This Is Your Brain on Fish

Thicker, stronger, and more resilient. Once a week is all it takes, new research says.
James Hamblin | Aug 7 2014

Alex Trautwig/Getty

Have you ever considered undergoing brain-thickening surgery, only to find that such a thing does not exist? And that the guy in the van was probably not actually a surgeon? Well, consider fish.

Dr. Cyrus Raji, a resident radiologist at UCLA, appreciates value beyond the cosmetics of a thick cerebral cortex. He’s the lead researcher in a new study in the current American Journal of Preventive Medicine that found that people who regularly eat fish have more voluminous brains than those who do not—in such a way that stands to protect them from Alzheimer’s disease.

“Understanding the effects of fish consumption on brain structure is critical for the determination of modifiable factors that can decrease the risk of cognitive deficits and dementia,” Raji and colleagues write. The team has previously shown gainful effects of physical activity and obesity on brain structure.

This study found that eating fish—baked or broiled, never fried—is associated with larger gray matter volumes in brain areas responsible for memory and cognition in healthy elderly people.

“There wasn’t one type of fish that was the best,” Raji told me by phone, probably while eating fish. “All that mattered was the method of preparation.” Fried fish had a unique dearth of benefits to the brain.

People who eat fish at least once a week have larger gray matter volumes in the red/yellow areas.

“If you eat fish just once a week, your hippocampus—the big memory and learning center—is 14 percent larger than in  people who don’t eat fish that frequently. 14 percent. That has implications for reducing Alzheimer’s risk,” Raji said. “If you have a stronger hippocampus, your risk of Alzheimer’s is going to go down.”

“In the orbital frontal cortex, which controls executive function, it’s a solid 4 percent,” Raji said. “I don’t know of any drug or supplement that’s been shown to do that.”

Speaking of supplements, the researchers initially looked to omega-3 fatty acids as the driver of these benefits. But when they looked at the levels of omega-3s in people’s blood, they didn’t correlate with better brain volumes.

“These findings suggest additional evidence that it is lifestyle factors—in this case, dietary intake of fish,” the researchers write, “and not necessarily the presumed biological factors that can affect the structural integrity of the brain.”

Omega-3 fatty acids have previously been shown to slow cognitive decline. In one study, higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids in people’s blood were associated with lower rates of brain atrophy observable over just a four-year period. We also know that when rats are fed diets low in omega-3 fatty acids, they have increased signs of dementia, possibly mediated by insulin and related buildup of amyloid plaques in their tiny brains.

Eating more omega-3 fatty acids, a lot of fruit, and not much meat, has previously been associated with increased volume throughout the brain’s gray matter. Recent research in the journal Neurology found that elderly people with high levels of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood had better cognitive function than those with lower levels. MRIs of their brains showed larger volumes, too. (The associations also held for vitamins B1, B2, B6, B12, C, D, and E, and folate.)

Drs. Deborah Barnes and Kristine Yaffe at UCSF recently calculated in Lancet Neurology that up to half of cases of Alzheimer’s disease “are potentially attributable” to seven modifiable risk factors: diabetes, midlife high blood pressure, midlife obesity, smoking, depression, cognitive inactivity or low educational attainment, and physical inactivity. Minimal inroads in those areas, they say, could result in millions fewer cases of Alzheimer’s.
People who ate fish once per week were just as well off as those who ate it more frequently.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine corroborate, “Our research has consistently shown that it is the interactions among these risk factors with the patho-biological cascade of Alzheimer’s disease that determine the likelihood of a clinical expression as dementia or mild cognitive impairment.”

Specific suspects in the fish-brain benefit paradigm are omega-3s docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), which seem to increase the size of the amygdala and anterior cingulate gyrus, and possibly overall brain volume. DHA and EPA can also affect the way neural synapses fire.

“Something about fish consumption, whatever it is, is strengthening to the brain,” Raji said. “It’s also possible that we’re capturing a general lifestyle effect—that there’s something else out there we’re not measuring that’s accounting for this.”

For example, people who ate fish might also eat more tartar sauce, and it might actually be that tartar sauce was responsible here. Though that’s unlikely. The researchers did control for obesity, physical activity, education, age, gender, race, and every other variable they could think of, and fish-eating itself remained a strong predictor of gray matter volume.

Even if it is just that people of good birth and cognitive fortune are those eating fish, the number of people with dementia is projected to double every 20 years. Or, as Raji put it to me, “By the time you and I are in our 60s and we start worrying about Alzheimer’s, 80 million people in the United States are going to have it.”

