| From: Jon Koplik | 2/11/2017 12:40:22 PM | | | | | | Reuters -- Oldest captive fish euthanized in his mid-90s by Chicago aquarium .................
Feb 6, 2017
Oldest captive fish euthanized in his mid-90s by Chicago aquarium
An Australian lungfish, Neoceratodus forsteri, acquired by the Shedd Aquarium in 1933, is pictured in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters February 6, 2017.
The longest-living fish in a zoological setting, a lungfish known as Granddad acquired by the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago in 1933, has been euthanized after suffering failing health well in his mid-90s, aquarium officials said on Monday.
Granddad, who came to Shedd from Australia in anticipation of the 1933-34 Chicago World's Fair, was seen by more than 104 million people during his time in Chicago, aquarium president Bridget Coughlin said in a statement announcing his death.
"For a fish who spent much of his time imitating a fallen log, he sparked curiosity, excitement and wonder among guests of all ages who would hear his story and learn about the incredible biology that makes his species a living fossil and one of the oldest living vertebrate genera on the planet," Coughlin said.
According to the aquarium, lungfish, which can live to be more than 100 years old and are a protected species in Australia, have existed for nearly 400 million years and fossils show they have remained unchanged for over 100 million years.
A Shedd spokeswoman said Granddad's exact age was unknown but that he was believed to be in his mid-90s. The aquarium said Granddad was euthanized after losing interest in food and showing signs of organ failure.
Lungfish, which are native to the Mary and Burnett rivers in Queensland, Australia, have a single primitive lung and are among the few fish that can breathe air.
(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Editing by Sandra Maler)
© 2017 Reuters.
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| From: Jon Koplik | 2/14/2017 8:42:22 AM | | | | | | BBC News -- Banned chemicals [ PCBs and PBDEs ] persist in deep ocean .........................
13 February 2017
Banned chemicals persist in deep ocean
By Paul Rincon
BBC News
Chemicals banned in the 1970s have been found in the deepest reaches of the Pacific Ocean, a new study shows.
Scientists were surprised by the relatively high concentrations of pollutants like PCBs and PBDEs in deep sea ecosystems.
Used widely during much of the 20th Century, these chemicals were later found to be toxic and to build up in the environment.
The results are published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The team led by Dr Alan Jamieson at the University of Newcastle sampled levels of pollutants in the fatty tissue of amphipods (a type of crustacean) from deep below the Pacific Ocean surface.
The animals were retrieved using specially designed "lander" vehicles deployed from a boat over the Mariana and Kermadec trenches, which are over 10km deep and separated from each other by 7,000km.
Not broken down
The pollutants found in the amphipods included polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), which were commonly used as electrical insulators and flame retardants.
PCB production was banned by the US in 1979 and by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, a UN treaty signed in 2001.
From the 1930s to when PCBs were banned in the 1970s, the total global production of these chemicals is estimated to be in the region of 1.3 million tonnes.
Released into the environment through industrial accidents and discharges from landfills, these pollutants are resistant to being broken down naturally, and so persist in the environment.
In their paper, the authors say it can be difficult to place the levels of contamination found below the Pacific into a wider context - in part because previous studies of contamination gathered measurements in different ways.
In the food chain
But they add that in the Mariana trench, the highest levels of PCBs were 50 times greater than in crabs from paddy fields fed by the Liaohe River, one of the most polluted rivers in China.
Dr Jamieson commented: "The amphipods we sampled contained levels of contamination similar to that found in Suruga Bay [in Japan], one of the most polluted industrial zones of the northwest Pacific."
The researchers suggest that the PCBs and PBDEs made their way to Pacific Ocean trenches through contaminated plastic debris and via dead animals sinking to the sea floor.
These are then consumed by amphipods and other deep sea creatures.
The authors of the study say that the deep ocean can become a "sink" or repository for pollutants.
They argue that the chemicals accumulate through the food chain so that when they reach the deep ocean, concentrations are many times higher than in surface waters.
Katherine Dafforn from the University of New South Wales in Australia, who was not involved in the study, said: "Although the authors were able to quantify concentrations of PCBs and PCBEs in crustacean scavengers from the hadal zone [deep ocean trenches], the source of [persistent pollutants] to these areas and also the mechanisms for delivery remain largely unknown.
"Furthermore, the toxic effects of these pollutants and their potential to biomagnify up the food chain still need to be tested."
But she added that the team members had "provided clear evidence that the deep ocean, rather than being remote, is highly connected to surface waters and has been exposed to significant concentrations of human-made pollutants."
Copyright © 2017 BBC.
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| From: Jon Koplik | 5/29/2017 11:33:24 AM | | | | | | Sydney Morning Herald -- Great white shark jumps into fisherman's boat ................
