Saving Seafood

Seafood will get more attention in development of new U.S. dietary guidelines

September 10, 2019 — Federal agencies are meeting through next March to define U.S. dietary guidelines for 2020-25, and a high-powered group of doctors and nutritionists is making sure the health benefits of seafood are front and center.

For the first time in the 40-year history of the program, the dietary guidelines committee has posted the questions it is going to consider. They include the role of seafood in the neurocognitive development in pregnant moms for their babies, and in the diet of kids from birth to 24 months directly, said Dr. Tom Brenna, professor of pediatrics and nutrition at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas.

“We really got jazzed when we saw that because we wanted to figure out what the committee would find when it does its literature search on what medical evidence is out there and boy, did we find a lot,” Brenna said.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Studies: Omega-3s temper premature births, heart attacks

November 21, 2018 — New research linking omega-3 fatty acids with a reduced risk of cardiovascular diseases as well as the reduction of dangerous premature births is expected to have benefits for the seafood industry.

In a study of people who took Lovaza, a prescription omega-3 fish oil, researchers found that subjects were 28 percent less likely to suffer heart attacks than those taking a placebo. Additionally, people who ate fewer than 1.5 servings of fish weekly reduced their risk of cardiovascular disease by 19 percent when taking Lovaza.

The research was presented at the recent American Heart Association 2018 Scientific Sessions in Chicago, Illinois, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“The use of fish oil did not significantly reduce risk for those eating more seafood, but the average overall showed a reduced risk,” Dr. Tom Brenna, a professor of pediatrics, chemistry, and nutrition at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, and chair of Seafood Nutrition Partnership’s Scientific and Nutrition Advisory Council, told SeafoodSource. “The message here is, ‘If you don’t eat fish, take supplements.'”

Alongside the Lovaza study, a new Cochrane Review of 70 studies worldwide found that omega-3 fatty acids reduced dangerous preterm births by 42 percent.

The extensive review of published studies, which included 20,000 pregnant women, also revealed an 11 percent reduction in preterm births, and a 10 percent reduction in risk of having a low-birthweight baby. The researchers reviewed studies involving fish oil supplements as well as seafood.

“This study is further evidence that health professionals should be actively promoting fish and omega-3s among pregnant women as they have possibly the most to gain from eating more fish,” Jennifer McGuire, a registered dietitian for the National Fisheries Institute, told SeafoodSource.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Hurricane Harvey Didn’t Stop These Fish From Mating

November 20, 2018 — Every summer, a symphony of grunts, croaks and roars echoes below the surface of the western Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico to signal the launch of spotted seatrout spawning season.

Last year, the noisy process—which finds males vibrating their air bladders in hopes of attracting fertile females eager to mate—coincided with the onslaught of Hurricane Harvey, a category 4 storm that made landfall in Texas on August 25. And as JoAnna Klein reports for The New York Times, a series of recordings captured by microphones placed at popular spawning grounds across Aransas Bay reveals just how persistent the trout are in their pursuit of reproductive success: Not only did they spawn on the days preceding and following the storm, but also on the day the eye of the hurricane passed directly over their habitat.

“These fish are resilient and productive, even in the face of such a huge storm,” lead author Christopher Biggs, a marine ecologist from the University of Texas at Austin, says in a statement. “On land, it was complete destruction, but these fish didn’t seem disturbed.”

The researchers’ findings, published in Biology Letters earlier this month, emerged largely by chance. Biggs tells Eos’ Jenessa Duncombe that he and his colleagues initially set out to study the fish’s breeding patterns, including where and how they spawn. Trout reproduction is best observed via aural methods, as the waters these fish call home tend to be too murky for visual analysis, so the researchers set up 15 underwater recording stations between April and June 2017.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine

 

Biologists Have Recorded The Loudest Known Fish And Oh Boy

December 21, 2017 — Each year between February and June, the fish gather to spawn in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta. The fish, a type of croaker called the Gulf corvina, meet in water as cloudy as chocolate milk. It’s a reunion for the entire species, all members of which reproduce within a dozen-mile stretch of the delta.

When the time is right, a few days before the new or full moons, the male fish begin to sing. To humans, the sound is machine guns going off just below the waterline. To female fish, the rapid burr-burr-burr is a Bing Crosby croon. Make that Bing cranked up to 11.

Marine biologists who recorded the sound describe the animals as the “loudest fish ever documented,” said Timothy J. Rowell, at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Rowell and Brad E. Erisman, a University of Texas at Austin fisheries scientist, spent four days in 2014 snooping on the fish with sonar and underwater microphones. The land surrounding the delta is desolate, Rowell said. Fresh water that once fed wild greenery has been diverted to faucets and hoses.

But the delta is alive with the sound of fish. “When you arrive at the channels of the delta, you can hear it in the air even while the engine is running on the boat,” Rowell said. Sound is measured differently in water than in air; still, the fish are as loud as lawn mowers, Rowell said.

Read the full story from the Washington Post at Science Alert

 

Redfish suffer deformities, heart problems from oil – even tiny amounts

September 22, 2017 — Even in trace amounts, oil can warp the spines, disfigure the faces and weaken the hearts of redfish larvae. That makes it difficult for young fish to swim, eat and grow into the 40-pounders that excite anglers.

The first comprehensive study of oil spill effects on the popular sport fish found that “micro-droplets” of oil, such as those that disperse after larger spills, cause skull and jaw deformities and can twist backbones upward, producing fish with awkward J-shaped bodies. Exposure to small amounts of oil reduced the cardiac functions of redfish by 70 percent, according to the study published this month in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

“Certainly, oil spills kill,” said Alexis Khursigara, a marine scientist with the University of Texas and the study’s lead author. “But sometimes those that survive can have complex deformities that can result in a delayed death because they’re not swimming well or fast enough, or they have a hard time capturing prey.”

More than 1 million of the fish, known as red drum, were caught in Louisiana waters last year, making it the second largest recreational catch after spotted seatrout, commonly called speckled trout. Commercial fishing for redfish was banned in Louisiana in the late 1980s to keep the species from becoming extinct, amid the Cajun food craze that was popularized nationally by legendary New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme’s blackened redfish dish. By 1988, only 2 percent of the fish were escaping capture to spawn offshore.

Read the full story at the New Orleans Times-Picayune

Fishing groups ask court to halt Atlantic Ocean seismic testing

POINT PLEASANT BEACH, N.J. (AP) — July 1, 2015 — Five fishing groups are asking a federal court to stop a research program that blasts the ocean floor with sound waves, arguing it’s disturbing marine life off the coast of New Jersey.

The lawsuit filed Friday seeks a halt to the program being carried out by Rutgers University, the University of Texas and the National Science Foundation.

The project uses sound waves to study sediment on the ocean floor dating back 60 million years to see how sea level rise has changed the coastline, and better plan for storms like Superstorm Sandy.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at My9 New Jersey