As that tide approaches, it can be nice to adopt a few hard grains of habit that confer a sense of command in sealing it out. Raji and other dementia researchers note that the challenge is to implement prevention strategies in the decades prior to ages when dementia manifests, before there are any signs of brain structural or functional abnormalities. In the case of fish, this doesn’t have to be a foundational life overhaul or even a substantive acquiescence. People who ate fish once per week were just as neurologically fortified as those who ate it daily.

“Nobody wants to eat food like they’re taking medicine,” Raji said. Unless, of course, they do.

View the original post here: http://www.theatlantic.com

Squid skin protein could improve biomedical technologies, UCI study shows

Conductivity could charge up futuristic disease treatments

Unraveling the Mystery of the Great White Shark

Sharks have swarmed the media this summer and it’s not even Shark Week yet.

A great white shark swims off the coast of Massachusetts. Studies show the predators’ population is returning to the waters in great numbers.

When men are caught taking selfies with a great white shark right outside of New York City, you know something’s a little fishy.

Fisherman Steve Fernandez said he and his friends were not far from 116th Street when they caught a baby white shark. They took pictures before releasing it back into the water about a mile off Rockaway Beach June 22, Fernandez told the New York Post.

“As soon as we saw it, there’s no mistaking it. It’s basically a miniature version of the shark you seen in the movie ‘Jaws,’” he said.

This wasn’t the only great white shark caught swimming just a little too close to the Big Apple.

In another recent spotting, a photographer used a drone to film a young great white greeting paddle boarders in Manhattan Beach in June. But a recent study provides some insight into these occurrences: After years of decline, the great white shark population is finally on the rise.
The study, conducted by researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and published June 11 by PLOS ONE, analyzed shark records from 1800 to 2010 and found the abundance of great whites has increased about 42 percent in the northwest Atlantic Ocean since its predicted lowest point around 1990, according to lead author Tobey Curtis.

Curtis tells U.S. News researchers think there may be a white shark nursery in the waters off New York, which could explain why the city seems to be a hangout spot for young sharks. Conservation efforts are largely to thank for the predators’ return over the past couple of decades, he adds.

But while the great white shark population is rising, other shark populations are dropping, Curtis says. Their decline is partly due to lack of conservation efforts, but some species also fall victim to fisherman more easily than white sharks because they are less resilient. Larger white sharks are able to escape and survive nets and hooks more easily than other sharks, such as hammerheads, he says.

A separate study published by PLOS ONE in June suggests the great white shark population is also surging in California waters.

The recent research contradicted a previous study published in the journal Biology Letters suggesting there were only 219 mature and sub-adult white sharks in “central California” and only about 438 in the entire eastern North Pacific Ocean. After finding such low numbers, the researchers tried to get the sharks protected under the Endangered Species Act, which would help prevent the species from being traded, sold, captured or disrupted, according to the National Wildlife Federation.

The newest research published in PLOS ONE suggests there are actually 2,400 white sharks just in California waters, meaning that the species is not in danger of extinction.

“That we found these sharks are doing OK, better than OK, is a real positive in light of the fact that other shark populations are not necessarily doing as well,” George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research and the study’s head author, told The Los Angeles Times.

This September 18, 2012, photo provided by OCEARCH shows scientists tagging a great white shark named Mary Lee off Cape Cod, Mass.

Among the great white sharks dominating the waters is a 14-foot, 2,300-pound fish dubbed “Katharine” by the scientists who are tracking her, reported ABC News.

Greg Skomal, a program manager and senior biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, says Katharine is one of 39 great white sharks he and other researchers are watching in the Atlantic Ocean.

Sharks like Katharine, who was tagged off Cape Cod last August, provide critical information about great whites’ breeding habits so people can learn how to protect them, says Chris Fischer, another one of the scientists tracking her.

Skomal says they began the study in 2009 and for a while they believed they had figured out the sharks’ migratory pattern: In the summers, they moved north and in winters, back down south.

But some, like Katharine, have broken this rule: Instead of moving north this summer, Katharine traveled to the Gulf of Mexico. Skomal says roughly 25 percent to 30 percent of the great white sharks they are tracking have more complex behaviors and follow more dynamic movements than once thought.

Despite the odd locations of the attacks, Burgess says there seem to be fewer attacks worldwide this year compared to last year.

