Sharks Killed for Oil Used in Swine Flu Vaccine

James Owen

for National Geographic News

December 29, 2009

Vaccines being made to protect people from swine flu may not be so healthy for threatened species of sharks.

That's because millions of doses of the pandemic H1N1/09 vaccine contain a substance called squalene, which is extracted from shark livers. (Get more swine flu facts.)

More commonly found in beauty products such as skin creams, squalene can be used to make an adjuvant, a compound that boosts the body's immune response.

The World Health Organization recommends adjuvant-based vaccines, because they allow drug makers to create doses that use less of the active component, increasing available supplies.

Olive oil, wheat germ oil, and rice bran oil also naturally contain squalene, albeit in smaller amounts. But for now squalene is primarily harvested from sharks caught by commercial fishers, especially deepwater species. (Related: "Tomato, Tobacco Plants Produce SARS Vaccine.")

"There are several very disturbing issues associated with use of shark-liver-oil squalene," said Mary O'Malley, co-founder of the volunteer-run advocacy group Shark Safe Network.

"The deepwater sharks targeted have extremely low reproductive rates, and many are threatened species."

For example, one supplier has dubbed the gulper shark the Rolls-Royce of squalene-producing sharks—but the gulper is listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN's) Red List of Threatened Species, meaning the species faces a high risk of extinction.

Shark Oil Demand

Although vaccines containing squalene have not yet been approved for use in the U.S., they are being distributed elsewhere, including Europe and Canada.

Novartis, a drug company that produces swine flu vaccines containing shark squalene, did not answer requests for information about its squalene supply.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), another major swine-flu vaccine producer, announced in October that it had received orders for 440 million doses of vaccine containing adjuvant.

And the adjuvant in GSK's vaccines—which have been administered in 26 countries so far—contains shark-liver squalene, company spokesperson Clare Eldred confirmed in a statement.

GSK wouldn't reveal the name of its supplier or the annual quantity of shark squalene it buys. But Eldred told National Geographic News that the drug company takes about 10 percent of its supplier's total output.

O'Malley, of the Shark Safe Network, estimates that GSK's 440 million doses would require at least 9,700 pounds (4,400 kilograms) of shark oil, based on the stated squalene content of 10.69 milligrams in a dose.

This estimate, however, assumes zero waste and no refining of the squalene once it's been extracted from the sharks, O'Malley said.

Slow-Growing Sharks

Found at depths of between 984 and 4,921 feet (300 and 1,500 meters), the deep-sea sharks that produce squalene are most frequently caught via bottom trawling, either deliberately or as bycatch.

(Related: "Eight Million Sharks Killed Accidentally off Africa Yearly.")

"Bottom trawling is a horribly destructive fishing method that just bulldozes everything in its path and destroys enormous areas of the ocean floor," O'Malley said.

What's more, the already at-risk sharks are extremely slow growing and reproduce rarely.

A female gulper shark, for example, takes between 12 and 15 years to reach sexual maturity. A pregnant female gives birth to a single pup after a gestation period of about two years.

This means that the loss of a single female has a big impact on the population, said Hans Lassen, fisheries advisor for the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, an intergovernmental organization.

In 2006 the European Union imposed deep-sea shark fishing limits in the Northeast Atlantic, and the amount of shark squalene available on the market has since been reduced.

Still, some squalene suppliers are actively soliciting fishers for these sharks, the Shark Safe Network's O'Malley said.

For instance, France-based suppler Sophim lists the species it seeks on its Web site, along with an offer to evaluate samples from shark livers that "are thrown away because fishermen don't know that the liver has a value."

Shark Liver Alternatives

Some cosmetics firms have stopped using shark squalene or are phasing it out following pressure from conservation groups.

A shark-squalene alternative isn't yet an option for adjuvant vaccine makers, according to GSK's Eldred.

The drug company is currently looking at non-animal squalene sources, including olive oil.

But at the moment, she said, "we are unable to find an alternative of high enough grade."

