Taiwan plans to set up an aquarium fish R&D and export centre in 2011 in an effort of becoming Asia’s main aquarium fish exporter, a Council of Agriculture (COA) official said Wednesday.

Construction is scheduled to commence next year in the Pingtung Agricultural Biotechnology Park (PABP).

Right now, the yearly Taiwanese export of aquarium fish is no larger than 3 million USD, while Singapore has an annual export valued well above 60 million USD.

Chen Chien-pin, head of the preparatory office of the PABP, predicts that the value of the Taiwanese aquarium fish export will exceed that of Singapore when the centre as been in operation for five years.

The estimated price tag for the new facility is 1.19 billion New Taiwan Dollars, which is roughly equivalent of 37 million USD.

The world’s first public aquarium specialising in clownfish has now opened its door for visitors. The aquarium, which is located in Taitung County in Taiwan, will eventually house 1500 clown fish from 18 different species.

The aim of the clownfish aquarium is to educate the public about clownfish life-cycles and captive breeding techniques, and specimens will be sent to the aquarium by breeders such as the Eastern Marine Biology Research Center in Taitung.

“By meeting market needs we are helping to ease the crisis of clownfish species being endangered”, says researcher and museum planner Ho Yuan-hsing. “Due to the increasing number of artificially-bred clown fish, the fishing of clownfish is no longer seen in Taiwan’s coastal areas because it is unnecessary.”

AC comment:

The movie “Finding Nemo” made a lot of people interested in getting their own “Nemo”, but few were willing to learn how to properly maintain a saltwater aquarium. Before you decide to get a clownfish, please keep in mind that these are marine fishes. Simply adding some salt to your freshwater aquarium will not make is a suitable home for marine fish; not even for the sturdy clownfish. Even though the worst Nemo-craze seems to have cooled off now, a lot of “Nemos” still face an early death in the hands of uninformed fish keepers; deaths that could have been easily prevented.

Since the early days of the 20^th century, marine biologists have pondered one of the world’s most puzzling questions – if a tree falls in the ocean, can the cephalopods hear it?

Fish use their swim bladder to hear, but cephalopods – a group of marine invertebrates that includes octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses – do not have any gas-filled chamber to use for this purpose and this has lead some scientists to suggest that these creatures are incapable of detecting the pressure wave component of sound.

A team led by sensory physiologist Hong Young Yan of the Taiwan National Academy of Science in Taipei has now, for the first time in history, been able to show that cephalopods can hear sounds underwater using their statocysts.

A statocyst is sac-like structure containing sensitive hairs and a mineralised mass. Fish can use their statocysts to detect sounds, so Yan suspected that other underwater creatures might do the same. After successfully showing that prawns use their statocysts to detect sounds underwater, Yan extended his experimentation from to prawns to cephalopods.

A quandary when researching cephalopods is their delicate bodies. When researchers wish to determine if an organism is capable of hearing or not, they normally attach electrodes to exposed nerves and measure how the nervous system electrically responds to sound. This type of invasive procedure can however easily injure a cephalopods and Yan was therefore forced to come up with a better method. Instead of attaching electrodes to exposed nerves, Yan placed the electrodes on the cephalopods’ body and measured the electrical activity in the brain. Thanks to this method, Yan could show that cephalopods do have a sense of hearing.

The lack of any gas-filled chamber means that cephalopods can’t amplify sounds the way a fish can, but their hearing is probably as good at that of prawns and similar invertebrates.

Yan now wish that his discovery will be used to further the understanding of cephalopod behaviour.

“The key question which I would like to investigate is what kind of sounds are they listening to?” says Yan. “Perhaps they listen to sound to evade predators and can eavesdrop to sounds made by their prey. […]Squid are heavily preyed upon by toothed whales including

dolphins. So perhaps their hearing would aid them to avoid the pinging sounds made by

dolphins. […] Or, perhaps they even could make sounds to communicate among themselves. “

This Monday, a Megamouth shark (Megachasma pelagios) was caught by a Taitung fisherman off the coast of Taiwan.

According to National Taiwan Ocean University’s Department of Environmental Biology and
Fisheries Science, the shark, which was netted off the county’s Chenggong coast, is only the 42nd that has been caught or sighted worldwide and the ninth in Taiwan since the species was discovered in 1976.

Mega mouth shark exhibited at the Aburatsubo Marine

The shark was identified by marine biologist Tien from the Eastern Marine Biology Research
Center (a part of the Council of Agriculture’s Fisheries Research Institute). It was 3.9 meter long, weighed 350 kilograms, and its mouth measured 75 centimeters across when opened.

The shark has now been purchased for NT$18,000 (US$549) by Chen Wen-jung, owner of a local shark museum where the fish will be displayed as a preserved specimen. Wen-jung said he has collected dozens of shark specimens but that this was his first Megamouth.

In late March 2009, a 500-kilogram, 4-meter long Megamouth shark was caught off Burias Island in the Philippines and turned into kinunot.

Big-mouthed but elusive
The Megamouth shark remained unknown to science until November 15, 1976 when a 4.5 meter long specimen became entangled in the sea anchor of a United States Navy ship about 25 miles off the coast off Kaneohe in Hawaii. Since then, the Megamouth has continued to be a rare sight and this deep water shark has for instance only been recorded on film three times.

The Megamouth is named after its gigantic mouth which it uses to filter out plankton and jellyfish from the water. When feeding, Megamouth swims around with its mouth wide open in a fashion similar to the Basking shark. The mouth is surrounded by luminous photophores, which may act as a lure for plankton or small fish. Megamouth can also be recognized on its large head and rubbery lips.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists visits Green Island each year to enjoy scuba diving and snorkelling among its beautiful reefs, but no sewage treatment exists so an average of 1,500 tons of untreated sewage is flushed into the sea on a daily basis.

