post-sanctions era

November 13, 2015 — GOLDASHT, Iran (AP) ” On the shores of the Caspian Sea, an ambitious project is underway to produce a pricey delicacy that could boost Iran’s economy as sanctions ease: caviar.

Iran, once the world’s biggest exporter of the luxury food, sold over 40 tons of sturgeon eggs in 2000. Exports plunged to just 1 ton last year due to dwindling fish stocks and economic sanctions imposed by world powers in response to Iran’s nuclear program.

After Tehran struck a landmark deal this summer to curb its nuclear ambitions in exchange for lifting sanctions ” including those on caviar ” some in Iran are now counting on a revival in exports of the exclusive eggs.

“We hope that as a result of the Iranian government’s interaction with the world, the path will be opened for us to export our products abroad and bring in foreign currency earnings. It does not make a difference where we export to, the United States or Europe,” said Ishaq Islami, manager of the private Ghareh Boron Caviar Fish Farm in the coastal village of Goldasht.

The farm and two nearby facilities are breeding half a million sturgeon fingerlings a year, filling its pools with water pumped in from the Caspian Sea.

Islami began the $100 million project in 2005 but it takes at least 12 years for sturgeon to mature and produce caviar. About 110,000 are beluga species that produce prized silver-gray eggs, the world’s most expensive caviar.

The fish farm aims to export 30 tons of salt-cured caviar and 2,000 tons of sturgeon meat in three years. Islami expects to earn $90 million a year based on an average price of $3,000 a kilogram (about $1,360 a pound) for caviar. The United States, Europe and Japan have traditionally been Iran’s biggest export markets.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Bedford Standard-Times

 

Absurd Creature of the Week: This Crafty Fish Turns Mussels Into Its Surrogate Parents

October 23, 2015 — Last week I wrote a little ditty about North America’s lampsilis mussels, which do unbelievable impressions of fish. And why would they? So that real fish attack them, busting loose clouds of mussel larvae that infiltrate the attackers’ gills. Here the larvae clamp onto the filaments and suck out nutrition, developing in safety until they drop out of their host. This, as you can imagine, is bad for the fish, to the point where it can kill them.

Lampsilis has the most highfalutin way of infesting fish with their larvae, but freshwater mussels the world over do it too—simply by releasing the young into the water column. There’s one group of fishes in Europe and Asia, though, that won’t suffer such parasitization without retaliation: the bitterlings. These guys flip mussels’ reproductive strategy back on them. Using a tube-like structure, the female fish inserts her eggs into a mussel’s gills, then the male fires his sperm in as well. The fertilized eggs get a nice little home in the host. The host mostly just gets embarrassed.

So let us explore the strange game that is different kinds of parasitic river critters trying to impregnate each other with their offspring.

Typically fish reproduction is about as basic as it gets in the animal kingdom. Males and females get near each other, then dump their sperm and eggs into the water. That’s it. The problem with that, though, is it opens the young up to all kinds of problems, particularly predation. Only a fraction will make it. The rest will end up in stomachs.

For the bitterling, this won’t do. Its reproduction begins with good mussels, and it’s up to the male to find them, preferably large hosts with more room to hold the young. When he chooses a victim, or even several in a given area, he posts up. Should rival males take an interest in his property, his coloration intensifies as he head-butts his foes for control of the territory.

Read the full story at Wired