Giant predatory shark fossil unearthed in Kansas
By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News

The fossilised remains of a gigantic 10m-long predatory shark have been unearthed in Kansas, US.

Scientists dug up a gigantic jawbone, teeth and scales belonging to the shark which lived 89 million years ago.

The bottom-dwelling predator had huge tooth plates, which it likely used to crush large shelled animals such as giant clams.

Palaeontologists already knew about the shark, but the new specimen suggests it was far bigger than previously thought.

The scientists who made the discovery, published in the journal Cretaceous Research, last week also released details of other newly discovered giant plankton-eating fish that swam in prehistoric seas for more than 100 million years. But this new fish, called Ptychodus mortoni, is both bigger and more fierce, having a taste for flesh rather than plankton.

It may even have been the largest shellfish-eating animal ever to have roamed the Earth.

Dr Kenshu Shimada of DePaul university in Chicago, Illinois, US found the fossilized remains of the shark in rocks known as the Fort Hays Limestone in Kansas.

"Kansas back then was smack in the middle of an inland sea known as the Western Interior Seaway that extended in a north-south direction across North America," says Dr Shimada.


The jawbone fragment came from a huge fish (diagram courtesy of Dr Shimada)
Along with a piece of jaw, Dr Shimada and colleagues uncovered a piece of jaw, teeth and scales.

"Although it represents a fraction of the entire body of the shark, the jaw fragment is gigantic. The estimated jaw length was almost 1m long, and that would suggest that the shark was likely at least 10m in length," says Dr Shimada.

Due to the lack of a complete skeleton, it is difficult to gauge the physical appearance of the shark.

But Dr Shimada suspects it had a body shaped much like that of a modern nurse shark (Ginglymostoma cirratum), with a broad rounded head and stout body.

Hundreds of robust teeth line the upper and lower parts of the shark's mouth, forming large slab-like plates capable of crushing shellfish.

"This in turn suggests that P. mortoni was probably a sluggish bottom-dwelling shark, rather than an actively fast swimmer," says Dr Shimada.

Fossils of this and other closely-related species have long been known.

"While there have been many teeth and a few incomplete skeletal remains of P. mortoni in museum collections, the significance of this new specimen is that it contains one of the largest teeth of this species that were found with a gigantic jaw fragment.

"The size of the jaw fragment in fact supports the contention that P. mortoni was likely a gigantic animal," says Dr Shimada.

The scientists have dated the fossil at 88.7 million years old.

At that time, a variety of animals, such as giant clams, other sharks, bony fishes, and predatory marine reptiles called mosasaurs and plesiosaurs inhabited the same water.

"The emergence of large ptychodontids roughly coincides with the timing of when many other kinds of organisms, including clams as well as sharks and bony fishes, became bigger," explains Dr Shimada.

"Clearly, the food resources must have been abundant enough in the marine ecosystem to support such large organisms.

"Becoming big does have advantages such as deterring predators and being able to travel faster, but it does come with disadvantages as well, most notably needing more food for energy."

Another specimen of P. mortoni has been found alongside another type of meat-eating shark called Squalicorax, with some scientists suggesting that the meat-eating shark may have been scavenging on the body of its larger relative.

Last week, Dr Shimada and colleagues published details in the journal Science of how a dynasty of large plankton-eating fish roamed the oceans between 66 and 172 million years ago.

These fish died out with the dinosaurs.

Once they had vanished from the ecosystem, mammals and cartilaginous fish such as manta rays, basking sharks and whale sharks began to adapt to fill a similar ecological role.

Female Shark Reproduced Without Male DNA, Scientists Say

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Published: May 23, 2007

A hammerhead shark that gave birth in a Nebraska aquarium reproduced without mating, a genetic analysis shows.

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Henry Doorly Zoo

This shark’s mother is said to have had no contact with male sharks.

This form of asexual reproduction, called parthenogenesis, has been found in other vertebrate species, including some snakes and lizards. But this is the first time it has been documented in a shark.

