PISCINE AQUA CULTURE—NO FREE FISH LUNCH—NOT WHAT WE EXPECTED?

 

In the 1990s I traveled to a small coastal village in Italy, for an extended vacation. Each morning I would arise and walk down to the village center, reaching my destination - a small cafe—by eight thirty or nine in the morning, where I would enjoy an espresso and purchase a fresh loaf of crusty bread. On the way back to our residence, I often passed by the village fish market. But the display window with its clean glass window displaying a well scrubbed, sloping wood display counter which was always clean and empty. 

One day my curiosity got the better of me, and I poked my head in to ask, “Excuse me, I see your sign, but tell me, how do you keep in business? I never see any fish here?”

“Sir, the fishermen arrive here at 5:30 AM, we put their catch out for sale at 6:00, and by 7:00 or 7:30 all of the fresh daily catch is sold. To buy fish here, you must come early.                 

Italians prefer only absolutely fresh fish. Fish was available, every day in the week, but was very expensive…and you had to arise early to get it. 

From the late 1960s on fish prices were constantly rising. Increased demand, larger and more efficient trawlers sent wild fish stocks into decline. Aquaculture seemed like a good solution. 

In the 1990s fish aquaculture became well established and we all welcomed the concept of fresh fish at lower prices and the support for the protection of wild fish stocks. By that time the earth’s human population had exceeded the 6 billion mark and ocean fishing had reached its maximum production limit.More factory ships could be built, but the world’s fish stocks could not sustainably produce any more fresh-fish tonnage.

Aquaculture seemed a reasonable solution. By growing fish on land in ponds or in cages off shore, it was thought that these fish could help satisfy the human demand for fish, slow the decline of wild fish stocks which for many species (such as the Atlantic Cod) which were approaching the critical point beyond which these species  could not recover and begin to recover populations.  

Fish farming was born!  Today more fish sold in fish markets are farmed fish than wild caught. But the problem aquaculture was touted to solve, did not materialize.  Aquaculture has exacerbated fish stock problems rather than offering  a solution.

 Aquaculture has put more strains of wild stocks of many species of fish since much of the food farmed-fish and shrimp are fed is derived from wild fish stocks. Then too, the massive tonnage of forage fish, such as anchovies, herring, and other small schooling fish which serve as major sources of food for predator fish and sea mammals has has exacerbated the food shortage plight of these other wild species—even those not sought for as food sources such as sea mammals. 

The reason?  The most popular farmed fish sold are Salmon and Tuna. These fish are predators or piscivorous, that is: they eat other fish. Piscivorous fish such as Tuna and Salmon  require about 5 pounds of wild fish to produce one pound of farmed fish.  A ten pound Salmon requires about fifty pounds (50lbs) of wild caught fish to reach market size.

As it functions today aquaculture of fish is not sound economics or effective natural resource management, and will only exacerbate the problems fish farming was meant to solve.

We should be cognizant of the impact of over-harvesting of the forage fish schools which are heavily impacted by over-harvesting as sources for fish farming.  These practices result  in population crashes of these primary food sources which in turn have a deleterious effect on the general ecology of the oceans and directly on the populations of other natural predators such as whales and porpoises.   

There is no free lunch. Humans can not continue to take fish resources from the oceans without impacting the well being of general marine ecology. 

 

ON THE ORIGIN OF SEX, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

In the dim past of Earth’s long, 4.5 billion year history, perhaps 2.5 billion years ago, single celled organisms reproduced, but had no sex.  Reproduction, and evolutionary change, the main function of sex, occurred only by simple cell division. In this process each cell when it reached “maturity” and with no further need for stimulation, simply divided into two equal parts…equally sharing the parent cell’s genetic material to create two almost physically identical offspring cells.

This reproduction process has been variously termed “budding”, “cell division”’ “sporulation”, etc. The end products of the process are two new growing daughter cells with little change in their physical properties (which are the expression of their genetic material). In simple cell division the only genetic change is that caused by random and probably rare DNA mutations…perhaps as a result of ionizing radiation, chemical exposure, or other random alterations to DNA during the physical division (mitosis)  of the parent cell.  Ionizing radiation was likely much more common on the surface of ancient Earth. 

Darwinian Natural Selection depends on minor variations in the physical characteristics of each species.  For species to evolve, physical variations must exist in a species, these are exposed to a trial for adaptation in the existing environment.  Those that are adaptive or provide some advantage for survival are conserved while other manifestation of those variations are lost. The physical variations of species permit  the potential of selection to take place.  Few variations in a species tends to slow or retard speciation (formation of a new more adapted species) —and adaptation of these new species to a modified environment. If species have little physical (genetic) variation natural selection is limited. Those species best adapted to the environment survive and others perish. 

As a result, the slow rate of mutagenic change or alteration of the genetic material, as in asexually reproducing species—must have resulted in corresponding slow rates of evolutionary change. Speciation -the evolution of new species—slowed down. As the Earth evolved—its physical environment changed—those species formed in earlier times, were not variable enough to adapt and thus perished. Asexual reproduction simply did not produce enough variations in physical form for biological evolution to keep pace with the slow physical alteration of the planet upon which these organisms lived.  

Our planet Earth is in constant flux undergoing continual slow change in temperature, atmosphere and oceans, even the locations and positioning of the continents themselves on the Earth’s globe are in constant change.  These early sexless simple organisms were likely less competent to adapt to the new physical conditions of Earth as continents moved over its surface, rove into and under each other , produced mountain ranges and continents split apart to form ocean basins. Inability to adapt resulted in death and die off of these early “sex starved” species.  In this early sexless world organisms evolved only slowly as they struggled to adapt to a constantly altering planetary environment.  But competion was coming. 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SEX

About two billion years ago, during the Proterozoic Era, some single celled organisms which reproduced had reprduced asexually by simple “budding” or fission evolved a more costly and complex process known as sexual reproduction.   Sexual reproduction provided a survival benefit for these new cells.  

