Seafood dilemma

I'm having a dilemma over seafood at the moment. I really love good, fresh seafood, although I don't tend to eat a lot of it. But it seems lately that the more I read, the less I feel I ought to eat. This despite the fact I'm constantly hearing on the news that seafood and fish oils are so good for my health and that most people don't eat enough of them.

In a typical week, the only seafood I am likely to eat is some canned tuna or a fresh piece of salmon, maybe a different fresh fish if something else looks good at the markets. If I lived at the coast that might be different though. I'm very careful to avoid species that I know are being unsustainably harvested, such as orange roughy. I know that salmon and tuna aren't perfectly managed either, but I've generally considered them to be better fish to eat from a conservation perspective. But this week I've read several things that have made me think I may be wrong. Perhaps I should give up on fish altogether? Here are some things to think about:

1) On Southern Fried Science, a really interesting post about why "Dolphin friendly" tuna might not be very friendly to anything else apart from dolphins - so maybe I should cut back on the tuna after all?

2) But maybe there is some hope? Tuna fisheries are also notoriously unkind to albatross populations, especially long-line fisheries. The birds try to eat the bait, get caught in the hooks and drown. I have always felt some guilt for these unseen deaths when eating my tuna mayonnaise. Then today I read on The Great Beyond that albatrosses may be saved after all. Changing practices have lead to an 85% decrease in the number of albatrosses killed by the fisheries. This can only be good news, surely?

3) I've also found another reason to worry about eating salmon. BBC Wildlife Magazine has an article in the February 2009 issue (page 39) describing a decline in salmon numbers in British Columbia. Fewer salmon means less food for grizzly bears for starters. So why are the salmon declining? The article points the finger at overfishing and the effects of fish farms on wild fish: sea lice breed in the farms then move out to infect wild fish. The salmon I get all comes from Aussie waters, mostly Tasmanian, but even though there are no bears to go hungry I'm sure the farms have the same problems. Perhaps I shall rethink salmon too?

I think I might just have to fork out a few dollars and get myself a copy of the Australian Marine Conservation Society's Sustainable Seafood Guide. At least then I'll have a better idea where I stand.

Finally, to end this post on marine life, I loved reading about this  in the Telegraph: a biologist on a tagging trip caught a huge stingray, 7 foot by 7 foot!!!

In the news today

Some sciencey stories that have caught my eye this week:

A paper in Genome Research describes the sequencing of the entire mitochodrial genome of the extinct thylacine or Tasmanian tiger. This probably deserves it's own post: it uses new methods and the results are surprisingly different from the sequences previously available. I'll try to review it in more depth later...

Scientific American reports on the discovery of two species of fly in Namibia which are members of a genus previously only known from the fossil record. This is pretty cool, especially given my personal soft spot for Namibia. Maybe I have unknowingly inhaled one of these flies! I am however a little disappointed that the good folk at Scientific American have described the flies as "living fossils". The term is not helpful. If a fly is alive it isn't a fossil. And where should the line be drawn? Many extant species have close relatives known from the fossil record. Are they all "living fossils"? How much divergence is required before they are no longer classed as "living fossils"? I think terms like this can really confuse people.

ABC news reports on the births of ten Tasmanian Devil pups on an island sanctuary. The pups are the offspring of devils chosen for captive breeding because of their good genetics. They have similar genetic profiles to the famous Cedric, a devil who raised, then dashed, the hopes of researchers by first showing immunity to the devastating Devil Facial Tumour Disease, only to later contract the cancer. Maybe these pups will show greater resilience to the disease?

And finally I can't resist posting a link to this: BBC footage of bears catching dead fish with their feet! Apparently they don't like to get their ears wet :-)

Darwin Day

As I described in my previous post, I've not been in quite the right frame of mind for blogging these last few days, my thoughts have been elsewhere. So my planned post for Darwin Day has been deferred as I've not put in the necessary reading. But I still wanted to mark the occasion. Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Darwin Day is "a global celebration of science and reason" held around Darwin's birthday each year. This year is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species...". At work we celebrated with Darwin-themed cakes and a few candles. But I said I'd blog today... can I come up with something interesting on the fly?

After all these years, how does society regard the legacy of Darwin? That's what I wanted to cover. I could list the essential contribution of Darwin's ideas to the development of modern biology and analyse Theodosius Dobzhansky's assertion that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. I could debate the future for evolutionary thinking and science in the US under the new Obama government, challenged as it is by the creationist and intelligent design lobbies. But so many others have written good, thoughtful posts on these topics already and here, in the last couple of hours of Darwin Day in Australia, I don't have the time to come up with any deep thinking or novel insights of my own. So I'll turn, as do so many of my generation (and so many of my students) to Google for some insight. I've just this moment performed a Google search for "Charles Darwin". If anything will reflect the popular legacy of Darwin today it will surely be the top ten hits I get on Google... right?

