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Reversing Undesirable Fish Evolution
TaeKwonDood writes "Your granddad's approach to fishing — throw the little 'uns back — may have hurt their evolution, but we can reverse that, says a group of researchers, with a change of policy.
Fish have been 'reprogramming' themselves to be smaller and live longer. Welcome to evolutionary dynamics, Lamarck. But, no, they are serious. And it can be fixed within 12 generations. What do the smart people out there think about this? Are they using the term 'evolution' the wrong way?"
Of course not! Hollywood would be proud!
Oh, and they can get it down to 6 generations if they reroute the power from the main EPS conduits through the deflector dish in order to create a reversed polarity tachyon field. The tachyons will interact with the quantum state of the fish at a subatomic level, forcing them to grow larger. Sort of like inflating a balloon. With tachyons.
Are they using the term 'evolution' the wrong way?
Nope. It seems correct to this biology teacher. This is a clear case of directional selection. Keep eliminating the larger fish and the median size of fish in the population will be smaller. So, by taking the large ones, we are selecting against them and for smaller fish and juveniles. If, over time the frequencies of the alleles for large and small change in the population, then we have, by definition, evolution.
What makes you think this wouldn't be an example of evolution?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Are they using the term 'evolution' the wrong way?"
If being smaller enables the fish to survive long enough to breed, then no. Big fish die off, small fish breed.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
What does Lamarck have to do with it? These fish haven't been passing down traits they've developed during their lifetimes - we've been killing all the big fish, so smaller fish are selectively left to breed. That's Darwinian evolution.
In normal situations, I'd imagine that bigger fish tend to reproduce more often. But when some external force (e.g., thousands of fishers in boats with GPS and big nets) changes things, you get a different outcome.
If we preferred to eat fish that were darker in colour, they'd be getting lighter instead.
Either TaeKwonDood misunderstands evolution, or rushed to post his article a little too quickly...
---sheath
No, but you're being rather careless with your language.
It hasn't "hurt" their evolution. Their evolution has been helpful, based on the selection pressures they face.
Nor are the fish "reprogramming themselves". The species' genetic make up may be shifting (in a loose sense "reprogrammed") but they aren't doing it to themselves.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
One species is trying to grow legs and arms so it can crawl to land and build nuclear weapons to end the world. We must stop this before it's too late!. -Anonymous Anomalocaris
Table-ized A.I.
Why are you name-dropping 17th century biologists? There's nothing even remotely transmutational about that article.
It's nice to be liked, but it's better by far to get paid
12 fish generations...
Animal Husbandry has been doing it for years in one form or another.
See Wikipedia
Of course, if you leave the runts of the litter only, you end up with smaller critters. Its how many lap dogs were bred in the first place.
And like any breeder can tell you, of course it can be fixed in 12 animal generations!
Clearly this is yet MORE poof of intelligent design! How can you not see it!
Whenever I go out to the bars, I make it a point to take the smallest woman I can find home with me. It is my hope that within generations, the women remaining in the bars will all be larger and provide... um... ::analogy fail::
they should be throwing back the young ones. Older fish are getting smaller? Chop 'em in half and count the rings.
Of course not! It's Evolution 2.0!
And how is it different from any other kind of selective breeding?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
For years, the elephants in southern India have been hunted for their tusks. Fifteen years ago, you could very well run into a lone tusker in the wild with metre long tusks.
But now of late, there are baby elephants being born who grow up to be fertile males without the large tusks. With tiny foot long points out of their mouths, instead of something resembling the original giants that I used to love.
It's almost as if the poachers are even more of a significant selection force than nature and female preference put together.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
just because those fish didn't evolve the way we would have liked that it somehow means that it "hurt their evolution."
I'd in fact go further and say it has helped their evolution. If they become small enough that us humans cannot be bothered with them then they have managed to eliminate the most dangerous predator on the planet as a concern. Seems like a smart move to me.
... should read Beak of the Finch
Money is the root of all evil?
Technically they are correct, in practice I have my doubts. It is hard to get all the variables in a breeding programme to act in line. Ask any dog breeder.
I once was asked by someone from J. Witnesses if I could transform a human into a crocodile. Sure I said, just give me some 300 million years and I might succeed. And, give give me another 300 million years and I may even get it back to a human.
Me, the magician!
TFA describes a closed study of a population of fish. It's not an examination of wild populations of fish or an analysis of trends in wild populations. Extrapolating their observations from the closed population and applying them to the wild populations isn't accurate.
Commercial fishing is performed with nets (or longlines) and does not discriminate based on size. Everything in the net goes into the hold. Any non-target fish are discarded after they are dead. Sport fishing does discriminate based on size, but doesn't have a significant impact on saltwater fish. Also, larger fish are usually the smarter fish that have avoided anglers' lures, etc. which is a phenomena that isn't accounted for in this study.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I was hoping the first 10 minutes of Idiocracy wasn't true. Unfortunately, after returning from Tomorrowland at Disney and reading this article, I fear the Cleavons will take over the earth.
-- $G
I read, about twenty-five years ago, that traditional people in the Andes, when planting potatoes, only planted the biggest and most beautiful ones they had from previous harvest. The religious justification is that the "Pacha Mama", which is "Mother Earth", only deserves the best.
Lately there have been examples of Lamarck-like 'evolution'. It's clear now the base-pair order is not the whole picture. To some extend acquired features (in particular, methylation of DNA) can be passed on to offspring.
see http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026845.000-memories-may-be-stored-on-your-dna.html
I don't oppose hunting on moral or ethical grounds. And I eat meat like nobody's business. My problem with hunting is that humans have obtained such an imbalance of power such that, unlike in the wild, where predators prey on the weak, humans only hunt the strong. We shoot the biggest buck, the biggest bear, the biggest whatever. We are removing the best genes from the gene pool. It's "survival of the weakest", and the long term consequences cannot be good.
