KUMANO, Japan Thousands of tuna, their silver bellies bloated with fat

tuna

KUMANO, Japan Thousands of tuna, their silver bellies bloated with fat, swim frantically around in netted areas of a small bay, stuffing themselves until they grow twice as heavy as in the wild.Is this sushi’s future? Tuna raised like chickens or cows?As the world’s love affair with raw fish depletes wild tuna populations, long-running efforts to breed the deep-sea fish from egg to adulthood may finally be bearing fruit. Though the challenges are daunting, the potential profits are huge.

By the end of this year, an Australian company says it will begin selling small amounts of southern bluefin tuna hatched in its fishery. A Japanese firm breeding the more prized Pacific bluefin tuna hopes to start sales in 2013 and ship 10,000 fish by 2015.

Whether tuna farming will become viable on a large scale remains an unanswered question. Tuna are much harder to rear than the widely farmed salmon and shrimp. They are large and need room to swim. They only spawn under certain circumstances. In some experiments, fewer than 1 percent of the babies survive. And those that do eat so much that they could wipe out other fish species.

The bulk of the tuna farmed today isn’t bred from eggs; it is caught in the sea and fattened on farms, which does nothing to save nature’s dwindling stock.

Atlantic bluefin, found in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean, is disappearing so rapidly that Monaco is pushing to list it as an endangered species at an international meeting in Qatar in March. The U.S. says it will back the proposal.Separately, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas recently slashed the quota for next year’s catch by about a third to 13,500 tons, a move criticized by environmentalists as not going far enough.

No wonder Japan’s biggest seafood company, Maruha Nichiro Holdings Inc., is bullish on tuna. Maruha operates several tuna farms, including the one here in Kumano, a small coastal city in western Japan. Here, in a small bay, the fish live in netted sections mostly 50 meters by 80 meters (160 feet by 260 feet), smaller than a football field.”For years, everyone assumed it was impossible to breed tuna on farms,” says Takashi Kusano, a general manager who has worked for 20 years on cultivating tuna. “Tuna remains forever a mystery.”

Japanese consume 80 percent of the world’s Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna, the two species most sought after by sushi lovers. In Japan, they are called “hon-maguro,” which translates roughly as “true tuna.”The survival rate for hatched Pacific bluefin is about 0.4 percent of the 28 million eggs collected for tests at Maruha’s farms. Another effort, at Japan’s Kinki University, has achieved a 6 percent survival rate.

Those numbers sound low, but one tuna lays tens of millions of eggs and the survival rates are improving.”I had to solve the puzzle of why our fish kept dying,” recalls Kusano.

Unlike other fish, which can pump oxygen better through their mouths, tuna must swim continuously at up to 80 kph (50 mph) to absorb oxygen through their gills.Baby fish, which aren’t developed enough to brake or steer, often die ramming into the nets that cordon off tuna farms in coastal waters.

Learning about tuna diseases and dietary habits took years of trial and error, and tuna are surprisingly vulnerable to stress, Kusano said.A handful of tuna that Maruha has produced are set to lay eggs next year, a sign that the full life cycle may be finally completed.

Kinki University has already done that, producing 40,000 Pacific bluefin babies this year from eggs laid by tuna on its farms, up from 10,000 last year.Even if the hurdles to a full life cycle are cleared, other concerns remain, such as the tuna’s voracious appetite.

“Bluefin tuna are like lions and tigers. They are at the very, very top of the food chain. And they eat other fish. What you are doing is catching wild fish to create bluefin tuna,” said Mike Hirshfield, chief scientist at Oceana, an advocacy group for the world’s oceans. “The anchovies, the sardines and the herrings are already fished to the max.”

That raises ethical questions about feeding tuna with relatively cheap fish that are needed by people in developing countries, Hirshfield said.Maruha’s answer is a tuna feed, which it patented in 2006, made of fishmeal mixed with oils and nutrients and looking like brown sausages.

The company says its feed is less polluting, fattens tuna three times faster than feeding them small fish, uses fish that aren’t eaten by people, and can be stored at room temperature, slashing energy needs.Eventually, Maruha hopes to develop a vegetarian tuna feed.Hirshfield calls vegetarian feed the last hope, noting it has had some success with salmon and trout.

