Fish Are Super Cool - They Use Tools

This fish uses tools, people, tools! The fish digs up clams (sorry, buddies) swims over to a rock and uses that rock as a tool to bash open the clam!

Dancing parrots, painful fish, handsome rooster

Some fun news bits in just a moment - no animal update would be complete without an Animal Place animal update.

Arturo is the dominant rooster at the sanctuary, but he doesn't rule with an iron beak. He's extremely gentle with the hens and even tolerates many of the lower-ranking roosters. Posing for the camera is also a favorite past-time of his, as you can see in this photo.


Parrots can groove
We're not sure if using YouTube videos as data is the most effective research tool, BUT we love that Harvard University researchers used video data instead of actual research on animals! The researchers analyzed video to see if nonhuman animals had the ability to synchronize with music. Turns out that they do, especially mimicking animals, like parrots.

Wildlife trade poorly regulated
The multi-billion dollar wildlife trade is poorly regulated, according to research from Brown University, Wildlife Trust, Pacific Lutheran University, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Global Invasive Species Programme. Approximately 200 million animals are imported to the United States every year. These animals are often taken directly from their native habitats, shipped without concern for their welfare, and sold to people ill-prepared to properly care for them.

A duh! moment in science
Fish feel pain. We already knew that (a previous study showed fish injected with bee venom exhibited classic pain behaviors that stopped when injected with morphine) but I guess folks need even more evidence. A Purdue University researcher studying pain response in gold fish showed that fish given morphine during a noxious stimuli (in this case, a heated foil strapped to the fishs' body) exhibited fewer pain-related behaviors than fish injected with the control, saline. The researcher feels that this may show fish have reflexive (like pulling your hand away from a hot burner) and cognitive (not eating, etc) pain response.

Eel-tastic

There is a chapter in Jeffrey Masson's most recent book "The Face on Your Place: The Truth About Food" on aquaculture (a powerful chapter). Within it is a bit about eels and, to be honest, it left me incredibly curious about these (to me) mysterious creatures. Here's an excerpt:

The female breeds only once in her life, which may not be until she is sixty years old. To do so she makes her way to the ocean, traveling at night, and even crossing land. When she reaches the sea, she swims perhaps 3,600 miles to the place in the Pacific Ocean where she was originally hatched. Once she reaches her destination, she lays up to 20 million eggs.

There are more than 500 species of eel. All are fish but have a more snake-like appearance. The American eel is born in the Sargasso Sea along with millions of her brothers and sisters. When she's born from an egg her mother and father died to produce, she will be transparant, aptly called a "glass" eel. As she matures, she will lose her transparancy and develop into a sleek, brown or olive skinned animal who glides effortlessly through the water. American eels can move from the ocean to freshwater rivers and estuaries. They can live a hundred years. A hundred years! Eels reach sexual maturity between the ages of seven and thirty but may not lay eggs or fertilize them until they are much older, sometimes as old as seventy. One female eel can lay up to 30 million eggs. Amazing.

Eels can breathe through their skin, allowing them to traverse land. In the water, they rely on gills, like other fish to breathe. And if the American eel left her ocean home in favor of freshwater streams, she undergoes an amazing metamorphosis for her return back to the ocean. She will increase her fat reserves dramatically - she will not eat during her migration and her gut will begin to destroy itself. She will turn a silvery white, earning her the name "silver eel". Her eyes will double in size and become more sensitive to the deep blue waters of the ocean. She will become more buoyant through an increase in the number of swim bladder blood vessels.

The American eel's cousin, the European eel, will also travel to the Sargasso Sea to lay and fertilize their eggs. And getting to the Sargasso Sea is no easy task - the European eel will take three years to do so.