May 29 2017
Great white shark jumps into fisherman's boat off Evans Head
By Megan Levy
Fisherman Terry Selwood was sitting on an esky in the middle of his small boat, enjoying the solitude of an afternoon's fishing off the NSW North Coast, when all hell broke loose in the middle of the ocean.
Out of the corner of his eye, the 73-year-old saw something launch itself over the side of his 5½-metre vessel, which was bobbing about two kilometres off the coast of Evans Head, on Saturday afternoon.
The next thing Mr Selwood knew, he had been knocked off his esky onto the deck, and was eye-to-eye with a large shark as it thrashed about next to him.
"There I was on all fours and he's looking at me and I'm looking at him, and then he started to do the dance around and shake, and I couldn't get out quick enough onto the gunnel [side of the boat]," Mr Selwood told the ABC.
A Department of Primary Industries spokeswoman confirmed to Fairfax Media that fisheries staff had since identified the shark, estimated to be 2.7 metres long, as a great white shark.
Mr Selwood was not bitten, but suffered a number of cuts to his right arm, and the animal's rough skin tore the skin off it.
He was able to grab his radio and make a distress call, received by Marine Rescue Evans Head.
Lance Fountain, a member of Marine Rescue Evans Head, said he and two other crew members immediately launched a boat and arrived to find Mr Selwood "standing up on the port side ... covered in blood with numerous lacerations on his right forearm".
"A large shark was also found in the cabin of the not-so-large fishing boat," Mr Fountain said.
Mr Selwood was quickly transferred onto the deck of the rescue boat, where his injuries were assessed and treated.
He recounted his incredible story as they returned to land, Mr Fountain said.
The fisherman explained how the shark suddenly launched itself out of the water, clearing the engine and landing on the deck, where it thrashed about violently.
"In the process, it knocked the stunned 73-year-old fisherman onto the deck as well," Mr Fountain posted on the Marine Rescue Evans Head Facebook page.
"Fighting to get to his feet and as far away from the shark as possible, the fisherman was relentlessly knocked about the deck and cabin, which is where he sustained most of his injuries.
"Eventually the fisherman was able to clamber up onto the port side gunwale of the boat where he remained while the shark continued to thrash about the deck of the boat."
When they reached shore, Mr Selwood was taken by NSW Ambulance paramedics to Lismore Base Hospital where he received a number of stitches to his arm. He has since been released, and will make a full recovery.
Mr Fountain said the rescue boat then returned to Mr Selwood's boat and towed it to shore, with the shark on board.
The animal had died, and its body was retrieved by Department of Primary Industries staff to perform a necropsy.
Authorities believe there is no way Mr Selwood could have caught the 200-kilogram shark and reeled it onto his boat, as the fishing line he had on board was for snapper - which weighs about 10 kilograms.
The shark was removed by a forklift when it was brought to shore.
Copyright © 2017 Fairfax Media.
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| To: Jon Koplik who wrote (1354) | 6/1/2017 3:18:10 PM | | From: Neeka | | | | "Odd News
Largest bass caught in Texas lake using McDonald's chicken McNugget
Published June 01, 2017
Fox News
Matthew McNellis and his girlfriend caught the massive bass last month by using a chicken McNugget as bait. (Matthew McNellis)
Matthew McNellis and his girlfriend went fishing in May at Lake Bardwell in Ennis and had no luck catching anything, McNellis told KDAF.
McNellis' girlfriend then suggested using a chicken nugget they bought from McDonald's as bait. To their surprise, they reeled in a 2-and-a-half-foot long bass that weighed more than 10 pounds.
The Highview Marina declared it as the biggest fish caught at the lake, posting a photo of it on Facebook.
The bass won't be turning into a Filet-O-Fish sandwich anytime soon. The couple tossed the bass back in the water at the end.
McNellis told the station that he planned on continuing the fast food bait trend by using Wendy's seasoned French fries the next time he goes fishing.
"
foxnews.com |
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| From: Jon Koplik | 9/3/2017 12:52:01 AM | | | | | | Detroit Free Press -- How antidepressants are ending up in Great Lakes fish .......................
Sept. 1, 2017
How antidepressants are ending up in Great Lakes fish
By Keith Matheny
Scientists say antidepressants could change the ecosystem
A new study might depress anyone concerned with Great Lakes water quality.
Antidepressant drugs, making their way through an increasing number of people's bodies, getting excreted in small amounts into their toilets, and moving through the wastewater treatment process to lakes and rivers, are being found in multiple Great Lakes fish species' brains, new research by the University of Buffalo has found.
Researchers detected high concentrations of both the active ingredients and metabolites byproducts of the parent drug of popular antidepressant pharmaceuticals including Zoloft, Prozac, Celexa and Sarafem in the brains of fish caught in the Niagara River connecting Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.
