Fish with Ich Credit: Dehai Xu, Ph.D

According to new research presented by Dehai Xu, Ph.D. at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS)*, a vaccine against the feared ich disease might be available in the foreseeable future.

Ich is a disease dreaded by hobby aquarists and professional fish farmers alike. It is caused by the ciliated protozoan Ichthyophthirius multifiliis (hence the name ich) and can easily kill of all the fish in an aquarium or fish pond. Fortunately, it seems to be unable to infect humans. Among aquarists, it is chiefly known as White Spot Disease since the parasites cause small white nodules to form on the skin and in the gills of infested fish.

Today, ich outbreaks in large commercial fish farms are often treated by adding hundreds of gallons of a formaldehyde solution to the water. This is far from an ideal solution, since formaldehyde can be toxic to both humans and fish. It is classified as a known human carcinogen by the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and is associated with both nasal sinus cancer and nasopharyngeal cancer. And as anyone who has ever combated ich in an aquarium knows, ich treatment is something you have to do over and over again since the parasite is usually only sensitive to treatment during one of its multiple life stages. This means repeatedly adding large quantities of formaldehyde solution to the pond. Even when formaldehyde ich treatment is successful, it provides no long-lasting effects since the fish develops no immunity. If new outbreaks occur, a new treatment cycle has to be carried out.

It is therefore no surprise that the series of vaccine tests carried out by Dr. Xu and his colleagues Dr. Phillip Klesius and Dr. Craig Shoemaker, who are with the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Alabama, have sparked vibrant interest within the aquatic world. For anyone from commercial fish farmers to public aquaria and hobby fish keepers, an ich vaccine would be a dream come true.

“Outbreaks of the parasitic disease caused by Ichthyophthirius (Ich) can result in losses of 50-100 percent of fish,” Dr Xu explained while presenting the team’s findings at the ACS meeting. “The disease is very common, and almost every home fish hobbyist has encountered it. Once the parasite infects fish, and starts growing in the skin, fins, and gills, there is no really effective treatment. Ich causes losses estimated at $50 million annually. It would be much better to prevent the disease. To vaccinate against Ich, you would need much less medication, and it would not pose an apparent threat to the environment. And you would need just one treatment to make the fish immune for life.”

In their efforts to develop a vaccine, Xu and his colleagues have focused on the use of so-called trophonts.

The ich protozoa goes though three life stages:

• The ich trophozoite feeds inside the nodule (”the white spot”) on the skin or gill of the fish.

• The ich trophozoite falls off and becomes an ich tomont, i.e. it enters an encapsulated dividing stage. During this stage, the tomont is attached to plants, gravel or other objects in the environment.

• The ich parasite will then start dividing itself, producing trophonts. The trophonts will move around freely in the water, looking for fish to infect.

Trophonts burrow into the skin and fills of a fish and start to feed, thus completing the cycle. When Xu, Klesius and Shoemaker began their research project very little was known about how fish develop protective immunity to trophonts, so the researchers basically had to start from scratch.

Eventually, they were able to show that vaccination with live ich theronts and trophonts killed with high-frequency sound waves stimulated production of protective antibodies in channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus)

“This study demonstrated that vaccines against Ich induced protective immunity and could provide a unique solution to prevent this parasitic disease through vaccination,” Xu said. “An Ich vaccine would have great impact by preventing the disease, minimizing loss of valuable fish and increasing profitability of aquaculture.”

Injecting fish in a laboratory setting is one thing, administering a vaccine to thousands or even millions of fish in a huge commercial farm is another, so the next goal will be to find a way of carrying out large-scale vaccinations. It might for instance be possible to produce a large quantity of Ich antigen and then creating a vaccine that can be administered as food or in a “bath”.

For aquarists however, injecting each fish with the vaccine might actually be a feasible solution, provided of course that an injectable vaccine would be produced for the aquarium market.

* http://portal.acs.org

Self cloning crayfish

An invading rare kind of self-cloning crayfish has been discovered in Madagascar, and is causing all sorts of alarm among researchers. Scientists are afraid that if these self-cloning crayfish continue to expand their territory that it could have sever consequences on the local environment. Madagascar is the home of numerous plants and animals, and is very delicately balanced. These invading crayfish may cause quite a disturbance.

The fear is escalating on Madagascar, an island located on the Indian ocean, as this self-cloning crayfish are invading and are eating their fair share of the rice paddies, and are an imminent threat to the endemic crayfish species.