According to The China Post , no sewage treatment project has been prepared for the island since land can’t be procured for a sewage plant. Researchers now fear that the untreated sewage is to blame for the spread of the so called “Black Death” among the corals.

Chen Jhao-lun, a senior research fellow at the Academia Sinica who has studied the coral
reefs, describes the affected colonies as being covered slowly with a piece of black cloth.
“As this black sponge which multiplies itself covers the colonies, it shuts off sunlight to stop
photosynthesis by coral polyps,” Chen explains. The polyps die and no new corals are formed.

The “Black Death”, a type of necrosis, typically manifests in the form of black lesions that gradually spread across the surface of an infested colony.

However, very little is known about the Black Death and some researchers think that other factors, such as changing water temperatures or overfishing, might be to blame – not the untreated sewage. It is also possible that a combination of unfavourable factors have tipped the balance of the reef, causing the disease to go rampant. Temperature does appear to be a key variable associated with outbreaks, but it remains unknown if a temperature change alone is capable of causing this degree of devastation.

Molecular studies on lesions have not been able to identify a likely microbial pathogen, and according to Chen, the black layer might actually be an opportunistic second effect rather than the causative agent of the coral mortality. Montipora aequituberculae corals seem to be especially susceptible to the disease, but at least five other coral species from three different genera have been affected as well.

When Chen surveyed the water of Green Island last year, only four colonies off Dabaisha or Great White Sand showed signs of Black Death. In April this year, Chen found 24 affected colonies – six times as many as last year. If nothing is done to remedy the problem, Great White Sand near the southernmost tip of Green Island may have only dead colonies in five to six years, Chen predicts.

Green Island
Green Island is known as one of the world’s best spots for scuba diving and snorkelling. Located roughly 16 nautical miles southeast of Taitung on east Taiwan, Green Island used to house a concentration camp for political prisoners. Today, it is instead famous for its rich coral reefs.

(The picture is not from the green island but rather the great barrier reef)

Shark fin soup has traditionally been a must-have among well-to-do Asians and an essential part of the menu at commemorative dinners, such as wedding banquets and New Years celebrations in countries like China, Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia and Indonesia.

However, as awareness grows about the precarious situation many species of shark are facing in the wild due to over-harvesting; many Asians – especially young ones –are substituting the shark fin soup with alternative dishes at their celebratory events.

Singaporean groom Han Songguang and his scuba diving bride are just one example of this trend; when they tied the knot in December last year they served their guests lobster soup and placed explanatory postcards depicting a dead shark on each seat.

“If we can do our part to save ‘X’ number of sharks … why not?” said Han, a geography teacher.

A symbol of wealth and status in several Asian cultures, shark fin soup consumption has traditionally been a delight available for a comparatively low number of Asian upper-class families only. Hand-in-hand with rising affluence in East Asia and the development of a prosperous middle class segment of society, demand has however soared rapidly in the late 20^th and early 21^st century and about 20 percent of all shark species are now endangered, partly due to them being over-fished to satisfy the Asian markets.

“They live a long time. They have a low reproductive rate. In other words they produce just a few young every year or every few years. So you just can’t take a lot,” says Yvonne Sadovy, a biology professor at the University of Hong Kong.

As more and more young Asians opt for lobsters and other alternatives to shark fins, market demands have dropped noticeably in recent years. After peaking at 897,000 metric tonnes in 2003, the world wide shark consumption has sunk to 758,000 in 2006, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation. British wildlife group TRAFFIC says shark fins now make up an increasingly small percentage of the total consumption.

“Students and people in their 20s wouldn’t go to a shark eatery, and $15 for a dish is no cheap price,” says Joyce Wu, programme officer with TRAFFIC.

Shang-kuan Liang-chi, a National Taiwan University student agrees. “University students never go in there,” he says, referring to a shark fin restaurant near campus.

The decline is not only due to shark fins becoming increasingly out of vogue among environmentally concerned youngsters; the global financial crisis and its effects in Asia has caused many Asian to cut down on restaurant visits or order less expensive dishes.

Another sure sign of the declining popularity of shark fin soup in Asian is the menu for Singapore’s Annual Chefs’ Association dinner – it is now completely void of shark fin dishes.

“It is much harder to stop serving shark’s fin in our restaurants as the consumers still demand it. However, in our personal capacity, we can make a stand,” said Otto Weibel, a food manager at one of Singapore’s top hotels.

A Taiwan research team has successfully extracted a brain-boosting nutrient from squid skin, according to an announcement made by the Council of Agriculture’s Fisheries Research Institute.

The nutrient in question is phospholipid docosahexaenoic acid, commonly known as PL-DHA, a substance known to improve a persons memory and enhance learning ability.

According to the institute official, PL-DHA is superior to TG-DHA another form of docosahexaenoic acid commonly found in deep-sea fish oil — when it comes to inhibiting degradation of the intellect since PL-DHA can cross the blood brain barrier and be absorbed directly by the brain.

Researchers at the institute have also showed that PL-DHA is effective in reviving neural cells and enhancing the content of three oxidation-resistant enzymes — GSH, CAT and SOD. In addition to this, the fatty acid will moderate the oxidative damage to neural cells that can be induced by free radicals in the body, which means that it will decrease the pace of plaque and tangle accumulation in brain cells.

Quoting medical reports, the institute official stressed that Alzheimer’s and other forms of senile dementia is known to be associated with the accumulation of plaque and tangles in the brain.