Researchers from the Guy Harvey Research Institute at Nova Southeastern University in Florida and Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland found no male DNA in the female baby shark, which was born in December 2001 and died shortly after birth, apparently killed by another fish. The mother was one of three female bonnetheads, a small hammerhead species, that had been captured in Florida and kept without male sharks for three years in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha.

At the time of the birth, many scientists thought that the female had mated with another species, or that it had used sperm obtained years before. Female sharks are capable of storing sperm, although none have been known to store it as long as these sharks had been isolated.

But through the analysis “it was pretty clear that there was no male contribution,” said Mahmood S. Shivji, director of the Guy Harvey Research Institute and author of a paper on the finding being published online today by the journal Biology Letters.

Instead, the female shark’s own genetic material combined during the process of cell division that produces an egg. A cell called the secondary oocyte, which contains half the female chromosomes and normally becomes the egg, fused with another cell called the secondary polar body, which contains the identical genetic material.

Robert E. Hueter, director of the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla., said the finding helped fill a gap in understanding of parthenogenesis, which has been found to occur in most vertebrate lines except mammals and, until now, cartilaginous fishes like sharks.

“These guys have proven their case,” Dr. Hueter said of the researchers.

Dr. Shivji said that after the bonnethead birth was reported, keepers at the Belle Isle Aquarium in Detroit reported similar virgin births by white spotted bamboo sharks. While those births have not been proved to result from parthenogenesis, Dr. Shivji said, it is reasonable to assume they did. And if it is found in these two species, “it seems not unreasonable to think this is probably more widespread in different shark lineages,” he said.

Gordon W. Schuett, an adjunct professor at Georgia State University who discovered parthenogenesis in a snake in 1997, said it would probably be discovered in more species “because we know to look for it.”

Previously, Dr. Schuett said, zookeepers and others tended to discount evidence of virgin births precisely because they were so out of the ordinary. But in recent years it has been found in Komodo dragons, other lizards and snake species.

“It’s all over the place,” Dr. Schuett said.

Still, parthenogenesis among vertebrates tends to be rare, and, while it may occur in the wild, has been documented only in captivity.

“It’s a last-resort tactic that animals use when they absolutely can’t find another mate,” Dr. Hueter said.

While it has the advantage of ensuring the survival of a species in the absence of males, it also comes at a cost: a loss of genetic diversity. And that, Dr. Shivji said, may spell conservation problems for some shark species whose populations are declining. If it becomes more difficult for female sharks in the wild to find a mate and instead they reproduce through parthenogenesis, then the offspring will be less genetically diverse, making the species more susceptible to diseases and other problems.

But Dr. Hueter said he thought it unlikely that most sharks, which are highly mobile, would end up so isolated that parthenogenesis would be much of a factor. Sharks have plenty of other problems that are of potentially greater impact.

“I would be concerned about a lot of other things than whether or not a female shark can get a date for an evening,” he said.

Article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/science/23shark.html?scp=1&sq=virgin%20shark&st=cse

Japan's Famous Tsukiji Fish Market Braces for Tuna Trade Ban

By Shingo Ito, AFP
Photo By: Issei Kato , Reuters

TOKYO - As bartenders close the shutters in Tokyo’s glitzy nightlife district, just a short walk away handbells ring in the pre-dawn tuna auctions in an old warehouse in Tsukiji.

Veteran auctioneers call for bids for hundreds of snap-frozen tuna laid in neat rows in the world’s largest fish market, the size of more than 40 football pitches.

The ocean predators, laid out on steaming dry ice, have their tails cut to reveal oval windows of the burgundy flesh that has fetched as much as 175,000 dollars for a 232 kilogram (511 pound) fish here.

In the chilly halls, fishmongers with headbands and aprons slice the red flesh with large knives, while three-wheel trolleys are pushed through the narrow aisles.

