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CSIRO Scientists' Aquaculture Holy Grail: Fish-Free Prawn Food
An anonymous reader writes "A team of CSIRO scientists has discovered the holy grail of aquaculture by developing the world's first fish-free prawn food: Novaq. According to the article there is intense global interest in Novaq because it solves one of the farmed prawn industry's biggest problems — its reliance on wild fisheries as a core ingredient in prawn food. The Novaq formula is a closely guarded secret, but it is known that the product is based on microscopic marine organisms. Not only will the new feed introduce greater sustainability into a growth industry but prawns fed on the new diet grow 40% faster and are healthier and more robust."
The Novaq formula is a closely guarded secret
Whenever anyone says that the answer is always the same...
Novaq is made out of PEOPLE!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There must be a joke somewhere...this is saying like cows only eat grass. They feed rations, antibiotics and I believe manure to your prawns raised mostly in Asia. And then there are large problems of infertile soil, because in the fertile season they cultivate rice, in the other times of the year, they put in the land salted water/water with salt to raise shrimp. This seems a slashadvertisement.
The scientists are prawn stars. You're welcome.
....will tell as to the "superiority" of these prawns. For those of us that grew up with the "superiority" of margarine over butter, high carb foods over paleo etc I'm willing to watch for 5-10 years first, see what the food chemistry and real problems turn out to be.
With our boorish, straight-from-central-casting "conservative" government planning to cut all spending in the upcoming budget, this comes at a perfect time. Traditionally the CSIRO and the ABC are the ones who get f-ed over first - it's an easy cut as no one cares.
The cynical side of me can't help wondering how much of this is a (likely fruitless) attempt to fight against the likely budget cuts.
The way they're touting it, it feels to good to be true.
There was an interesting piece on Radiolab* last year about some guys who'd found an protein-rich insect whose larva at almost anything, including agricultural waste and pig manure. They reduced the amount of waste that had to be dealt with and result in copious quantities of nutritious bug flesh.
One of the suggested uses was food for farmed fish.
* I think . . . I'm having trouble finding the segment in the archives.
The environmentalists will still find a way to hate it, regardless of whether or not it's actually good for the environment.
We think of fish is heart healthy, but fin fish don't produce omega-3 fatty acids; they bioaccumulate Omega 3s produced by the algae at the bottom of the food chain. Farm-raised fin fish may or may not have a healthy fat profile based on their diet. Grass fed beef has a healthier fat profile than grain fed beef, as well as containing useful phyotchemical (chemicals from plants) like carotenoids. Same goes for pork; lard from pasture raised pigs is relatively high in mono- and poly-unsaturated fats.
The pattern seems to be that the best thing to feed an animal is something that approximates that species' natural food in the wild. So I'm skeptical of a secret, proprietary, industrially produced feed. It's not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if it's just a matter of skipping a few trophic levels (i.e., feeding the animal something prepared from stuff that's lower on its natural prey's food chain). Aquaculture needs something like that. The world's population demands more seafood than can be wild caught. But I'm not enthusiastic about buying meat from animals raised on mystery food.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It looks like the secret is to feed them vat fed plankton instead of similar or identical species of the wild plankton they normally eat - which was apparently much hard than that sounds. The big deal is it means a more reliable supply.
I foresee, they will find cheaper ingredients as time past.,, the hard part is what to call it, "Man made fake shrimp" or plawns a whole new word.
...is that it's essentially trading one harvested item for another.
...and are healthier and more robust"
These Shrimps ain't shrimps anymore, I guess. With a 40% increased growth rate we should feed that stuff to Yankees sluggers.
These statistics sound like those cattle and poultry farmers achieve from hormone injections. If these shrimp suddenly become lobsters maybe the cholesterol will be a little too high as well.
It seems to me that "healthier" is a marketing term, not a scientific matter of fact.
See Detroit if you want to start understanding why Republicans are irrelevant to cuts happening.
When you run out of other people's money, things get cut. That's just how life works. Republicans are just trying to ease the shock of a natural effect, but if you want to make it more painful later go right ahead - you aren't the ones prepared for the painful shock. While millions die in cities the Mormons for instance are sitting on a years supply of food for every family in Utah. So they will simply take over the remnants of what is left...
So basically the Republicans are trying to save you from Mormon rule, but you seem to WANT to be ruled by Mormons. I mean they are nice and all but it just doesn't seem appealing to me.
Remember the ribwich? "Think smaller, and more legs."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Do you even know who the CSIRO is?
I doubt they will be manufacturing this themselves, just licensing it to others. This is a good thing for Australia given the Axe the prime minister has taken to their budget.
Unless there's a lot of prawn farmers hanging out at /., I'd say it's failed ad targeting. If anything, you can get the usual shitstorm about food industry holding farmers in a stranglehold and put CSIRO (whoever they may be) in a corner with Mosanto and the like.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except the CSIRO dose the actual development, its not suing ppl for having rounded corners, monetizing your invention that new is what the patent system is for
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
aka brine shrimp, but 'Sea Monkey' sounds better.
dose? ppl? You sound stupid.
soylent green is people!!!!!!!