It is not quite clear just how, or when, these shrimp like crustaceans, which are believed to have come from North America, came to Madagascar, which is some 400 miles off the coast of Mozambique.

Researchers think that the crayfish may have made its way from Europe, where scientists from Germany warned that crayfish were becoming very prolific as aquarium fish back in 2003.

A biologist at the Universite d’Antananarivo, professor Olga Ramilijaona, has explained that the first of these crayfish were found in a rice paddy close to the Capital in 2003.

However, the first “invasion” of the species, known as Marmorkrebs or Procambarus due to the fact that they appear to be closely related to North American crayfish in the genus Procambarus, particularly Procambarus fallax, came in the rainy season of 2007, when the crayfish, which were sold to less fortunate locals as a source of protein in the diet, began being sold in the markets.

Looks like there will be plenty enough to go around on the menu, if something isn’t done about this soon.. Scientists still don’t have a plan of action, but they are working on it.

Picture by Mr Krugersky

In a strange turn of events, a fisherman was left speechless after an enterprising frog hopped into his net, and proceeded to swallow his hard earned fish whole.

It appears the clever little creature had been biding his time, waiting for the fisherman to catch something before jumping in there and stealing away the prize.

The amateur fisherman, Valery Krugersky, was minding his own business and trying to relax in a lake just on the outskirts of the town of Chernigov, Ukraine.

Valery ingeniously makes use of an old curtain as a net, and was completely flabbergasted to see the frog hop out of the water and take what was rightfully his.

The frog, which was just a tad over six inches long, swallowed the catch whole, and then sat with a smug look upon his face, having had its fill.

All the hapless Mr. Krugersky could do was pull out his camera, and photograph the peculiar sight.

An engineer by trade, Mr. Krugersky had this to say: “I have seen a big pike jump in the net and eat the fish before but never a frog.”

There were a multitude of frogs milling about the lake, making boatloads of noise, however this frog made his way away from the crowd to jump into the make-shift net and eat the catch in mere seconds.

“I left the net in the lake and the frog just sat inside it for a long time making some noise.”

This just goes to show… Never leave your net unattended for even a second, you never know who might just be eying your prize.

Elkhorn Coral

An accidental find just off of Key Largo has lead to farms being created for delicate, yet ever so important, species of coral.

Just over 30 feet below the calm waters above the colorful reef off of Key Largo, Ken Nedimyer proudly displays a small slate which reads “Let’s plant corals.”

Along with a team of volunteer divers, they quickly get to work and utilize epoxy putty to help tiny bits of staghorn coral gain a foothold in the great big ocean.

In the vast expanse of ocean just off of Key Largo, Fort Lauderdale, and a few other choice locations, Nedimyer, an accomplished collector of tropical fish from Tavernier, along with researchers and his hodgepodge group of volunteers, are getting to work and raising groups of rare coral species to help repopulate the rapidly depleting reefs of the southeastern United States.

“These are my little children,” 54 year old Nedimyer, commented later that same day, explaining that the endangered coral which he has been cultivating on slabs of concrete, grows much like delicate saplings in an aquatic underwater offshore nursery.

Elkhorn and staghorn corals are classified as undersea architects, they create structures in the reef which then in turn support a myriad of sea lifeforms such as sponges, fish, lobsters, and many others. These reefs have really taken a beating from things like global warming, disease, and many other stresses over the past three decades, and have declined to just a few sparse patches in the warm waters that run from southern Palm Beach County to the islands of the Caribbean.

However, in an exciting turn of events, staghorn coral was found growing in an undersea farm for commercial aquarium rock, and researchers have now begun to raise these diffent species of coral in nurseries located offshore with the ultimate goal of transplanting them back into the wild.

The Obama administration, through economic stimulus money, has been financing the expansion of the $3.4 million project. It is hoped that this will create 57 full time jobs, commented Tom Moore, who is a representative of the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration’s Habitat Restoration Center in St. Petersburg.

Healthy reefs lead to more jobs in the tourism industry, increase the habitat for fisheries, and even provide much needed protection from weather patterns such as hurricanes, Moore continued.

Today there are now a row of 10 such coral nurseries which stretch from Fort Lauderdale to the U.S. Virgin islands, which are cultivating new stands of both the elkhorn and staghorn coral.

“These are two of the most important species of coral,” explained the marine science program manager for The Nature Conservancy, James Byrne. The Nature Conservancy is an ecologically minded group of individuals corporations that have applied for the federal money and is coordinating the work. “The staghorn coral provides very important habitat for juvenile fish, and elkhorn coral is one of the most important reef builders.”