Wild tuna still commands a premium over farmed tuna. In January, a 200-kilogram (440-pound) Pacific bluefin tuna fetched a record 20.2 million yen ($220,000) at a Japanese fish market. 40-kilogram (90-pound) tuna raised at Maruha fetch about 100,000 yen ($1,100) each.

Farmed tuna’s disadvantage is that “it doesn’t have a fish taste, and its color is almost white,” said Kazuo Sato, 56, who has run a sushi shop outside of Tokyo for 31 years. But, he added, “we can’t be relying just on natural tuna these days, and there are bound to be improvements in farmed tuna.”Maruha harvests its fish the old-fashioned way, with baited lines from small boats – the method believed best to preserve a sought-after buttery taste.

The company aims to be marketing 10,000 tuna bred from eggs in 2015, worth 1.5 billion yen ($17 million) at today’s prices. That would be 10 percent of Japan’s current annual farmed tuna production of 5,000 tons, only a tiny fraction of the 44,000 tons still caught in the wild.At Kinki University, Osamu Murata, head of research, says, “It’s our mission to spread to the world our knowledge about producing man-raised tuna that doesn’t rely on nature’s resources.”

In Australia, Clean Seas Tuna worked with Kinki to overcome such problems as cannibalism and young tuna crashing into tank walls, the company said. And Hawaiian regulators have approved the world’s first commercial farm for “ahi,” bigeye tuna.

In Japan, tuna is such a staple that it recently merited an editorial in Yomiuri, the country’s largest newspaper, urging readers to curb their appetites for the sake of the fish’s long-term survival.
That would include eating less “toro,” the prized fatty cut. “To keep enjoying ‘toro,’ we must exercise self-control,” it said.

Photographer 33 year old has become a sensation online ( orangutan) at facebook

orangutan

Photographer 33 year old has become a sensation online via a number of portraits of life in  Vienna zoo that attracted thousands of fans. However, the photographer is not always the photographer, but a female orangutan named Nonja. Some images documentation Nonja attracted more attention from the 18,000 fans on Facebook since the Vienna zoo Tiergarten to post photo albums on the social networking site. Uniquely, a number of photo shots are dim picture Nonja just get the full spotlight clicking sound impressed by the comments made by some fans. Apparently, the photographer actually been indifferent to the kemashyurannya. This is not because only expect Nonja raisins out of a digital camera Samsung ST 1000 every time he snapped the photo equipment that has been specifically designed this.

Project an image capture by the orangutans were deliberately arranged by the Tiergarten Zoo in Vienna to avoid Nonja and other primates friend from saturation in the cage. Of course that primates do not care about the actual work, just a coincidence resulting from the activities taking pictures,” said a spokesman for Vienna Tiergarten. All the animals know is to press the camera button then they will get a raisin.& nNonja may not realize that his work was admired by men. However, the popularity of online albums current Nonja can deliver it to the stage as an icon orangutans achievement.

Mississippi River Fears mount over giant carp reaching Great Lakes

giant carp

CHICAGO – Fears that giant, voracious species of carp will get into the Great Lakes and wipe out other fish have led to rising demands that the government close the waterway connecting the lakes to the Mississippi River – an unprecedented step that could disrupt the movement of millions of tons of iron ore, coal, grain and other goods.

The dispute could become an epic clash of competing interests: commerce, environmentalists and fishermen.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and five environmental groups threatened Wednesday to sue the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to force it to temporarily shut three shipping locks near Chicago because of evidence that Asian carp may have breached the electrical barrier that is supposed to hold them back from the lakes.

The environmental groups went further than the governor and said the Great Lakes and the Mississippi should be permanently separated to avert what Granholm called “ecological disaster.”

Col. Vincent Quarles, commander of the Corps’ Chicago district, said the agency is considering all options but would not close the locks without first studying the possible effects.

Environmentalists fear the fish, which consume up to 40 percent of their body weight daily in plankton, could starve out smaller and less aggressive competitors and cause the collapse of the $7 billion-a-year Great Lakes sport and commercial fishing industry.

