salmon
dr. dolittle | June 24, 2014
Image of Biwa salmon from the Lake Biwa Museum (http://www.lbm.go.jp/english/exhibits/aquarium.html)
It is not surprising that Biwa salmon (image above), a subspecies of Oncorhyncus masou, do not adapt to seawater very well after having been landlocked in Lake Biwa, Japan for the last 500,000 years or so. Researchers from Hokkaido University and Shiga Prefecture Fishery Experiment Station in Japan wanted to know what caused the salmon to lose their ability to thrive in salt water. In a new paper published in the American Journal of Physiology they compared the sodium/potassium pumps in…
edyong | August 28, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Getting excited when fish produce sperm would usually get you strange looks. But for Tomoyuki Okutsu and colleagues at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, it's all part of a day's work. They are trying to use one species of fish as surrogate parents for another, a technique that could help to preserve species that are headed for extinction.
Okutsu works on salmonids, a group of fish that includes salmon and trout. Many members of this tasty clan have suffered greatly from over-…
ddobbs | June 16, 2009SciAm ponders evidence that fish hatcheries are watering down the trout and salmon gene pool.
Matt Yglesias looks at one of many lies being told by those opposing health-care reform â confirming Salon's prediction that the opponents of reform are not going to play nice. See also The American Prospect on How Big Pharma Intends to Kill the Public Option. I should add this campaign is having an effect: On the radio this morning I heard NPR Steve Insky Inskeep vigorously press the "public plan as trojan horse" attack on Kathleen Sibelius; I can only hope he'll as vigorously ask people such as…
sciencewoman | May 17, 2009One my friends lives outside of Anchorage, Alaska and recently had a black bear pay a visit to her backyard. Now her preschoolers are obsessed with bears.
Minnow too has a bit of a bear obsession at the moment, though she hasn't seen any bears in their natural habitat. At school, she's been reading "We're Going on a Bear Hunt" and at home one of her favorite books is the "Berenstain Bear's Big Honey Hunt." Saturday morning, Minnow announced that we were going on a bear hunt, or maybe that we were going to look for bees that would, presumably, lead us to bears. We made it all the way to the…
ddobbs | March 23, 2009Now this makes my day: I've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. Beard, foodees know, was a great eminence in fooddom, and won my heart years ago by stressing in one of his cookbooks that (to paraphrase) the quantity of food in a meal can be as important to its enjoyment as the food's quality -- especially if the food is good. His food awards are greatly coveted among chefs, food writers, and others who care about food.
So I'm thrilled that, as Eating Well editor Lisa Gosselin kindly informed me today,, my Eating Well story "The Wild Salmon Debate: A Fresh Look at…
zooillogix | November 13, 2008We're gonna need a bigger canoe...
This is not a hoax. This monstrous Chinook Salmon was found dead in a shallow stream by the California Department of Fish and Game.
Biologist Doug Killam discovered this angler's dream during a survey of salmon that had recently spawned in Battle Creek, California. "I have counted tens of thousands of salmon during my career, and this is the biggest I have ever seen." It better freakin' be. The previous record holder was an 88lb-er although this beasty's weight was not provided in DPFG's press release.
Because Pacific Chinook salmon die after spawning,…
ddobbs | May 7, 2008
I've been remiss in tracking here the farmed salmon issue I wrote about in the April/May Eating Well. Much has transpired; here a few tidbits and updates.
Soon after my feature ran, news broke that the Sacramento king (aka chinook) salmon run -- traditionally fairly robust, and the base of both the California salmon fishing industry and the main supply for many California restaurants -- went completely snuff this year. The California salmon fishery was closed for the first time in 160 years. A stunning blow to the fishing industry and all fans of salmon in general.
This has had some…
grrlscientist | September 17, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, salmon, trout, spawning, molecular biology, cloning, conservation, endangered species
A trout germ cell is transplanted into the body cavity of a newly hatched salmon embryo. This is part of the process that allowed adult salmon to successfully spawn trout offspring.
Image: Science magazine
Have you ever heard of a trout with salmon for parents? Since when has one species given birth to another species? Well, ever since scientists began experimenting with salmon in the hope that they could genetically alter these fish by injecting sex cells from trout so the…