TRAgic that i cannot use the caps for that
I've got a better idea than little shrimpies. I say feed the homeless to the hungry. Gets rid of two problems at once!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Because a company would never lie about something like that.
Prawns are not Kosher, can't be eaten by Jews. Some say is is because the prawns scavenge.
So Jews cant have a Lobster either.So saw Pig meat by pigs whose feet never touch the ground can be eaten (raised on wood planks).
So maybe now maggot or krill raised prawns will pass a rabbi's blessing and we can finally have seafood on the Easter menu.
It looks like the secret is to feed them vat fed plankton instead of similar or identical species of the wild plankton they normally eat - which was apparently much hard than that sounds. The big deal is it means a more reliable supply.
So is the vat-fed plankton as healthy as the wild stuff? Because if not, then the unhealthy part of that diet will exist in the farmed prawn. Basically take the GPP's argument "Just like food, your food itself is what it eats. " and follow that down the food chain.
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They are disgusting, it's the same as eating insects - locusts, cockroaches, etc.
Do you even know why you're NOT vegan? If everybody else in the world was vegan, would you still be insisting that it's 'normal' to eat animal products?
put CSIRO (whoever they may be) in a corner with Mosanto and the like.
Ten seconds on Google would have saved you from making a fool of yourself.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That's the new idea of dice after beta: Slashdot - new for fish farmers
BRILLIANT!
So is the vat-fed plankton as healthy as the wild stuff?
Sure, why wouldn't it be? It may well be different. The problem is that plankton is in trouble. Algae is facing the same challenge.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You sir/madam/etc are in contention for Twit of the Year 2014! Congratulations for a stunning leap of illogical crap in one brief post. Please feel free to research more about CSIRO and their work at a later date.
It looks like the secret is to feed them vat fed plankton instead of similar or identical species of the wild plankton they normally eat - which was apparently much hard than that sounds. The big deal is it means a more reliable supply.
So is the vat-fed plankton as healthy as the wild stuff? Because if not, then the unhealthy part of that diet will exist in the farmed prawn. Basically take the GPP's argument "Just like food, your food itself is what it eats. " and follow that down the food chain.
Well, since nobody knows what is in it, it is hard to say. I suggest a wait-and-see approach, but testing the resulting fish does make sense.
A challenge here is we really don't have a good understanding of what foods are or aren't healthy, or what makes them that way. You can talk about Omega 3s and all that, but there isn't a lot of outcomes data on Omega 3s, when trials are done there are many different kinds of Omega 3s so it is hard to compare them to products you can actually buy, and we have no idea what the Omega 3s are actually doing (though there are theories).
Omega 3s are actually one of the better-understood dietary ingredients - for most other foods we know even less about what is good/bad for you. Oh sure, everybody has their pet theories and there are TONS of advice floating around. The problem is that you can't lock people in cages and feed them controlled diets in a blinded fashion while keeping them from drinking/smoking/etc, so it is really hard to know just what it is that makes people gain weight at some times and lose it at others, and develop diabetes.
Let me go call someone that cares about your opinion .... no ... wait ... looks like they aren't available. While we try to find someone that cares about the brainfart masquerading as opinion you posted how about you go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself. kthxbai
Someone's fishing for a high score.
If you want me to eat something, you have to tell me exactly what it is, and how it was grown; If it's something from the animal kingdom then I want to know what you're feeding them, and how they're raised. We require ingredients lists on our other food products too. Before you cook shrimp or prawn you have to remove their "sand vein" AKA their digestive tract AKA their shit tube -- Guess what's in there? What they last ate. Some of that shit gets into what I eat. Now their job is to convince me that none of the "marine micro-organisms" in Novaq are harmful, and are free of things like, say, marine flesh eating bacteria...
All the food I eat I've grown myself, or gotten from the farmer's market from local farmers who's farm I have visited, or at the very least it has all of the ingredients listed. I only have one life, and I should have the information available to make an informed decision about what I fuel myself with, and the cost to the environment that I am a part of. That information includes how and where things are fished, hunted, farmed, etc. This extends to other purchases too. Eg: I'd only buy lab-grown diamonds to ensure I'm not supporting the blood-diamond trade. Electronics are often made in shitty conditions too. Just like it was unfortunate but necessary to use proprietary Unixes to make GNU/Linux, it is unfortunate that I must purchase hardware made under pitiful working conditions. When I do so I buy the fastest and most upgradeable hardware available so as to mitigate the frequency of my hardware purchases. Retired hardware goes to into the server rack or my home-grown cloud cluster that serves all my AV storage, display and streaming needs. What is decommissioned gets recycled, just like all the packaging I buy. I do the same with food waste via compost pile for my own garden.
