Fishermen Catch Huge Numbers of Live Venomous Sea Snakes

 Journey to the Gulf of Thailand to witness the venomous sea snake trade with Emerging Explorer Zoltan Takacs.

Scientists sound a conservation alarm on the harvest of over 80 tons of sea snakes each year in the Gulf of Thailand.

By Jane J. Lee

National Geographic

 Fishermen wading barefoot through a writhing ball of venomous serpents can pay a high price for participating in the Gulf of Thailand's (map) sea snake harvest. Some die from snakebites, according to a recent study that suggests the snake catch may be one of the biggest hauls of marine reptiles in the world.

 Scientists published estimates of the catch size in the journal Conservation Biology in December, along with some of the first research documenting who's buying and selling sea snakes and the fishery's indirect role in rhino poaching

 Fishermen bitten by their deadly catch believe that drinking ground-up rhino horn—or putting chunks of horn on the wound—can cure them. (See "Why African Rhinos Are Facing a Crisis.")

Caught in the glare of artificial lights, these sea snakes are destined for dinner plates and use in traditional medicines.

Photograph by Zoltan Takacs

Some scientists are raising concerns about the practice. Little is known about the region's sea snakes, including what species and how many live there, so it's not clear whether the harvest is sustainable.

An overharvest, these researchers worry, could jeopardize potential medicinal discoveries. Compounds in venom, once processed and administered in controlled amounts, can be beneficial in treating human ailments like heart disease.

The sea snake catch—a side job for the region's Vietnamese squid fishers—takes in over 80 tons (73 metric tons) of the marine reptile annually. That's roughly 225,500 individual sea snakes per year, valued at over $3 million.

Fishermen bitten by sea snakes use treatments that contain rhinoceros horn (shown above), which has no proven medical benefits.

Photograph by Zoltan Takacs

The fishery of opportunity occurs during squid hunts conducted each lunar cycle before the moon gets too bright.

Most of the sea snakes end up in China and Vietnam, says the study's lead author Zoltan Takacs, whose work was funded by the National Geographic Society. Restaurants use the meat in soups and employ either the whole animal or just its blood in alcoholic beverages.

The snake's organs, including the heart and gallbladder, play central roles in concoctions meant to relieve maladies such as joint pain, anorexia, and insomnia.

Little is known about sea snakes in the Gulf of Thailand, so researchers aren't sure whether current harvest levels are sustainable.

Photograph by Zoltan Takacs

Lost Medicines?

Hunting snakes for food or medicinal purposes is nothing new, says John Murphy, a sea snake researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago. "[And] the Gulf of Thailand harvest seems to be driven by the Chinese market," says the biologist, who was not involved in the study.

Snakes figure prominently in traditional Chinese medicines, Murphy says. Coupled with the country's strong economy, "the demand for snakes—not just sea snakes—is huge." (See why "China's Expanding Middle Class Fuels Poaching, Decadence in Myanmar.")

Fishermen handle their highly venomous catch with little or no protection, often wading into pens barefoot and grabbing sea snakes with their bare hands.

Photograph by Zoltan Takacs

The demand extends to Western medical practices in other parts of the world, says Takacs, a pharmacologist specializing in animal toxins at ToxinTech in New York City.

"Out of the top three heart attack medications, two of them come from snake venoms," he says.

The potential uses of venoms in the sea snakes in the Gulf of Thailand haven't been studied, says Takacs. "So we absolutely have no idea what kind of venoms or toxins we are eating away."

Follow Jane J. Lee on Twitter.

Sea snakes destined for market are sorted by weight and can fetch up to $20 per pound.

Photograph by Zoltan Takacs

News Source:http://news.nationalgeographic.com

Ban on landing of trash fishes at Karachi Harbour: fish traders' strike enters third day

 
  
RECORDER REPORT

Fish traders' strike on Wednesday entered third day against official ban on landing of trash seafood at Karachi Fish Harbour, fishermen said. Fishermen said the strike reduced the fish and shrimp rates by 50 percent within the last three days, adding that the government and traders dispute has badly hit their living.

They feared there are several boats anchored at the harbour with loaded seafood stuff during the last three days. "The seafood stuff loaded in the boats is likely to decay as the cooling in holds is gradually losing," fishermen said. The government has suddenly imposed ban on trash fish and shrimp landing and disallowed all coming boats to landing their catch. "The policy should be implemented with consensus and with clear warnings to boats," they noted.