The famous market on Tokyo Bay, long a must-see tourist spot, is facing a disputed relocation plan in coming years — but another threat is looming large, a possible cross-border trade ban on Atlantic bluefin tuna.

At a meeting in Doha, Qatar that runs until March 25, countries will vote on whether to declare bluefin a highly endangered species, alongside tigers, great apes and the panda, and ban its international trade.

A ban became more likely after the United States and the European Union last week backed the move ahead of the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Decades of overfishing have seen stocks crash by more than two-thirds in the Mediterranean, from where giant freezer ships have long headed for Japan, which consumes three-quarters of the global bluefin catch.

But the move has sounded alarm bells in Japan.

“I can’t imagine sushi without tuna,” said Ayaka Mimura, a 21-year-old Tokyo university student, as she was buying seafood in Tsukiji.

“Of course, I oppose overfishing. But a sudden, total ban sounds unfavourable to me. We just eat fish the way others eat beef.”

It is a view shared by Japan’s government and fishing industry, who oppose and have threatened to ignore a trade ban, pushing instead for industry-based ways to make the catch more sustainable.

Japan last year pledged to help meet an accord to slash the total catch in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean by 40 percent, although environmental groups charge that such quotas are routinely exceeded.

“Overfishing has never ended under the current quotas,” said Wakao Hanaoka, a Greenpeace researcher. “It is necessary to protect the fish under the convention. I hope Japan will take responsible action.”

Hisashi Endo, a fishery agency official, said: “We are not optimistic about the meeting. We are concerned the result could set a new global trend and spread to the Pacific and other oceans.”

Japan sources 25,000 tonnes of bluefin tuna a year from the Pacific and 19,000 tonnes from the Atlantic. The country also has about 20,000 tonnes of deep-frozen bluefin tuna in domestic stock.

Yuichiro Harada, who works with a Tokyo-based lobbying group that says it supports “responsible” bluefin tuna fishing, said: “It’s quite unfair to treat tuna the same way as lions and tigers and elephants.

“Unlike those animals, tuna can bear hundreds of millions of eggs and is internationally recognised as a commercial food.”

Tsukiji fishmongers staged a small protest last week, yelling out “Protect tuna in the markets!” and “We oppose a decision at the Washington Convention” as the CITES treaty is also known.

Traders fear a steep price hike for the bluefin, known as “kuro maguro” or black tuna in Japan. A piece of “otoro” or fatty underbelly, now costs 2,000 yen (22 dollars) at high-end Tokyo restaurants.

“I bet prices will jump on the same day if the ban is adopted,” said Mitsunobu Iida, a tuna wholesaler and sushi restaurant owner.

“That’s what market sentiment is always like. We can’t ask our customers to accept a price hike easily.... If we raised the price, people would stop buying it. I’m afraid we are going to have a hard time.”
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Japan+famous+Tsukiji+fish+market+braces+tuna+trade/2682850/story.html#ixzz0iJEu27Pv

Fish Developed With 'Six-Pack Abs'

Development of More Muscular Trout Could Boost Commercial Aquaculture
ScienceDaily (Mar. 11, 2010) — A 10-year effort by a University of Rhode Island scientist to develop transgenic rainbow trout with enhanced muscle growth has yielded fish with what have been described as six-pack abs and muscular shoulders that could provide a boost to the commercial aquaculture industry.

Terry Bradley, a URI professor of fisheries and aquaculture, said his research into the inhibition of myostatin, a protein that slows muscle growth, has obtained "stunning results" in the last two years, with trout growing 15 to 20 percent more muscle mass than standard fish.