The carp – which can grow to 4 feet long and 100 pounds and are known for leaping out of the water when boats are near – were imported by Southern fish farms but escaped into the Mississippi in large numbers during flooding in the 1990s and have been making their way northward ever since.

The Mississippi and the Great Lakes are connected by a complex, 250-mile network of rivers and canals engineered more than a century ago. It runs from Chicago, on the southern edge of Lake Michigan, to a spot on the Mississippi just north of St. Louis.

The American Waterways Operators, a trade association representing the tug and barge industry, said closing the locks would lead to higher shipping costs because commodities would have to be sent overland via truck or train across Illinois before being put back onto vessels.

“The impact is going to be large,” said Lynn Muench, the group’s senior vice president for regional advocacy in St. Louis. “It could definitely impact day-to-day living.”

Tens of millions of tons of goods are moved annually along the shipping canals or through the locks that lead into Lake Michigan. Muench had no estimate of the value of the cargo, which includes salt, sugar, molasses, cement, scrap metal and petroleum.

In the continuing struggle to keep the fish out, Illinois environmental officials began dumping poison Wednesday night in a nearly six-mile stretch of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal near Lockport to kill off the carp while the electrical barrier is turned off for maintenance.

Chief Petty Officer Robert Lanier of the U.S. Coast Guard said workers began dumping a fish toxin called rotenone into the canal about 8 p.m. and would continue the poisoning until some time Thursday morning. Crews then planned to use large cranes with nets to scoop up an estimated 200,000 pounds of dead fish, which will be taken to a landfill.

The electrical barrier, installed in 2002 to repel fish with a non-lethal jolt, has long been the only thing standing between the carp and Lake Michigan, the gateway to the four other lakes. But officials said two weeks ago that DNA from Asian carp had been found between the barrier and one of the locks near the lake. No actual carp have been found in Lake Michigan.

Environmentalists and Granholm said the locks should be closed while the scope of the problem is established.

“This is an immediate threat to the Great Lakes, to our sport and commercial fishery, and as such it requires some emergency actions appropriate to the level of that threat,” said Ken DeBeaussaert, director of Michigan’s Office of the Great Lakes. “Closing the locks to prevent the possible spread of the Asian carp into the Great Lakes is an appropriate response on an emergency basis.”

The environmental groups also said the government should find a way to permanently separate – through physical barriers or other means – the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds so the invasive species has no way of passing between the two.

Last fall, environmental groups offered several possible solutions, including erecting concrete walls, constructing more locks, even lifting barges over the locks.

The issue “takes on a whole new urgency because of the Asian carp emergency,” said Andy Buchsbaum of the National Wildlife Federation. “We don’t know where the carp are, and the risk of their being in the canals is too great.”

Some fishing enthusiasts doubt the government will consider closing the locks. Dan Thomas, president of the Elmhurst, Ill.-based Great Lakes Sport Fishing Council, said too many industries and too many jobs would probably be affected.

“Ideally it’s the way to go, but many things that are ideal don’t always come to fruition because there are too many other circumstances,” he said. “They can still be contained, but only with concerted effort and a sense of urgency to do what is necessary on a timely basis.”

Scientists say more than 180 invasive species have entered the Great Lakes, multiplying rapidly and feeding on native species or competing with them for food. Millions of dollars have been spent trying to control the zebra mussel and the round goby fish, which already have moved between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins.

74 bison from Yellowstone National Park to go to billionaire Ted Turner's private ranch

bison

BILLINGS, Mont.- The head of Montana’s wildlife agency has given preliminary approval to a plan calling for 74 bison from Yellowstone National Park to go to billionaire Ted Turner’s private ranch.

Officials hope to eventually use the bison to establish new herds on public lands. But conservationists see the move as privatizing Montana wildlife.The bison have been held in federal quarantine for the past several years to make sure they don’t have the animal disease brucellosis.Turner offered to hold them for five years – the duration of the quarantine program – in exchange for keeping 90 percent of their offspring. That could amount to about 190 animals to offset his costs.The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which runs the quarantine in Corwin Springs, Mont., also opposes the move.Bison, or buffalo, once numbered in the millions across North America but were driven to near extinction.