He says there have been 26 attacks so far this year, with two fatalities, one in South Africa and one in Australia. Sixteen of the attacks were in the U.S., with no fatalities. The ratio of attacks each year is low compared to the amount of times humans and sharks are near one another.

Humans and sharks are actually very close to each other on a regular basis, says Burgess.

“Certainly anyone whose spent any time in the sea, just recreationally in the surf zone, has been within 10 or 15 feet of a shark at some point in their lifetime,” he says.

At any given time, “hundreds or perhaps thousands” of people are that close to a shark, he adds.

In fact, statistics show that sharks have a lot more to fear than humans do.

Burgess says humans are killing about up to 37 million sharks per year, while sharks only kill around four or five humans each year. Most sharks are dying when fisheries aiming for another type of fish catch them by mistake and have to throw them overboard, he says.

However, Burgess warns that if people do not learn more about shark safety, the number of shark attacks on humans are sure to increase. Naturally, a larger population, increased tourism and water activities means more bites, even if the shark population remains the same, he says.

A recent study shows the shark population is growing in California waters, contradicting previous research.

Humans are not a normal part of a shark’s diet, he says, but sharks can mistake people for fish in certain situations.

One way of avoiding an unexpected encounter is to stay in a group. Sharks, like other predators, look for the weak stragglers in the pack who linger behind, and tend to attack prey that looks to be alone, Burgess says.

And if your parents have ever told you not to take a midnight swim in the ocean, they were right. Sharks feed the most from dusk until dawn – and you don’t want to end up being a midnight snack.

The last bit of advice Burgess provides is to ditch your rings and bracelets before hitting the waves. To sharks, shiny jewelry can look like fish scales, reflecting light as you move in the water. Burgess urges people to remember that, when they enter the ocean, it’s like entering the wilderness. Most people don’t think about it, he says, but they are invading other species’ territory.

“Can you imagine walking into the Serengeti in your bikini, barefoot and not worrying about the big animals that can do you harm?” he asks.

Still, he adds, the ocean is a “pretty nice host.”

“Although we wander in their naked and stupid, most of us come out just fine,” he says.

Original story: www.usnews.com

Vampire squid spotted in Gulf of Mexico depths

A group of scientists exploring the depths of Gulf of Mexico on Friday videotaped a rarely observed vampire squid.

Watch the video here.

The sighting was made via remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) and documented by the crew aboard EVNautilus. The footage (posted here) shows the vampire squid moving slowly, yet gracefully, in the gentle current.

Stated Nautilus Live on its Facebook page: “We had a surprise visit from a Vampire Squid last night, perfect timing for the end of #Cephalopod week. Check out this eerie video as it drifts into the cameras of the ROV Hercules. Beautiful!” 

According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which last month acquired one of these amazing critters, vampire squid are an ancient species that possess characteristics of a squid and an octopus.

Its Latin name, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, translates to “vampire squid from hell.”

Contrary to its name, however, the vampire squid does not feed on blood. Rather, it scavenges largely on marine snow—organic detritus falling through the water column—and decaying animal carcasses. The richly colored critter boasts incredibly large eyes and can turn itself inside out to escape predators.

Vampire squid are thought to reside at lightless depths between 2,000 and 3,000 feet.

Aside from the Gulf of Mexico, they’ve been observed in the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez) and off Monterey Bay.

The EVNautilus is studying the impacts of oil and gas inputs into the Gulf of Mexico.

View the original story on: GrindTV.com

FDA and EPA Issue Updated Draft Advice for Fish Consumption

Advice encourages pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers to eat more fish that are lower in mercury

• Draft advice on fish consumption, and supplemental questions and answers about the draft advice:  Fish: What Pregnant Women and Parents Should Know

• Federal Register Notice of Availability: Advice About Eating Fish; Draft Update

• 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans

• FDA Consumer Update: New Advice: Some Women and Children Should Eat More Fish

• EPA information on wild-caught fish

• FDA Audio Clips

• EPA Audio Clips

• Read the draft advice.

• Starting Wednesday, June 11, 2014, submit comments through the Federal Register docket at FederalRegister.gov.

Giant squid escapes icy tomb

The giant squid has been thawed and preserved for public display at the Queensland Museum for the first time. (ABC Multiplatform:Lucinda Kent)

 
A giant squid that was found frozen in a block of ice has been thawed and meticulously preserved by scientists for display in the Deep Oceans exhibition.