"Belgian blue cattle have a natural mutation in myostatin causing a 20 to 25 percent increase in muscle mass, and mice overexpressing myostatin exhibit a two-fold increase in skeletal muscle mass. But fish have a very different mechanism of muscle growth than mammals, so we weren't certain it was going to work," Bradley said.
According to Bradley, the number of muscle fibers in mammals is limited after birth, but in fish, muscle fiber numbers increase throughout their lifespan. Since inhibition of myostatin increases the numbers of muscle fibers, it had been a mystery as to whether inhibiting myostatin would cause an increase in muscle growth in fish.
Bradley and a team of graduate students spent 500 hours injecting 20,000 rainbow trout eggs with various DNA types designed to inhibit myostatin. Of the eggs that hatched, 300 carried the gene that led to increased muscle growth. After two years, most exhibited a "six-pack ab" effect, even though fish lack standard abdominal muscles. They also have increased musculature throughout, including a prominent dorsal hump that made them look like they had muscular shoulders.
The first generation of transgenic trout were subsequently spawned, and offspring carrying the gene in all of their muscle cells have been produced. Studies are under way to determine if the fish grow at a faster rate as well.
"Our findings are quite stunning," said Bradley, who also studies salmon, flounder and tuna. "The results have significant implications for commercial aquaculture and provide completely novel information on the mechanisms of fish growth. The results also allow for comparisons between the mechanisms of growth of muscle in mammals versus fish, and it could shed light on muscle wasting diseases in humans."
About 500,000 metric tons of rainbow trout are raised each year in aquaculture facilities in the United States and Europe. In the U.S., some 1,000 trout farms produce approximately $80 million of trout annually, mostly in Idaho, New York, Pennsylvania and California. Assuming Bradley's transgenic fish meet with regulatory approval, it could provide a boost to the industry by enabling aquaculturists to grow larger fish without increasing the amount of food the fish are fed.
"One of the advantages of this approach is that the modified genes introduced into the fish use the same mechanism and cause the same type of effect that occurs naturally in Belgian blue cattle and other 'double muscled' animals," said Bradley.
While the transgenic trout may look like bodybuilders, Bradley said they exhibit normal behaviors. He will continue to study the fish to learn if the new gene affects any other genes, and to determine if new husbandry practices will aid in the raising of the trout.

Quake Threatens Important Chile Fish, Wine Sectors

Ravages infrastructure lifeline for Chile's important fish and wine sectors

By VIVIAN SEQUERA and ALAN CLENDENNING Associated Press Writers
TALCAHUANO, Chile March 3, 2010 (AP)

The tsunami that hit this coastal city sent 50-ton fishing boats crashing onto land and demolished its port — wiping out the $40 million in business that courses through the local economy from the annual anchovy and sardine catch.

Less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) away, Chile's economy took another beating as the mammoth quake downed bridges and opened up vast crevices on the nation's only north-south highway, paralyzing the export lifeline for the nation's renowned farm-raised salmon industry.

And Chile's telecommunications system was still so badly out of whack Wednesday — four days after the quake — that local and foreign investors who own vineyards that carpet the hardest-hit areas couldn't reach winery employees by phone or Internet to discuss the upcoming harvest.

"You have to get grapes from the vineyards to the winery, and I don't know the condition of the roads around the winery," said Mark Osmun, spokesman for California's Jackson Family Wines, owner of the Vina Calina winery in the devastated Talca region about 65 miles (105 kilometers) from the quake's epicenter.

Chile's horrendously destructive 8.8-magnitude quake doesn't have a price tag on it yet, though President Michelle Bachelet mentioned a $30 billion estimate when she met Tuesday with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who delivered 25 satellite phones as a down payment on disaster assistance.

But the quake has already forced tens of thousands into unemployment with no end in sight in the nation's south-southwest area and will almost certainly mean higher salmon prices at U.S. supermarkets. It also translates into higher wine production costs for an industry already hurt by the declining value of the U.S. dollar.

Chile's copper industry, which supplies a third of the world's copper, wasn't badly affected because most operations lie north of Santiago. Mining company Anglo American PLC said Wednesday that one of its plants near the epicenter had considerable damage, "preventing the resumption of operations until further notice."

The large ships that fish Chile's rich waters far out to sea rode out the tsunami and can deliver their catches to ports unaffected by the earthquake.

