Saving Seafood

Octopuses Get Strangely Cuddly On The Mood Drug Ecstasy

September 21, 2018 — The psychoactive drug known as ecstasy can make people feel extra loving toward others, and a study published Thursday suggests it has the same effect on octopuses.

Octopuses are almost entirely antisocial, except when they’re mating, and scientists who study them have to house them separately so they don’t kill or eat each other. However, octopuses given the drug known as MDMA (or ecstasy, E, Molly or a number of other slang terms) wanted to spend more time close to other octopuses and even hugged them.

“I was absolutely shocked that it had this effect,” says Judit Pungor, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon who studies octopuses but wasn’t part of the research team.

The eight-legged invertebrates are separated from humans by more than 500 million years of evolution, Pungor says. Octopuses’ closest relatives are creatures like snails and slugs, and their brains have a host of strange structures that evolved on a completely different trajectory from the human path.

“They have this huge complex brain that they’ve built, that has absolutely no business acting like ours does — but here they show that it does,” says Pungor. “The fact that they induced this very sort of gentle, cuddly behavior is really pretty fascinating.”

The idea to test the drug’s effect in octopuses came from Gul Dolen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University.

Read the full story at NPR

When Conservation Backfires

August 29, 2018 — On New Year’s Day 2015, as celebratory fireworks erupted around the world, a quieter but no less explosive change was happening in Kiribati. After years of planning, the central-Pacific nation finally instigated a complete ban on all fishing within a 157,000-square-mile area of ocean, equivalent in size to California. This area—the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA)—had enjoyed limited (and controversial) protections since 2008. But the upgrade of 2015 turned it into one of the biggest protected areas on the planet, and arguably one of the most lauded. Here was a place where some 500 fish species could swim untroubled. Here was a sign of humanity’s growing commitment to protecting the oceans.

But the lead-up to this upgrade was a long one, full of the usual gauntlet of debates, public meeting, and blue-ribbon panels. Those discussions had been going on since at least the fall of 2013—and that gave fishers time to react. By analyzing ship movements, Grant McDermott from the University of Oregon and Kyle Meng from the University of California at Santa Barbara have shown that fishing intensity more than doubled in the site of the future reserve in the run-up to 2015. The damage was equivalent to fishing continuing for another year and a half after the ban took effect. The path to fully protecting PIPA triggered a preemptive race to yank as many fish from its waters as possible before the opportunity to do so closed for good.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

Warmer oceans are now linked to dangerous neurotoxins in shellfish

January 10, 2017 — A mysterious, potentially deadly neurotoxin that poisons humans by way of shellfish has now been linked to warming ocean waters. The new findings could help fisheries predict spikes of this substance in their catches, allowing them to protect human consumers and mitigate their own financial losses. But one question remains unanswered: as climate change edges ocean temperatures higher and higher, will blooms of the dangerous neurotoxin follow suit?

Domoic acid is natural, but it ain’t pretty. It’s a substance produced by tiny algae called phytoplankton—but no one is quite sure why.

“The shellfish that eat these algae blooms don’t seem to be affected by the toxin,” Morgaine McKibben, a PhD student at the University of Oregon, tells PopSci. But while the algae’s direct predators are seemingly impervious to the substance, the animals that eat them can suffer terrible consequences: domoic acid mimics a neurotransmitter called glutamate, and does a better job of binding with the brain than the real thing. It essentially kicks the neurotransmitter out of place, causing symptoms like seizures and memory loss. Some research suggests the toxin is causing an Alzheimer’s-like illness in sea lions, and it’s been blamed for the mass deaths of everything from whales to seabirds. It’s killed humans, too.

“Why do these little bitty single-celled creatures in the ocean make a toxin that only works a couple levels up the food chain? It could be an accident. We don’t have a good answer yet,” McKibben says.

But while the evolutionary purpose behind this sinister trick of the food web is still a mystery, McKibben and her colleagues have started to answer another important question: how can we predict increases in domoic acid to keep the substance off of human dinner plates? In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, McKibben presents over two decades worth of evidence that warmer oceans can trigger domoic acid production.

Read the full story at MSN.com