Affected species included smallmouth and largemouth bass, rudd, rock bass, white bass, white and yellow perch, walleye, bowfin and steelhead. While the concentrations aren't potentially harmful to humans eating the fish, they are problematic, said University at Buffalo chemistry professor Diana Aga, the lead author of the study published Aug. 16 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
"It is a threat to biodiversity, and we should be very concerned," she said.
Previous research has shown antidepressants in water create "suicidal shrimp" that swim toward light instead of away from it, making them vulnerable to predator fish and birds, Aga said.
"Other research teams have shown that antidepressants can affect the feeding behavior of fish, or their survival instincts," Aga said. "Some fish won't acknowledge the presence of predators as much."
That has the potential to affect delicate ecological balances in the Great Lakes, already under siege from invasive species. Ultimately, it could disrupt the sport fishing that fuels a multibillion-dollar industry in Michigan.
The use of antidepressant drugs in the U.S. increased 65% between 2002 and 2014, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Portions of the drugs are excreted in human waste, and are now found in Great Lakes fish.
Prior to her research, Aga expected that higher concentrations of the drugs would be found in larger fish, predators higher in the food web, due to bioaccumulation, a process by which big fish, eating medium-sized fish, that eat smaller fish, amplifies the concentration of contaminants each step of the way.
But that wasn't the case with the fish studied, "which means they are not getting it by eating smaller fish; they're getting it from being in the water," she said.
Sertraline, the active ingredient in Zoloft, was found at levels estimated 20 times higher than levels in Niagara River water. And levels of norsertraline, the drug's breakdown product, were even greater, reaching concentrations often hundreds of times higher than that found in the river. That means the drugs appear to be accumulating in the fish over their prolonged exposures to them, Aga said.
Concern for pharmaceutical contamination of lakes and rivers has risen with the emerging technological ability to detect the drugs in very small quantities in water bodies and as use of the prescription drugs has exploded.
The percentage of Americans taking antidepressants rose 65% between 2002 and 2014, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. From 2011 to 2014, some 12.7% of Americans age 12 or older had taken antidepressant medication within the past month.
Most wastewater treatment plants don't screen for such drugs, only screening for waste solids and treating to kill E. coli bacteria.
"There is no way I could tell, because I am not measuring for those compounds," said Sree Mullapudi, director of wastewater operations and compliance at the Ypsilanti Community Utilities Authority. The utility provides wastewater treatment for Ypsilanti city and township, and seven other townships in the region, processing more than 8 billion gallons of sewage per year at its plant near Willow Run Airport.
If the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or Michigan Department of Environmental Quality confirmed negative impacts to the ecosystem from antidepressants, regulatory revisions would likely occur compelling wastewater treatment plants to implement filtration for those chemicals, Mullapudi said. But in an industry focused on meeting state and federal regulatory requirements, unless and until such a governmental mandate happens, few treatment plants would have the financial wherewithal to unilaterally take action, he said.
Noted Aga, "These plants are focused on removing nitrogen, phosphorus and dissolved organic carbon, but there are so many other chemicals that are not prioritized that impact our environment. As a result, wildlife are exposed to all of these chemicals.
"Fish are receiving this cocktail of drugs 24 hours a day, and we are now finding these drugs in their brains."
Aga said she will be partnering with fish biologists to look at the minimum levels at which exposures to antidepressants affect fish behavior and biology.
Contact Keith Matheny: 313-222-5021 or kmatheny@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @keithmatheny.
© 2017 www.freep.com.
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| From: Jon Koplik | 11/12/2017 11:05:40 AM | | | | | | Pre-historic Shark From Dinosaur Era With 300 Teeth Found Swimming Offcoast of Portugal
Shark Dating Back to 800 Million Years Found Swimming Offcoast of Portugal
Updated: November 12, 2017
By India.com
Scientists working on the Algarve coast were in for a surprise when they caught a rare frilled shark earlier this week. Termed as the pre-historic shark, the creature dates back to 80 million years making it the oldest species on the planet. While it has a long slim snake-like body it has a strange circular arrangement of 300 teeth. Researchers from the Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere were working on a project to ‘minimise unwanted catches in commercial fishing’ when they stumbled upon this shark.
As per reports, the Institute said that the fish measured 1.5 metes in length was caught from the waters off the resort of Portimao at a depth of 700 meters. According to the scientists, the shark is “little known in terms of its biology or environment” as it lives in the great depths in the Atlantic and off the coasts of Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. They said that this marine animal is rarely caught and even these examples will not make it o the research laboratories. There is also little footage of the shark in its natural habitat.