Much about eels remain a mystery. The eel's lifestyle is still barely understood, though the tragic reality is that their populations have declined dramatically. The european eel's numbers have dropped by 90%, the Japanese eel by 80%. The American eel, though not considered an endangered species, is also suffering. Much of their habitat has been destroyed by dams and mature eels are being killed by the turbines of hydropower plants. Aquaculture has increased the eels exposure to lice that can damage their swim bladder, an organ of utmost importance for migration back to their spawning site.

We know eels can feel pain, all fish can. They have been known to remember people and interact positively with scuba divers and swimmers. There is so much about them that we don't know, they are part of a world we exploit so easily but are egregiously unfamiliar with.

Thousands upon thousands of eels are killed annually and their deaths are not the stuff of bedtime stories. A common method of slaughtering eels starts with a knife-cut to the throat while the animal is fully conscious. At least one study shows that brain activity still occurs and that suffering may be prolonged with this method of slaughter. Another method of slaughter is "desliming" or dessication, where the eel is submerged in dry salt and then gutted. It's an incredibly painful kill-method and can take several long moments before the eels is finally dead.

What a sad, unfair end for such a fascinating creature. Though they are not familiar like other mammals, they are by no means animals unworthy of our compassion and respect. They are not mindless automatons but feeling, thinking beings who endure incredible physical stresses throughout their life for that one, single moment of creating new life. You can help them and their oceans by eating vegan, which is a sustainable dietary choice that is compassionate and healthy as well.

Overfishing destroying our oceans

70% of the world's fisheries are now targeting "prey" species of fish, because of the degradation of the larger, predatory fish populations from, yes, fishing.

Unable to keep up with human greed, prey fish populations are beginning to decline. And as they decline, so does the health of the sea lions and tuna and salmon - the animals who rely on smaller "prey" fish to survive. Whales may also be affected, losing valuable feed resources and becoming unable to survive their migrations.

As it stands, 80% of all marine fish stocks are fully exploited or depleted or desperately trying to recover from significant losses caused by fishing.

There are serious repercussions of humanity's lust for more and unfortunately the ocean's inhabitants are the latest victims.

It isn't hard to help: Stop eating fish. Get your Omega-3's from flaxseed oil, not fish oil. Choose a sustainable diet that gazes upon a future where fish still swim in the ocean and humans do a better job of coexisting with nature. It's only possible if we change our own behavior now.

Swim back, Flipper!

Photo courtesy of freephotosbank

Swim aside, Flipper, there's a new aquatic-genius in town --- the goldfish!

Apparently, people think fish only have a 3-second memory span. Please ignore the silliness of arbitrarily assigning memory abilities.

A 15-year-old student discovered goldfish have pretty decent memory, spanning an entire week (which is saying something, considering I can barely remember this morning's breakfast).

Now his study is probably not going to be published in the Annals of Fish Geniusness (sadly, not a real word), but it does bring up a good question: If fish do have good memory, are those tiny bowls people dump them in really fulfilling their "fishiness"?

We hope this intelligent student's experiment convinces some people that fish can only hold onto a thought for a fleeting 3-seconds...because, as of yet, there are no studies on how long a fish holds a grudge!

In all seriousness, we encourage people not to buy fish and to seriously analyze their current aquariums, making sure the welfare of the animals take precedence over space concerns.

-Marji Beach, Program Coordinator

One more reason to go vegan

It’s hard to fathom but estimates now put the total number of sea animals killed in the US annually at 34.6 billion. Over-fishing has depleted our ocean’s biodiversity and increased pollution.

Fish kills were calculated by taking the weight of commercial landings from Fisheries of the United States (U.S. Department of Commerce), obtaining average weight of each species, and then calculating the estimated number of individuals slaughtered. The initial numbers exclude discards – individual animals caught, then released back into the water. Over 40% of discarded animals die, including turtles, dolphins and other marine animals.

Fish experience pain and can suffer – this is scientific fact. Commercial fishing increases the spread of disease to wild populations, and it harms other species, like seals and sea birds who are mercilessly killed for trying to eat the farmed fish.

Do the oceans a favor – skip the fish and go veggie!