First up is a news story from the Telegraph in England. Darwin's home, Down House, is re-opening to the public on Darwin Day, following renovations. So Darwin is sufficiently well known and interesting that people will travel and spend money to see where he lived. I guess that is nothing surprising, but perhaps encouraging for Darwin fans to know that people care.

Second is Wikipedia, of course. But Google anything today and you will surely get a Wikipedia entry in the first few hits, so not much to glean from this.

Next is AboutDarwin.com. This is one of many websites dedicated to the man. Here you can find info on his life, his travels, his writings and people he knew and worked with. Today the homepage is decorated with a birthday cake and balloons. I wonder if he would have appreciated the thought?

Fourth is a biography of Darwin at Lucidcafe. It is short but seems to cover the basics well as far as I can tell at a glance and there are plenty of related links.

Fifth is a link to a list of blog posts on Darwin. This doesn't surprise me, especially today, as he pops up everywhere in the blogosphere, in scientific blogs and in blogs on what I shall simplistically refer to as "evolution vs religious fundamentalism". Likewise, the sixth is a link to a list of Darwin's books. Again, no great surprise.

Finally, the seventh hit, we get to that wonderful resource: The complete work of Charles Darwin online. Want to know what Darwin wrote about something? Look here. It's open access and it does what it says on the tin, with a handy user guide.

In eighth and ninth are two more brief biographies and in tenth a link to "On the Origin of Species..." on Google Books.

So, most of the top ten hits are either biographical links or academic links to Darwin's writings. I like this. Darwin was an academic and it seems only correct that the top ten hits (realistically this is as far as many people will look) include so many links to the works of the man himself. Amongst all the serious scholarship, so much rubbish is written today about what "Darwinism" really is that it can be hard for those new to evolutionary theory to figure out which sources to trust. So where better to start than with what he actually said. Then take it from there.

Out of interest I scrolled through a few more pages of results and found mostly more of the same. A mention perhaps to the Charles Darwin Foundation for science in the Galapagos at number 12, and Charles Darwin University in Australia at number 15. Nice to see his name is out there still.

Motivation

Specifically, motivation to go in the lab and do science. It is lacking today. Possible causative factors:

1) I am suffering post-public-holiday-itis, an extreme form of Monday-itis brought on by the long weekend. A possibility, but unlikely to be the full story? I'm not lacking motivation for other work-related tasks.

2) I am lacking motivation to move in general because my neck and shoulders are achy and I have arranged to see my physio. So the idea of repetitive pipetting is unattractive. I think there is some truth in this one.

3) I am still crabby, despite my years of professional experience and knowing not to take it too personally, that the PCR I ran on Friday has to be repeated. There is a faint but definite band in one of my negative controls. This is not the end of the world: I know that the nature of the samples I work with and the type of reactions I do make me a prime candidate for occasional contamination and I have ways to deal with this, but it still makes me grumpy. Especially when it happens on a Friday afternoon. At heart I think this is the real cause of my apathy today.

I have an hour before I have a meeting. I should go to the lab. Now. Really.

Endangered delicacies

It wasn't perhaps the main intention when setting up this blog, but I am starting to think I will post regular updates on species in danger of extinction as a consequence of human gastronomic tastes. This decision is prompted by an article I encountered today on Biology News Net titled Frogs are being eaten to extinction, which reports on recent research from the University of Adelaide.

Dodos

Given my interest in wildlife conservation, I thought it only right to make my first sciencey post a comment on extinction, or what happens when wildlife conservation fails. One of the best-known extinct species in the popular mind is, of course, the dodo. I won't rehash the story of the dodo here, it has been covered in detail elsewhere. But as a quick summary: the first accounts of dodos came from Portuguese visitors to the then-uninhabited island of Mauritius in 1507. The Dutch colonised the island in 1638. By the end of that century the dodos were gone.

The 2008 IUCN Red List will tell you that the dodo is one of 717 known animal species to have become extinct since their records begin. Some of these extinctions are shamefully recent events, for example the extinction of the baiji dolphin only a few years ago.

Reading about human-mediated extinctions reminds me why I do the work I do. Perhaps it is a futile hope in the society we live in, but I hope that something I do might one day make a difference to some species on the edge. I study Australian wildlife, haunted by the ghosts of the thylacine and the 26 other Australian mammals driven to extinction since 1788 (not to mention the birds, frogs, insects, plants...). As I travel the country I can only feel the gaps left by creatures such as the toolache wallaby, the desert rat-kangaroo or the remarkable gastric-brooding frog. I've seen Tasmanian devils in the wild and I confess the first time it brought a tear to my eye. On my next trip to Tassie I fear I won't see them as easily and if I do it will be bittersweet: since I arrived in Aus nearly ten years ago they have been ravaged by devil facial tumour disease.

Teaching these topics to first year undergrads saddens me. I think some wonder why we even bother. In the face of the weight of history is it futile to hope that there is a place for conservation in this world? I hope so.