It is nice to see that a group has taken an interest in the “reforestation” of the seas, as well as on land. The ocean is crucial to our world’s survival.. Nice to know someone has remembered that.

The area of the census ranges from Japanese to Australian waters.

Japan along with Australia have some of the world’s most diverse oceans, however thousands of the marvelous creatures in their deeps, remain unknown to man, and global warming is a major concern, suggests a newly performed census.

Both Japan and Australia are the proud owners of 33,000 some odd known species, according to a decade long scientific survey of the life in the sea, aptly dubbed “What lives in the Sea”.

However, there could be more than 200,000 species in the vast waters of Australia, which are surrounded by three oceans and four seas, which extend from the icy southern pole, to the coral-rich tropics.

“This constitutes a vast array of highly diverse habitats and ocean features, but many have received limited if any exploration,” wrote Alan Butler, from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, who is the lead author of the work.

The majority of the 33,000 species which were noted for Australia were animals, including fish, seabirds and of course marine mammals, with an astonishing rate of new fish and shark species being found on a continuing basis. Butler has guessed that only about 20 percent of Australia’s total marine species have been discovered to date.

Life was most densely populated in the northeast, which is where the World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef makes its home, and is cock full of turtles, colorful corals, dolphins and dugongs.

“Australia is of tremendous ecological interest,” explained Jessie Ausubel, a representative for the marine census. “It is advanced in creating protected marine areas, around coral reefs but also around its deep-sea areas.”

A representative of Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, Katsunori Fujikura, has commented that somewhere in the vicinity of 155,000 species have been spotted in the waters surrounding Japan, which only accounts for a mere 30 percent of all estimated life, and only 33,000 have been officially recorded on the books.

“The reason why such high diversity occurs is undoubtedly the varied environments existing in Japanese waters,” explained Fujikura.

Japan’s waters are just about 11 times larger than the land area, and they feature coral reefs, ince bound seas and trenches (which can be up to 10 kilometers deep). The strong ocean currents in the area, mean that roughly 5 percent of the species found there are actually unique to Japanese waters.

By contrast, 19 percent of New Zealand’s 17,000 marine species are found only around the isolated island state, and Antarctica’s Southern Ocean also hosts many species not found anywhere else.

“Most species in the Southern Ocean are rare, with over half of the known benthic (sea-bed) species having only been found once or twice,” explainedHuw Griffiths, a report author, from the British Antarctic Survey.

The extremely remote, and even hostile, Antarctic region is the home to 8,000 some odd recorded species, with sponges, small crustaceans, and moss animals richly represented.

However, over 90 percent of the marine environment is over one kilometer below the waves, and less thn 10 percent of the total deep-sea area has been explored, “implying there are still a great many species yet to be described” Griffiths explained.

Bighead Carp

This past June a bighead carp was reeled in near Lake Michigan, and it seems highly likely that it spent just about its entire life in the Great Lakes.

This whopper of a fish, weighing in at 9 kilograms, was reeled in in Lake Calumet on the 22nd of June this year. This was the first Asian carp which was reeled in on the wrong side of the electric barriers placed underwater strategically near Chicago to help prevent this invasive species from moving up the Mississippi River system and make its way into the Great Lakes.

Scientists at the Illinois Aquaculture Center, in conjunction with researchers at the Southern Illinois University Carbondale Fisheries, were analyzing the chemical markers in the inner ear bones of the carp and just released their results this past Thursday.

As fish mature, their bones take in the chemicals from their ambient surroundings, and will contain the unique chemical footprint of where the fish had made its home.

“It is very plausible that this fish originated in the Illinois River and then moved or was transported to Lake Calumet or Lake Michigan during the early portion of its life,” the Illinois Aquaculture center’s director, Jim Garvey commented during a session..

The assistant director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, John Rogner, has said that the results from the tests indicate that the fish may have been put into the Lake by humans.

It has been known that East Asian Buddhists sometimes let fish go as a practice of their religion.

For this reason, the sale of Asian carp has been banned in Ontario and many U.S. States, and their transporting them live across state lines is also prohibited.

Stickleback

Researchers with the University of British Columbia have witnessed one of the most rapid evolutionary cycles ever recorded amongst populations in the wild. It took just 3 short years, for the stickleback fish to develop a tolerance for frigid waters. The waters they have grown accustomed to are about 2.5 degrees Celsius lower than those that their ancestors had to endure.

The study was recently published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and gives is some of the first concrete evidence that evolution could help populations survive the effects of global warming.