Turner Enterprises general manager Russell Miller said Ted Turner stepped in after Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer asked if he would consider submitting a proposal for the animals.Turner wanted to help the state after prior efforts to relocate the Yellowstone bison had failed, Miller said.”I see this as a perfect blend between conservation for the public good and privatization to recoup the costs,” Miller said.It would cost about $480,000 to tend to the animals over the five years, he said.Ken McDonald with Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks said the animals could be moved to Turner’s sprawling Flying D Ranch by late February.An environmental study must be done first, then the department would open the plan to comment for 30 days.Officials recommended the moved last month. Final approval must be given by Fish Wildlife and Parks chief Joe Maurier.

Turner already owns about 50,000 bison, most domesticated, on ranches throughout the West. His restaurant chain Ted’s Montana Grill serves buffalo burgers, although Miller has said the Yellowstone bison are prized for their pure genetics, not their meat.The animals would be kept on a 12,000-acre parcel within the billionaire’s 113,000-acre ranch south of Bozeman.State officials were initially reluctant to put the animals on private land. But McDonald said the bison faced possible slaughter if no home was found.”They need to get moved out of that facility,” he said.Fourteen more of the animals would be shipped to Guernsey State Park in southeastern Wyoming and kept on about 1,500 acres, said state park administrator Dominic Bravo. He said their offspring could be distributed to other state parks or interested public landowners.”For us, the opportunity to have Yellowstone’s pure genetics would be great,” Bravo said. He said the herd would likely double in size over the next five years.The bison have been tested extensively for brucellosis, a disease carried by many of Yellowstone’s wildlife that can be transmitted to cattle and cause premature abortions.Fears over the disease helped sink an earlier attempt to move the quarantined animals to Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation.(AP)

Earl Cooley: Remembering an Early Smokejumper

Earl Cooley, who died November 9 at age 98, helped to develop the profession of sending firefighters by parachute to battle forest fires.Years ago, a young forester took an unusual new job. Earl Cooley became one of the first smokejumpers. Smokejumpers parachute from airplanes. They fight fires that crews cannot reach quickly or easily from the ground.Earl Cooley worked for the United States Forest Service, an agency of the Agriculture Department. The Forest Service had a plane that it wanted to use to drop water bombs onto wildfires. But that idea failed. So the agency decided to use the plane for what was then a new practice: smokejumping.

The first fire jump in the United States took place on July twelfth, nineteen forty, in the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho.Another smokejumper, Rufus Robinson, went first. Then out came Earl Cooley.As he later described it, the plane was not much more than half a kilometer above the trees. The day was windy, and the jump was not as good as others he had made.

He began to turn over in the air when his chute opened, and there were problems with the lines at first. But he chose a large spruce tree to land in near the fire, and climbed down.With hand tools, he and Rufus Robinson threw dirt on the fire and dug a line to contain it so the flames would not spread. They worked through the night and had the fire controlled the next morning, when other men arrived from a camp in the area.

Earl Cooley always said he was not afraid being a smokejumper. Over the years, he worked to develop the profession. He served as the first president of the National Smokejumper Association. He also wrote about his experiences. But not all had happy endings.On August fifth, nineteen forty-nine, he was involved in a disaster at a forest fire near Helena, Montana. He had to choose where a crew would jump. But the wind changed and the fire grew unexpectedly, taking thirteen lives.Many years later, Earl Cooley told a newspaper that he still believed he had made the best decision he could. He retired from the Forest Service in nineteen seventy-five. But he continued to visit the mountaintop where the men were buried, until he could no longer make the climb.

Earl Cooley died on November ninth in Missoula, Montana. He was ninety-eight years old.Today, more than two hundred seventy men and women are smokejumpers for the Forest Service. Smokejumpers are also used in Russia and other countries.And that’s the VOA Special English Agriculture Report, written by Jerilyn Watson. I’m Karen Leggett. (VOA)