The ordinance, which the government has implemented now, has been in place for the last 28 years but the authorities paid any head to the grim situation that the country's seas are facing from growing seabed trawling. "The government and traders should end their dispute immediately to facilitate the local fishermen, whose earnings are relied on sales of fish and shrimp to maintain their families amid growing inflation," they said.

They said the government continued to spare the sea-lords, who are using the banned nets for seafood catch in creeks. The nets are so thin that catch undersized shrimp and fish species which are not fit for human consumption and sold at cheaper rates as trash stuff. "The government should evolve fisheries policy keeping in view the world standards in collaboration with local fishermen and then implement it effectively and indiscriminately across the coastal belt of Sindh province," they said.

 News Source

Protest and Strike of Fishermen Against Govt: of Sindh Fisheries & Live Stock Department.

 
Catching and landing of wet fishes and processing of fishmeal have been stooped in the result of a strike which is being observed under protest against Sindh Government Fisheries & Live Stock department for undeclared period. It was decided in a joint meeting of fishermen & fishmeal manufacturers/ exporters which was held at Ibrahim Haidri Goth Karachi yesterday against illegal raids over the fishmeal factories/ plants and to seal them by Govt: of Sindh Fisheries & Live Stock department. It was discussed that despite of restricted through stay orders by Honorable Sindh High Court Karachi, some officers of Sindh Govt: have been harassing fishmeal factories/ plants owners and workers not to process fishmeal alleging that it contains prohibited fish species catches through illegal fishing nets.

Fishmeal is produced automatically or manually from different wild-caught wet/ dried marine fish species which have low weight and reduced size and they ever remains naturally in their original low live weight from 5 mg to 200 mg similarly reduced size from 2 inches to 6 inches. The said wild-caught small marine fish contain a high percentage of bones and oil, and is usually deemed not suitable for direct human consumption in Pakistan and worldwide. The fish caught for fishmeal purposes solely are termed industrial. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_meal]. Hence, there is no question of alleged illegal fishing nets and so-called prohibited fish species arose in the recent issue malafidely  raised by Govt: of Sindh Fisheries & live Stock department.

16-foot great white shark spotted near Australian beach

By: Tanya Lewis, LiveScience


Cage diving with great white sharks is one thing. Spotting one at a local beach is quite another! (Photo: Hermanus Backpackers/Flickr)

A massive great white shark has been spotted swimming close to an Australian beach, scaring the locals and forcing the beach to close, according to news reports.

The female shark, nicknamed "Joan of Shark" by local fisherman, is more than 16 feet (5 meters) long and weighs about 1.8 tons (1.6 metric tons), The Telegraph reported. Signals from a satellite tag on the shark alerted authorities to its location, and city officials warned residents of Albany, Western Australia, to stay out of the water.

Joan was the largest of her kind to be electronically tagged. Fisheries protection officers injected an external tracking device in the shark and tracked her for three weeks. They captured the shark again a week later and placed a more sophisticated tag in her stomach that will enable the officers to track her for at least a decade, The Telegraph reported. A network of more than 300 monitors on the seabed can pinpoint the shark's movements, sending signals via satellite to warn authorities of her whereabouts. [Image Gallery: Great White Shark Pictures]

The shark may have smelled a dying humpback whale that was beached in the area, a spokesman for the state department of fisheries said, according to The Telegraph.

Great white sharks are the largest predatory fishes on the planet. They can reach up to 20 feet (6 m) in length and weigh up to 2.5 tons (2.3 metric tons).

They are highly intelligent and curious creatures, with well-developed senses. They can swim at speeds of up to 15 mph (24 km/h), and can leap completely out of the water when hunting prey. They attack quickly, from below, and pack a powerful, sometimes deadly, bite.

These massive sharks have 300 teeth, arranged in up to seven rows. Young great whites feed on fish, rays and other small sharks. Adults hunt harbor seals, sea lions and elephant seals, or scavenge whale carcasses for the blubber.

Great whites have been known to attack humans, but not eat them. Great white sharks have killed a number of swimmers and divers off the coast of Western Australia in the past four years.