Professor Margarida Castro of the University of the Algarve reportedly said that the shark gets its name from the frilled arrangement of its 300 teeth, “which allows it to trap squid, fish and other sharks in sudden lunges”. This isn’t the first time that a frilled shark has been caught, last year a fisherman called Roman Fedortsov had posted pictures of a frilled shark he caught in Russia. Frilled sharks are known for having extra gills, big mouths, eyes on the side of their heads and also spineless back. fins. They are members of some of the most ancient groups of sharks in the world.
Copyright © 2017 India WebPortal Private Limited.
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| To: Jon Koplik who wrote (1357) | 4/20/2018 4:29:35 PM | | From: Neeka | | | | Video at site.
The Path of the Unseen Whale Just as a hunter leaves a trail in the snow, a whale forms prints on the water’s surface.
Authored by by Glen Jeffries
April 25th, 2017
The multi-hour experience of whale watching can generally be edited down to a few key frames: a burst of action on the clock face of the sea; the animal’s slow, elegant arc; and the Y of the tail, slipping below the surface. At that point, most whale watchers get distracted, turning back to their cameras to check if they pressed the button at the exact right moment.
There’s actually more to see. Just as patient moviegoers are treated to “credit cookies” at the end of a film, those who keep watching the water are rewarded. Look where the whale was and you will see in its place, for a short time, a completely smooth, undisturbed crown of glassy water.
I found a mention of the phenomenon in a single paragraph of Philip Hoare’s hugely popular 2008 non-fiction book The Whale. He refers to the “slick of flat water” with an Iñupiaq term—qala, translated as “the path of the unseen whale.”
How evocative! I began to look into the word. Google returns a single relevant result: source notes to Hoare’s book. It seems he heard it from a biology teacher in Massachusetts. The biology teacher, I found out, while speaking with her over the phone, heard the word from a whale disentanglement expert. The whale disentanglement expert told me by email that he learned it from an Iñupiaq whale hunter from Barrow, Alaska.
The search eventually led me to another knowledgeable member of the Iñupiat: Qaiyaan Harcharek, a subsistence research coordinator at the North Slope Department of Wildlife Management in Barrow. He explains that the qala (pronounced similarly to “Carla”) is “almost a form of communication” between whale and man. It is even more informative to an Iñupiaq hunter than a paw print on the ground. The qala is more immediate; it reveals the precise location of a whale’s last surface movement. And it remains visible longer than the ephemeral spray from a blowhole, providing a signpost on an otherwise homogenous seascape. It is “our way of being able to follow the whale,” Harcharek says. Hunting a whale is chasing the qala. From the qala, a hunter can also infer the size of the whale; the larger the whale and the deeper the dive, the larger the surface print.
This short scientific animation narrated by Rachel Levy of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, explains how flukeprints are formed.
Qala derives from the verb qalat—“the boiling or churning of water”—and can also be used to refer to the wake behind an oar or a propeller. But in the context of a hunt, qala is “a really special word,” says Harcharek. Whale hunters will not willingly enter the qala with their boats. The qala is the confirmed and respected domain of the whale.
Hoare has romanticized the prints of the qala as “mirrors into the whale’s soul; and mirrors into ours.” Less of a mirror, the flukeprints are more of a signature in disappearing ink: the whale’s contribution to the canon of the oldest writing known on Earth.
hakaimagazine.com |
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| From: Snowshoe | 6/19/2018 3:35:44 PM | | | | | | Pacific pink salmon found in Norway...
Humpy invasion
Full story: craigmedred.news
The successful Russian fish came from the Sea of Okhotsk on the western side of the Bering Sea from Alaska. Early summer spawners, they proved well suited to the White Sea, according to the International Council for Exploration of the Seas (ICES.)
These humpies have since spread as far south as England, Scotland, and Ireland, and swum through the North Sea into the Baltic Sea to invade Sweden and Finland.
A “single pink salmon egg-transfer from an odd-year population resulted in the establishment of local self-reproducing populations in the White Sea rivers of Murmansk and Archangelsk regions of Russia with the adult returns fluctuating between 60,000 to 700,000 fish during the period 1989 through 2009,” according to a white paper prepared by an ICES working group five years ago.
At that time, humpies were reported to have also established themselves in 11 rivers in northern Norway, but they were clearly not done with their colonization. The fish began showing up in streams all over Northern Europe last year.
“There was a formidable invasion in rivers all along the Norwegian coast with more than 11,000 pink salmon being caught or observed in 272 rivers,” Sandlund wrote. “Spawning was observed in many rivers along the coast. This last winter, fertilized eggs, fry with partly absorbed yolk sac, and fry in the process of smoltification, have been collected as far south as Bergen, and they have also been caught throughout northwestern Europe.”
This is not good news for Atlantic salmon which the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has on its “red list” as “vulnerable, ” a ranking between “near threatened” and “endangered.” |
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