Saving Seafood

They were trying to save a species. Instead, scientists created a fish that’s part sturgeon, part paddlefish, all accident

July 22, 2020 — A group of Hungarian aquatic scientists was looking for ways to save the fish responsible for some of the world’s finest caviar from extinction.

Instead, they made a Frankenfish.

But their accidental hybrid, a fish that’s part American paddlefish and part Russian sturgeon, could benefit fish farming and the industry’s carbon footprint. And on their own, the fish are a marvel of biology.

Though they haven’t been formally named yet, fellow fishery researchers have given them the moniker “sturddlefish.”

The “sturddlefish” study appeared this month in the scientific journal Genes.

How it happened

The initial goal of the study was to encourage the critically endangered sturgeon to reproduce asexually. That isn’t quite how it went.

The Russian sturgeon, instead, hybridized with the American paddlefish, the first time the two have ever hybridized successfully in captivity. The paddlefish was originally meant to provide sperm — not its DNA — to help the sturgeon reproduce on its own.
The sturgeon isn’t so genetically different from paddlefish — they belong to the same group, Acipenseriformes. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, sturgeon and paddlefish both provide tasty caviar.

Read the full story at CNN

Paddlefish caviar, the next big thing?

June 3, 2018 — Everybody has a food thing, right? Everybody has that one item that you wouldn’t eat unless you were stranded on a deserted island or someone had a shotgun pressed securely to your lumbar region. Or both. And maybe not even then.

For us, it’s eggs. Oeuf, there it is.

No fried eggs. No omelets. No scrambles. No frittatas. Soft boiled, hard boiled, you can keep them. We’d rather stay dirty than submit to an egg wash. We can’t even watch other people eat eggs, especially when they start jamming their toast into the yokes and creating all sorts of Jackson Pollard-looking stuff on their plates. Our little phobia probably goes a long way toward explaining why we tend to be solitary breakfasters.

Needless to say, we’re not exactly down with caviar (thank God we’re poor). But we have to admit we were intrigued by a New York Times story out of Montana about a program to harvest the roe of giant freshwater paddlefish — which can run anywhere from 50 to 100 pounds — and sell it as caviar.

“It winds up on cruise ships, it winds up in restaurants, it winds up everywhere,” Dennis Scarnecchia, a fisheries professor at the University of Idaho, told the Times.

Scarnecchia (any relation to Pats line coach Dante, we wonder?) oversees paddlefish caviar programs in Montana, North Dakota and Oklahoma, from whence profits are funneled into research and monitoring of the massive fish.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Times

William and Mary biologist uses fish mouth to design a better filter

April 11, 2016 — For years, when biologist Laurie Sanderson peered into the mouths of filter-feeding fish, what she saw was a puzzle.

How did such fish, from the foot-long menhaden to the 42-foot whale shark, manage to filter tiny food particles so naturally, so efficiently from the water flowing into their mouths and out again?

The answer wasn’t a simple dead-end sieve, like a coffee filter or colander, which ichthyologists assumed for centuries. In fact, Sanderson says, some textbooks still get that wrong.

No, what the professor at the College of William and Mary, her colleagues and students have teased out by studying the filter-feeding paddlefish and basking shark is that they have a complex mouth architecture — with a series of bone ridges or gill arches that have the marvelous ability to form vortices or eddies in the fluid flow. Those vortices serve to separate and collect tiny food bits before the filtered water is expelled.

See the full story at the Daily Press