Source:  http://www.mnn.com

Ocean Acidification Could Make Fish Lose Their Fear Of Predators, Study Finds

By Katie Valentine
 

CREDIT: Shutterstock

Add “losing fear of predators” to the long list of impacts acidifying oceans could have on fish and other marine life.
A new study published in Nature Climate Change has found that elevated CO2 levels in marine waters make reef fish attracted to the smell of their predators, rather than being repelled. Researchers looked at multiple species of reef fish living near natural volcanic CO2 seeps in Papua New Guinea, an environment the study says is acidified to levels comparable to projections of what the entire ocean’s acid content will be in the next 100 years. They compared the behavior of the fish living in the acidified environment to fish in nearby, less acidified reefs, and found that, while fish in the nearby control reefs avoided water streams that contained predator odor, fish from the acidified reef spent 90 percent of their time in water streams that smelled of their predators.
On top of that, fish that lived under high-CO2 conditions were bolder than other fish — meaning that they emerged more quickly from their hiding places after a disturbance and ventured farther from their hiding places than other fish — and couldn’t differentiate the smells of different habitats. Fish from the control reef spent more than 80 percent of their time in hiding, while two species of damselfish from the acidified reef spent less than 12 percent of their time in shelter, and two other fish species studied spent no time in shelter, preferring to swim in more exposed, open water
Danielle Dixson, assistant professor at Georgia Tech and co-author of the study, told ThinkProgress that the results of the study were surprising because scientists long believed that fish would be able to deal with ocean acidification due to their natural mechanism for coping with increased levels of CO2. When fish are exposed to high acid environments, they absorb the acid into their bodies, and to compensate for the increased acid, they increase the amount of bicarbonate — a base — their bodies produce.
“The thing that people didn’t really think about was that when they up-regulate all this bicarbonate, it interacts with neurological pathways,” Dixson said.
Dixson said that when there’s too much bicarbonate in the fish’s system, their GABA receptor stops working properly, causing the cognitive issues the researchers recorded. These effects have major implications for the future of the ocean ecosystem. The balance of the acidified reef ecosystem in the study did not suffer as a result of the cognitive problems of the fish, mainly because there were fewer predators in the environment and because, when young fish were killed by predators in the acidified environment, other young fish would migrate from nearby, less acidified reefs to replace them. But when all the oceans are at the level of the CO2 seep ecosystem, this replacement from fish in less acidified waters won’t be an option.
“It is hopeful that there are still fish that live [in the CO2 seep sites] and that they’re metabolically the same as the fish that live in the non-CO2 seep site, but the degree of aid that the control sites are providing the CO2 sites is unknown,” Dixson said. “As the world acidifies — in 100 years when the ocean is expected to be the equivalent of a CO2 seep reef — there won’t be these safe havens that can help.”
The study isn’t the first to document ocean acidification’s wide-reaching effects on fish and other marine species. Another study from August also found that fish could become confused and hyperactive as acid levels increase in the ocean, and also found evidence that the metabolism of fish could change. That study also found that when atmospheric carbon levels reached 500 to 650 parts per million — levels that are predicted by 2100 — corals, echinoderms (such as starfish), mollusks and fish were negatively impacted. Researchers have also predicted that ocean acidification could lead to a decline in shellfish, and that coral will struggle to build its skeleton as acidity rises. The effects of acidification could be so harmful to coral that Oceana predicts some species of coral could become functionally extinct within 20 years.

Source:  http://thinkprogress.org

Khan Traders Fish Meal — Karachi

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Source:  http://karachi.olx.com.pk/khan-traders-fish-meal-iid-619704380

When male fish turn female!

Written by Oman Observer



In what can be termed as a perfect case of gender-bender among fish, biologists have found evidence of “feminisation” of male fish in the estuaries in the Basque coast of Spain. Pollutants acting as oestrogens are responsible for this phenomenon which, among other changes, is causing ovocytes — immature ova — to appear in male fish, biologists claimed. The acquisition of feminine features by male fish has been detected, to a greater or lesser extent in all the estuaries — not only in the characteristics of the gonads of the specimens analysed but also in various molecular markers.
“The results show that endocrine disruption is a phenomenon that has spread all over our estuaries, which means that, as has been detected in other countries, we have a problem with pollutants,” explained Miren P Cajaraville, Director of the group of Cell Biology in Environmental Toxicology at the University of the Basque Country. The team has conducted research using thick-lipped grey mullet and has analysed specimens in seven zones in coastal Spain — Arriluze, Gernika, Santurtzi, Plentzia, Ondarroa, Deba and Pasaia. The results of the research were published in the journal Science of the Total Environment and Marine Environmental Research. — IANS
Source:  http://main.omanobserver.om