The stickleback fish originated in the oceans, however they started to make their homes in freshwater lakes and streams just after the last ice age. For the past 10,000 some odd years, both marine and freshwater sticklebacks have evolved varying physical and behavioral pattersn, making them a perfect fit to the models for Darwin’s natural selection theory.

“By testing the temperature tolerance of wild and lab-raised sticklebacks, we were able to determine that freshwater sticklebacks can tolerate lower temperatures than their marine counterparts,” explained Rowan Barrett, the lead author who hails from the UBC Department of Zoology. “This made sense from an evolutionary perspective because their ancestors were able to adapt to freshwater lakes, which typically reach colder temperatures than the ocean.”

To figure out just how quickly this adaptation happened, Barrett, along with collegues from Switzerland and Sweden, “recreated history” by taking marine sticklebacks to freshwater ponds and they discovered that in as little as 3 years, they were remarkably able to tolerate the same minimum water temperature as the freshwater sticklebacks, 2.5 degrees Celsius less that their ancestors!

Critics har been raised that this is an example of mere adaptation not evolution.

Steller's sea lions

The poor endangered Steller’s sea lions are surviving so poorly, and their populations decreasing alarmingly, at the point of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands that the Obama administration is stepping up, and calling for the immediate cease and desist order for the commercial fishing of two very prominent species of fish; the Atka mackerel and the Pacific cod.

This shutdown being proposed by the Obama administration would only hit a small, yet vital portion of Alaska’s largely Seattle-based fishing industry.

However, it is also the latest proof that the sea lions have become a proxy in a heated battle over fishing in Alaska. Both environmentalists and big Industry are keeping their eye on what’s happening to the $1 billion a year pollock industry in the Bering Sea nearby. The fishery there supplies half of the country’s catch of fish.

On Monday the fishing industry expressed their concerns at the rapid and sever proposal put out by the Obama administration. It should be noted however, that this proposal was made in response to a 45 percent drop in the western Aleutians’ sea lion population since 2000. That’s quite a dip in only 10 short years.

The National Marine Fisheries Service wants to have everything closed down and other preventative measures in place by next year.

“What they’ve put on the table today is a head shot for us,” exclaimed counsel for United States Seafood in South Seattle, Dave Wood.

Bolivia

If you think you don’t like the cold, think of the fish! Somewhere in the neighborhood of six million fish have perished in three different rivers of Bolivia due to intense cold. This cold snap has been passing through the country for the last couple of weeks.

The situation is so dire in fact, that the authorities in the eastern Bolivian province of Santa Cruz have issued an alert. This alert came after fish had died in Grande, Pirai, and Ichilo rivers that run through the tropical region.

This is a real “environmental calamity” which was caused by the absolute lowest temperatures seen in Santa Cruz over the past 50 years, Governor Ruben Costas informed journalists.

Costas went on to say that experts in the field have discovered that the rivers are incredibly polluted by the carcasses of dead fish, and he has warned the locals not to use those waters.

This cold snap, which has had the Southern Cone of South America in it’s death grip for the past month, has caused a substantial decrease in the temperatures in both southern and eastern Bolivia. So drastic a change, that the temperature even dropped below 0 degrees Celsius.

The weather department of Bolivia has predicted that the eastern and southern parts of the country will continue to be out in the cold for the rest of the week.

Humboldt Penguin

Five penguins species are finally getting a new lease on life, after being awarded protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. This protection is being awarded after a 2006 petition initiated by the Center for Biological Diversity, in conjunction with two lawsuits which were filed together with Turtle Island Restoration Network.

The decision made by the Interior Department will finally put the Humboldt penguin of Chile and Peru, and four different New Zealand penguins, on the threatened list.

“Protecting these penguins under the Endangered Species Act gives them a renewed chance at survival,” explained Shaye Wolf, Center biologist “Unfortunately, in today’s finding the Obama administration failed to acknowledge climate change as a threat. This administration won’t be able to help penguins survive the climate crisis if it doesn’t admit that it’s a problem.”

These penguins are acing some very real threats from things such as ocean acidification, climate change, and commercial fishing. The designation handed down today will hopefully raise awareness about the situation these penguins face on a day to day basis, increase funding for research and conservation, and provide additional scrutiny of any U.S. government approved activities which could cause harm to both the penguins and their respective habitats.

With the oceans warming up, the sea ice melting, and overfishing, the penguins food supply of kril and fish is more scarce then ever..

It’s about time something was done about the problem, let us hope it isn’t too late..