See more photos at the 612 ABC Brisbane Facebook page.

Mollusc expert Darryl Potter says the squid on display may seem large at around seven metres long, but the species can grow all the way up to 13 metres in length including their ‘club tentacles’ used for killing prey.

Giant squid live in some of the deepest parts of the ocean and were thought to be mythological creatures until around 100 years ago, but the first sighting of a live giant squid in the ocean was in September 2004.

“They were spotted by mariners in early days and that lead to the tales of monsters from the deep,” Mr Potter said.

“That of course led to all your science fiction movies with grossly distorted facts about the size of these things and what they ate.”

Mr Potter says the giant squid on display in the Deep Oceans exhibition, is known as Cal, short for calamari, is one of the best preserved specimens in the world.

Breaking the ice

Cal the squid had previously been on display at Underwater World on the Sunshine Coast, where it was kept frozen in the block of ice it was found in, which kept the creature intact before museum scientists used professional preservation techniques.

“We brought it back to the museum here and it took about three days of chipping through the ice very carefully because you didn’t want to damage any of the appendages,” he said.

“Not only just chipping through it but there’s a lot of ice that was inside it that had to thaw, it sat around for about a week completely thawing.”

Museum workers had to don protective ‘spacesuits’ while they applied chemicals that keep the animal’s skin, tentacles, and head permanently fixed.

The squid has been kept in the museum laboratories for the past 5 years and can be seen for the first time out of the ice at the Deep Oceans exhibit at the Queensland Museum from 28 March to 6 October 2014.

Time to Take Ocean Acidification Seriously?

    
November 22, 2013 — HUMANS, being a terrestrial species, are pleased to call their home “Earth”. A more honest name might be “Sea”, as more than seven-tenths of the planet’s surface is covered with salt water. Moreover, this water houses algae, bacteria (known as cyanobacteria) and plants that generate about half the oxygen in the atmosphere. And it also provides seafood—at least 15% of the protein eaten by 60% of the planet’s human population, an industry worth $218 billion a year. Its well-being is therefore of direct concern even to landlubbers.

That well-being, some fear, is under threat from the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a consequence of industrialisation. This concern is separate from anything caused by the role of CO2 as a climate-changing greenhouse gas. It is a result of the fact that CO2, when dissolved in water, creates an acid.

That matters, because many creatures which live in the ocean have shells or skeletons made of stuff that dissolves in acid. The more acidic the sea, the harder they have to work to keep their shells and skeletons intact. On the other hand, oceanic plants, cyanobacteria and algae, which use CO2 for photosynthesis, might rather like a world where more of that gas is dissolved in the water they live in—a gain, rather than a loss, to ocean productivity.

Read story from Saving Seafood here.
Read story from The Economist here.

FDA says US, imported seafood has no radiation risk from Fukushima

SEAFOOD.COM NEWS by John Sackton Sept. 23, 2013 – In a September update on food safety issues related to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the FDA declared that there is no public health concern for the U.S. They said that the same holds true for imported seafood, including seafood from Japan. For example, in a study that detected very low levels of cesium in bluefin tuna caught off the coast of California, the FDA says these levels were 300 times lower than the level that would even trigger an investigation to see if there was a public health concern. In short, although some specific radioactive isotopes may be detected from time to time, the FDA says that these levels are so low as to provide no issue whatsoever for public health.

Their full statement is below:

To date, FDA has no evidence that radionuclides from the Fukushima incident are present in the U.S. food supply at levels that would pose a public health concern. This is true for both FDA-regulated food products imported from Japan and U.S. domestic food products, including seafood caught off the coast of the United States.

Consequently, FDA is not advising consumers to alter their consumption of specific foods imported from Japan or domestically produced foods, including seafood. FDA continues to closely monitor the situation at and around the Fukushima Dai-ichi facility, as it has since the start of the incident and will coordinate with other Federal and state agencies as necessary, standing ready to take action if needed, to ensure the safety of food in the U.S. marketplace.

Import Alert # 99-33, which instructs FDA field personnel to detain foods shipments from Japan if the food is likely to contain radionuclide contamination, remains active. In addition, FDA tests for radionuclides as part of its routine surveillance, through the toxic elements in food and foodware monitoring program and through its Total Diet Study.