It's more expensive to eat free-range chickens which keep the bugs out of the pesticide free garden, but they produce tastier eggs and taste better themselves (yes, I've done double blind taste tests, For Science!). It's usually more expensive, but sometimes it can be cheaper, to go in with a few friends or family on beef from a mobile butcher and have it cut however we like from a cow of our choice at a local farm. I understand that not everyone can afford to eat the way I do. However, if I can afford to eat better or healthier or in a way that enriches the local community or ecosystem then I do so.
I don't eat pesticide or herbicide. It is not necessary to do so. Contrary to popular belief, these poisons have not been tested for safety on animals, humans, or the ecosystem. Seriously, the chemicals they test on animals and humans are then added to other "stabilizing" or "inactive" chemicals prior to use in the field and the end result does change the properties of the pesticides and herbicides, they become more deadly, and the end result has not been tested on animals or humans. I also don't take drugs that have been on the market for less than 10 years (thus has 20-25 years of testing). Did you believe Tobacco farming corporations when they valued profit over people and said smoking is good for you, or when they said it wasn't harmful for decades? Why would you believe chemical making corporations then? I don't eat plants covered in poison (or that produce poison internally that kills critters we need for our ecosystem), I don't eat meat that eats such poison or that is sick or raised on feed that is a "closely guarded secret". I don't feed my family milk that has growth hormones either.
Did you know you can leave seeds in the sun to accelerate mutations for the test crops you select against to produce better yield while preserving genetic diversity rather than use a corporation's mono-culture which nature simply adapts to? You see, "exposing plants to UV light" isn't patentable and doesn't yield patentable produce. It's true that without poisons bugs will eat some of the plants. The portion of a crop that nature reclaims is the cost of doing business in her neck o
If everybody else in the world was vegan, would you still be insisting that it's 'normal' to eat animal products?
Err, no, because it wouldn't be - by definition. ... normal.
In fact I'm not sure what your point is.
If everybody went around with their face painted blue and said "I've traveled from 1983 to say this" before every sentence, that would be normal. But it wouldn’t make it a good idea.
Perhaps your saying that 'normal' isn't the same thing as 'natural', but since societies where the unnatural (painting your face blue) is normal are the exceptions, it's a good approximation to it.
This isn't a good argument for veganism, because most societies throughout most of history have eaten meat. So meat eating is normal and therefore likely natural.
Another possibility is that you don't know the meaning of the word 'normal' and think it actually means 'natural'. In the west that level of ignorance is
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you took the bait , hook line and sinker.
dose? ppl? You sound stupid.
nuh-uh YOU DO!
Prawns? I'd sooner eat my own shit.
prawns fed on the new diet grow 40% faster and are healthier and more robust.
Look similar to the the claims for the rations given to cows, while their meat is not the healthier one. When the ultimate metric is rate of production instead of quality (specially if have health consequences) a lot of consumers will be harmed.
Just feed them cat food, it's their favorite.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
guess what .. fish like to eat baby shrimps.
by Hrry Hrrsn
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I'm way in the middle of a hundred postings. I reply to an article. I ask it to be quoted. Oops, the quote tags are visible, wtf is this? Ok, go into options. For some reason I was reset to "extrans". Ok, whatever, I change back to html. I save, and, lo and behold, my comment is gone, all the other comments are missing. I'm back to the first page with the first five comments. And this is in the "good, well-programmed" version, not the beta.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
We should dolphinitely scale back on the fish puns.
I've haddock enough!
But you still tossed one in just for the halibut.
I can't stand the smell of fish in my pr0n
Imagine trillions of years from now on a planet far-far away, some technician named Vort assembling computer subroutines from a small number of libraries (known as the Legacy code) that dropped from a space probe billions of years before he was born.
Vort's creating "organic" software to get one of his jobs done, one that's just like Vort's ancestors created using these well-known components that always seemed to do the job. It's really expensive to assemble components this way because the Legacy codes are very inefficient, and you need to string together lots of calls to get all the requirements you need for the job, but it's known to be a sustainable process and even if nobody understands it, Legacy code doesn't have any "secret ingredients".
Back a few decades ago, Vort recalls there where two movements that tried to change the way code was assembled to get a job done:
One was to actually modify software to have it do what you wanted it to do, but the purveyors of this black magic were evil companies that wanted to keep these modifications to themselves and you could never be sure what type of modification they made or what side effects they had.
The other group was called the Open movement which wrote all new code free of the original Legacy libraries, but offered them to everyone so that they could see for themselves. Sadly although there were many experts among the Open group, normal users of open code did not have the expertise to validate the new code so it was just as mysterious as the Legacy code. Contrary to popular belief, the new open code has been used at most less than 10 years (meaning tested less than 25 years), the Legacy code has been tested for 1000's of years...
Nope, Vort, will continue to use the original Legacy code. None of that modified code for Vort, also, none of that open code created from scratch. Vort would continue to use Legacy code...
FTFY, you may be an OPEN code advocate, but you are a LEGACY food advocate, not an OPEN food advocate.
Not bad, cod do batter....
Someone should knock him off his perch, maybe with a pike, before he starts to flounder.