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Swarm of Giant Jellyfish Capsize 10-Ton Trawler
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that the Japanese trawler Diasan Shinsho-maru has capsized off the coast of China, as its three-man crew dragged their net through a swarm of giant jellyfish (which can grow up to six feet in diameter and travel in packs) and tried to haul up a net that was too heavy. The crew was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler. Relatively little is known about Nomura's jellyfish, such as why some years see thousands of the creatures floating across the Sea of Japan on the Tsushima Current, but last year there were virtually no sightings. In 2007, there were 15,500 reports of damage to fishing equipment caused by the creatures. Experts believe that one contributing factor to the jellyfish becoming more frequent visitors to Japanese waters may be a decline in the number of predators, which include sea turtles and certain species of fish. 'Jellies have likely swum and swarmed in our seas for over 600 million years,' says scientist Monty Graham of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. 'When conditions are right, jelly swarms can form quickly. They appear to do this for sexual reproduction.'"
The worst part of this "invasion" is that the species isn't really tasty at all. Not to mention that every part of this particular jellyfish contains toxins. Every touching the top of the jellyfish will result in temporary numbness.
If they are proliferating because of a lack of predators, we should probably go ahead and kill as many of these as we can to maintain a good ecosystem balance.
That's got to be one of a mariner's worst nightmares...
Hard to top that... capsizing amidst a swarm of hungry sharks, maybe.
There's no need for fisheries. It's been shown that simply cordoning off sections of the ocean where no one is allowed to fish at all, causes an explosion of sea life in the surrounding areas.
Well...okay, I take back part of what I said. We do need fisheries for shell fish. It's fishing for shell fish (especially shrimp) that causes so much of the habitat destruction. The trawlers rake scoops across the ocean beds to catch shrimp. Which annihilate the corral reefs.
It's the feed. Ever eaten rabbit? A wild rabbit has a taste that is very distinctive. Farm raised rabbit has a rather soapy taste, so I won't eat it. The only difference is, wild rabbit eat what wild rabbits are SUPPOSED to eat - green vegetation. Farm raised rabbits eat prepared feed, which includes anti-biotics, possibly hormonal growth accelerators like they use for cattle - whatever the eggheads believe will grow the most meat for the least money. Farm fisheries are the same. It's near impossible to duplicate their natural diet, and if you could duplicate it, they would be far more expensive than wild fish.
Diet has everything to do with the flavor of the meat.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
So I wonder... would a farm rabbit raised on feed taste better if its diet were changed to something more natural say... a month or so... before it was killed? Or is this something that happens over the entire course of its life?
I am totally unsurprised by this development after reading about the 5 species that seem to be trying to take over the earth article at Cracked.com.
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The problem with farmed fish is that most of the meat is contaminated with parasites, such as sea lice.
Talk to anyone who works in a cannery that works with farmed fish - they'll tell you about having to pick the parasites off the flesh all day.
If these were land animals instead of fish, they would be classified as unfit for human consumption.
It's probably not the winching power which capsized the boat. A boat takes several times its own length to stop from any reasonable speed (or much worse; a large shipping freighter will take well over a mile to 'brake' to a halt from cruising speed).
I expect the boat was trawling along under power and the resistance suddenly came on the net. The winch probably locked up and the boat's momentum probably caused it to carry on forwards while the boom-mounted net pulled backwards, causing the capsize. Much like deploying a parachute out one side of the boat, really.
To address the article's stating they were "hauling in", they may simply have been winching while the boat was also under power. Cover more ocean that way.
Back in the late 1980s, a friend took his shiny new chemistry Ph.D to the then State-run Dairy Research Organisation in New Zealand. His first assigned task was to figure out a way to reduce or eliminate milk in cheese and replace it with water.
A fun fact: It takes something along the lines of 5,000 litres of water to produce 1 litre of milk using New Zealand's current extravagantly wasteful and heavily polluting dairy farming methods and practices.
But water is still relatively cheap, although, having said that, the latest NZ dairy farming boom has seen natural landscapes ploughed under and replaced by heavily irrigated pasture, leading to erosion, run-off pollution, and man-made drought.
However, the cheese made from (mostly) water is of course cheaper than that produced using milk, which is why "more water, less milk!" means bigger profits.
The reason NZ cheese now has the texture of dried earwax and tastes like stale snot is because my friend did his job very well, and is now in a very senior management role at the organisation, which is no longer State-run, and very focused upon the Capitalist ideal of "Everything for me and the rest of you can fuck off and die."
The problem with farmed fish is that most of the meat is contaminated with parasites [wikipedia.org], such as sea lice [wikipedia.org].
The wikipedia article you link to does not say that most of the meat is contaminated. If you're going to make outrageous statements like this, please pick sources that actually back your claim.