On top of the information obtained from its testing of imported and domestic foods, FDA stays current on radiation monitoring efforts by other U.S. Government agencies, including the environmental radiation monitoring program (RadNet) conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Additionally, the Agency consults on a formal and informal basis with experts from government, academia and the private sector on radiation safety issues. FDA scientists also keep abreast of scientific publications and reports from both private and public scientific institutions, including oceanographic research institutions. For example, a study published in 2012 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reported finding very low levels of Cesium in Pacific Bluefin tuna caught by recreational fisherman off the coast of California in August 2011. FDA reviewed this study and determined that the levels of cesium were roughly 300 times lower than levels that would prompt FDA to investigate further to determine if there were a health concern.

Read the full article here.

Ocean acidification, the lesser-known twin of climate change, threatens to scramble marine life on a scale almost too big to fathom.

NORMANBY ISLAND, Papua New Guinea — Katharina Fabricius plunged from a dive boat into the Pacific Ocean of tomorrow.

She kicked through blue water until she spotted a ceramic tile attached to the bottom of a reef.

A year earlier, the ecologist from the Australian Institute of Marine Science had placed this small square near a fissure in the sea floor where gas bubbles up from the earth. She hoped the next generation of baby corals would settle on it and take root.

Fabricius yanked a knife from her ankle holster, unscrewed the plate and pulled it close. Even underwater the problem was clear. Tiles from healthy reefs nearby were covered with budding coral colonies in starbursts of red, yellow, pink and blue. This plate was coated with a filthy film of algae and fringed with hairy sprigs of seaweed.

Instead of a brilliant new coral reef, what sprouted here resembled a slimy lake bottom.

Isolating the cause was easy. Only one thing separated this spot from the lush tropical reefs a few hundred yards away.

Carbon dioxide.

In this volcanic region, pure CO2 escapes naturally through cracks in the ocean floor. The gas bubbles alter the water’s chemistry the same way rising CO2 from cars and power plants is quickly changing the marine world.

In fact, the water chemistry here is exactly what scientists predict most of the seas will be like in 60 to 80 years.

That makes this isolated splash of coral reef a chilling vision of our future oceans.

Watch the introduction video.

Read the complete article, watch the videos and look at the images here.

In the U.S., Good News on Fisheries

Around the world, the status of fish and fisheries is grim indeed. Approximately 85 percent of global fish stocks are either over-exploited, fully-exploited, depleted or recovering from depletion. But rigorous management efforts have resulted in some American fisheries making a comeback.

The new report by the National Research Council assessed 55 fisheries and found 10 that have been rebuilt and five that showed good progress toward rebuilding; only nine continue to experience overfishing. What about the rest? Eleven have not shown strong progress in rebuilding but are expected to rebuild if fishing levels remain reduced and a whopping 20 were not actually over-fished despite having been initially classified as such.

The report comes with a neat interactive online graphic to track the fate of fish populations in different regions over the years. By selecting particular species or geographic areas, users can watch, as for example, yelloweye rockfish becomes steadily overfished, as chinook salmon numbers – especially susceptible to changing environmental conditions – swing wildly back and forth, and the likes of lingcod, George’s Bank haddock, king mackerel and Bering Sea snow crab stage their marches toward recovery.

The report is fairly technical, so for a summary – and an explanation of what it means in practical terms for U.S. fish consumers – Discovery News turned to Chris Dorsett, Director of Ecosystem Conservation Programs for the Ocean Conservancy.

“If you look at a map of the United States and where overfishing is still occurring, it’s almost exclusively an east coast problem,” he points out. “And when I say east coast, I mean Gulf of Mexico as well. Where we have not seen success in terms of species recovering based on management actions, that could be due to climatic factors, which aren’t particularly good for productivity. It could be due to management regimes that aren’t particularly effective. But what exacerbates the issue is that, when you drive a population to an extremely low abundance level, environmental variability plays an even more meaningful role in the recovery of that population, so recovery is a little less predictable.”

As the classic case in point, Dorsett points to cod fisheries off Canada, which collapsed in the 1990s and subsequently saw catches slashed essentially to zero. Despite such drastic measures, neither the fish population nor the fishery has shown signs of recovery.

As the NRC report notes, however, there remains some variation: fishing pressure is still too high for some fish stocks, and others have not rebounded as quickly as plans projected. To a large extent, argues Dorsett, that’s a function of natural variability in fish populations and their environments, as well as differences in the ways fisheries have been managed over the years.

In general, though, the news remains positive, increasingly so, and is reflected in the choices available to consumers.

Read the full article here.