But an estimated 1,000 boats that stick closer to shore were destroyed, said Gonzalo Olea, a spokesman for Chile's National Confederation of Small Fishermen. Some boats ended up kilometers (miles) inland.

The quake hit just as the three- to four-month fishing season was starting for 760 small-scale fishermen in Talacahuano, said Nelson Estrada, president of their union representing fishermen who now wander around with nothing to do, their jeans stained by black mud that the tsunami left behind.

"The season has been killed," Estrada said from the wrecked port reeking of putrid fish.

The region where they ply the waters nets 4 percent of the world's annual catch of seafood, some 2 million metric tons, said Hector Bacigalupo, general manager of Chile's National Fishing Association. At least 90 percent — including hake, mackerel and shellfish — goes to the United States, Australia and Africa.

Many fishermen also lost their homes, an eerie replay of Louisiana's shrimpers who were devastated by Hurricane Katrina and haven't fully recovered five years later.

Even Chilean fishermen whose boats survived intact may find it hard to work because it will take months or more to repair unloading piers and replace equipment that looters stole from fish-processing plants.

"Now the boats are paralyzed because there's no way to unload," said Carlos Rivas, a boat captain in Hualpen.

Some went out to sea anyway in the quake's aftermath, buoying their boats in bays after returning and rowing to shore to give their catch free to hungry survivors in a zone that is home to a large proportion of the earthquake's death toll.

Chile's salmon industry that raises fish in pens and competes heavily with Norway and Canada was spared from major damage because it lies hundreds of kilometers (miles) south of Talcahuano. But the sector's transportation chain was thrown into crisis when the tremor hit before dawn Saturday.

On maps, Chile looks like a slender chili pepper with the north-south Pan American Highway sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains. Fresh salmon must be driven in refrigerated trucks for 900 kilometers (560 miles) along the now damaged road to the airport in Santiago to be loaded onto cargo planes flying to the U.S. and elsewhere.

The airport, meanwhile, hasn't reopened to commercial flights.

Some Chilean salmon suppliers are trying to set up a trucking route to Buenos Aires, Argentina, said Kimberly Gorton, president of Boston-based seafood distributor Slade Gorton & Company Inc. But that route is twice as long, and trucks would have to navigate high mountain passes.

Still, no one knows how long it will take to repair all the damaged bridges and highway pavement on Chile's highway.

"Clearly what's going to happen is a reduction in supply is going to cause an increase in prices," Gorton said. "It's sad because Chile is so dependent on its fishing industry for exports."

Some of Chile's oldest and most famous wine-growing regions lie in the heart of area slammed by the earthquake.

More: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wirestory?id=9998190&page=3

Observatory
Fish Use UV Patterns to Tell Species Apart


By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: February 26, 2010

If you’ve seen one damselfish, you’ve seen them all.

That may be true for people, who have a difficult time telling some damselfish species apart. But the fish themselves see it differently, according to a study in Current Biology. They can use ultraviolet facial patterns to tell one species from another.

Ulrike E. Siebeck of the University of Queensland in Australia and colleagues studied Pomacentrus amboinensis and P. moluccensis, two species of damselfish capable of seeing light at the ultraviolet end of the spectrum. They are also highly territorial: P. amboinensis males, for example, will chase off unfamiliar members of their species because they are seen as competitors, but go easier on P. moluccensis intruders.

To people, the two species of reef fish look practically identical. But under UV light they are revealed to have distinctly different patterns in the scales around the eyes. “These are really fine, intricate patterns that we can’t see at all,” Dr. Siebeck said.

The question for her and her colleagues was whether the patterns, and the ability to see them, had an effect on behavior. In a series of experiments in which, among other things, they placed fish inside a glass chamber equipped with UV filters, they showed that P. amboinensis used the patterns to discriminate between the two species.

The work provides support for the idea, suggested by others, that the ultraviolet part of the spectrum may be a way for some species to communicate secretly, in ways invisible to those that cannot see UV.