The same selection of the smallest happens in the logging industry when people cut down the bigger trees and think the little ones will grow up to fill in. That's called "high cutting" and it will ruin a forest for generations. As much bad publicity as clear cutting gets it's usually the best way to manage timber cutting.
This is no more evolution than the development of different breeds of dogs, which are all the same species, was evolution. Take a population and select a specific trait. Breed the population to amplify that trait.
Take a population of dogs. Bread the population to be big, and you end up with a population that is bigger and bigger. Eventually, you end up with great danes, mastifs, etc.
Continue this kind of divergent breeding long enough, with a large enough group of traits and one might be able to force evolutionary change and the creation of different species.
This is an example of change due to environmental pressure. But, the pressure has not been applied long enough to make the change permanent or complete.
The article shows a simplistic understanding of the Theory of Evolution and a simplistic and misinformed interpretation of the data.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samurai_crab
Did a similar thing (by accident) by 'evolving' a fox breed to a new species of dogs over 10 fox generations (10 years).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Belyaev
He NEVER caught the big fish. He didn't even try. His tactic was to put a tiny little hook on his line and sit in the shallows. In 3 or 4 hours he'd have about a hundred tiny little bluegills. Of course, he'd have to clean all those bitty fish, but he didn't mind. Once they were fried up with a little batter on them, you could eat them whole like sardines and they were FUCKING DELICIOUS.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It's desirable to the fish. Personally, if I was smaller and lived longer I'd consider that a pretty decent trade-off.
No one posted a comment about getting fish to have laser beams on their heads? Sharks are preferred, but sharks are fish. The little one with little lasers only annoy. We want really big ones with huge lasers to take out our targets!
As someone who does go fishing, I am sort of concerned with this. Commercial fishing has always had a different set of rules then recreational fishing. For example: flounder (or summer flounder or fluke) in my state the size limit is 18 inches with a bag limit of 4 in 2008 (I have to look up 2009 rules). The commercial fleet is allowed 12 inch fish and has a tonnage limit. Once they hit that limit, they are done.
The season was closed for a 10 day period which happened to fall right when those fish were biting the best. The fleet got close to the limit before the short close break. Then their catch got reset to zero. So after the break they can catch the entire quota again. The closing and quota reset allowed the commercial fleet to almost double their catch for the year. Not so fair and talk about depleting the fish stocks.
The article is talking about silver sides/spearing/shiners these are a bait fish. I have seen them ranging is size from 1/2 inch to 9 inches long. Not sure about weight, since these are small bait fish. The schools of them in the ocean are fewer then past years. So are the tuna and other fish we are going for. So more bait (food) should help the other fish that feed on them. Time will tell. Farming these bait fish and releasing them into the wild should be doable. I have not heard about any size limits on these bait fish. Now I need to read about how that Japanese guy is making out with the farming of blue fin tuna. If we can farm and release into the wild game fish people want, that would be great and help with the fish stocks. We can just farm these fish then send them to market, but there are those who still want to catch them.
It wasn't called "evolution", it was called "The Origin of the Species".
The debate is not over whether "evolution" occurs. Evolution is just iterated selection. The debate is over whether evolution leads to speciation.
Our ancestors were all strong and built like Schwarzenegger before the Predators came and hunted them down.
Just because humans are influencing the system, why is this artificial? We've exerted selection pressure on fish, and they have adapted to fit the pressure. How's this different from any other predator influencing a population?
I would hazard a guess that there is a much higher percentage of atheists and agnostics among slashdotters than what is in the general population, so I just don't get the whole ascribing good/evil tags to human impact upon evolution. As I understand it, there is no right or wrong in evolution, only cause and effect.
I have said a number of tymes on /. that I am agnostic, "a" - without and "gnosys" - knowledge and so without knowledge as far as a higher power or being, but I still believe in good and bad. They are not exclusively a matter of religion or spirituality but are also part of ethics.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Who cares? I want to know what the fish think!
Seems to me that the trick is separating two effects
1) Fish which are larger because they are older are removed from the population, leaving the population on average smaller but not necessarily changing the genetic makeup.
2) Fish with genes which make them larger are removed from the population, leaving the population on average smaller, and reducing the frequency of "big fish" genes.
Leaving the population alone will eventually reverse the first effect. The second effect, on the other hand, should be permanent unless there is selection pressure for "big fish" genes. However, since the article states that bigger fish produce more offspring, it's rather likely that there is such pressure, so the researcher's results make sense.
Respectfully, I guess that I never quite understood that. Outside the context of the supernatural, how is behavior either good or bad? Why isn't it just homo sapiens behavior, like it would be in any other species?
We all have our own ideas of what's good or bad.
That behavior is either good or bad implies that we have a choice in our behavior (i.e. free will).
To a certain extent we all have free will, though not all of us can control our behavior all the tyme. I used to be easy going and didn't get angry, mad, or self defensive much. But now I know I can't always control myself. More than 10 years ago I survived a TBI or Traumatic Brain Injury and lost some abilities because of it. And I do mean "survived", while I was in a coma the docs told my family it would be a miracle if I lived. I disagree with those docs but that's something else.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Throw back the little ones
and pan-fry the big ones
use tact, poise and reason
and gently squeeze them
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Awww, you're stalking me. I'm honored. Thank you.
Involve the AA! Send them to the bottom of the ocean to change those bottom-dwelling creatures to live without alcohol!
Yes! You fish can do it too! Send in the Alcohol Anemones!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..