In sexual reproduction the cell nucleus undergoes a complex intracellular process called a“reduction division”. The nucleus of these cells divide in a special way (meiosis) to form offspring cells or “gamete” cells which have only one-half of the genetic material of the parent cell. To form a new individual (offspring cell) these (gamete) cells must combine with other gametes of the same species (each with only half of the genetic material of a parent cell) to form a new offspring.  

This sexual process is more costly to the individual, requires more time and more energy, but it provides an evolutionary advantage, by producing greater genetic variation in the gamete offspring cells (more variation ) as a result of the more complex, (more “accident prone”?) reduction division, and then the random recombination of the often free moving gametes, which often must combine in an alien environment (as in marine organisms). Sexual reproduction provides many more chances for gene alteration, intracellularly during the more complex formation of gametes, and then during the process of sexual combination of the gametes often in an alien chemically challenging extracellular environment. 

All of these circumstances results in greater genetic variations and higher levels of physical diversity of offspring. As the result of these developments of the process of sexual reproduction increased the rate at which evolution progressed. Such a process favors the evolutionary selection and adaptation to a rapidly changing environment like that of planet Earth. Perhaps without sex, Earth as a planet may have altered physically over time but, with only a very primitive level of biosphere and little or no advanced living organisms. Humans may have never evolved on such a planet.  The difficulty of this transmission from asexual to sexual reproduction may be one reason that our near-by known habitable planets remain radio silent and leave us seemingly very much alone in the near by universe. 

That is why all paramecia and pachyderms vary both genetically and in their physical manifestation (termed the phenotype). All humans too!  Diversity is a natural manifestation of almost every living organism. Its benefit lies in the necessity of evolution to operate by moulding each species to evolve into specimens better adapted to the environment in which it lives. 

Sexual reproduction provided offspring cells which had greater variation  than sexless cells. That greater ability to adapt to continuously changing environments gave “sexy cells” a great advantage for survival. 

Thus by nature and for over two billion years all life is by natural design, unequal, and diverse.  We can not change that.

So what is sex good for?  Evolution.  Sexual reproduction permitted evolutionary change which was rapid enough to keep pace with a rapidly changing Earth. It permitted the living earth (its biosphere) to continue to survive and to become more complex and better adapted to its changing surface.

    

ON INEQUALITY, HUMAN’S NATURAL STATE

 

In Middle Way of American Equality,11/22/2024, by Daniel Mahoney (Tom Klingenstein.com) , the author calls the world we inhabit “obsessed with inequality”.   According to Mahoney doctrinaire proponents of egalitarianism rail over “equity” and “social justice” and posit that all “disparities” we see in the economic and social status of our citizenry are the result of racism or oppression of “the underclass”.  Blame too often falls on “the white ‘privileged’ majority” when the real cause of disparities is the simple fact that humans—though belong to the same species —are not clones of each other…we are all unequal in our physical manifestation, our physiology our mental capacity and even our proclivity to disease. 

Mahoney defends the US Declaration of Independence which states that “all’ men (i.e. human beings) are “created equal”in the eyes of the state.  according to Mahoney the Founders did not propose that all humans were “equal”. They knew better. Though the term “equity” (an “all come-out-even” policy) was likely not part of their lexicon. It is certain they would have claimed it unattainable.

For the Founders inequality must have been a manifest fact of Nature. Mahoney supports his contention against this false vision of equality by way of intriguing and eloquent quotes from Tocqueville, Abe Lincoln, Thomas Sowell, Burke, Hawthorne, and even Dostoevsky. In each case these authors underscore how this corrupt unnatural vision of equality has always had the potential to threaten actual democratic equality of opportunity. These seekers of equity supported oppressive totalitarian regimes, which, generate instead a form of oppression and injustice. Any move toward equity goes against the natural order of the universe. 

In July of 1776 Thomas Jefferson (in the Declaration of Independence) wrote: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, …..endowed by Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  

And we find that many years later, the UN, Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, no one claims the right to absolute equity.  

There is no absolute equality….thankfully we are all very different form each other. Each of us is a unique individual (and perhaps there i no need for all those supposedly distinguishing marks like tattoos).  And for this reason we must expect natural variation in physical, physiological mental and other factors, even response to disease and environmental stimuli. 

 

I write here to underscore the position of our brilliant and enlightened 18th century Founders who understood well that no humans are “equal” in the sense that they have identical abilities traits or characteristics. Human “inequality” is the natural state of “man” and Nature.

The natural world supports this idea.

Every living organism from a paramecium to pachyderm is a unique individual with established genetic variation which clearly distinguish every individual from every other one of its species. Variations in genetic material is expressed in the physical, physiological and other aspects of every living organism and assures, that each one varies in some small way from every other. As is well known, DNA analysis can precisely identify each one of us from the 8 billion others of our species on this Earth.  

In fact the entire biosphere—is based on the fact of individual genetic diversity, expressed in the physical manifestation (phenotype) of the genetic material carried in the nuclei of each cell. These variations are expressed in the inequality of each member of a species.  In fact all of evolutionary change is based on the necessity of the inequality of individuals. Indeed, there would be no humans on Earth, had the primitive organism from which humans evolved—been asexually formed as genetic clones of each other. The process of biological evolution requires individual inequalities, which then permit the environment, in which these natural beings exist to select for those better adapted.  In this way the process of Natural Selection- nature “selecting” those organisms which are best adapted to survive and reproduce their species has occurred over the four billion plus years of earth history.

We as a species would not exist were it not for nature’s assurance of inequality!