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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
....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.
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.
...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.
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?
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.
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.'"
They are disgusting, it's the same as eating insects - locusts, cockroaches, etc.
So they're yummy? deep fried locusts, crickets etc are delicious and much more ecologically sustainable than a vegan diet.
It's replacing wild caught fish that are ground up and used for feed with farm raised plankton that are compressed into pellets.
Two obvious benefits are 1) raising the plankton is much more sustainable than catching wild fish, and 2) the plankton is apparently a better diet for the shrimp.
It wouldn't surprise me if that plankton also makes a good protein supplement for non-marine animals like chickens. Maybe even cut out the middleman/shrimp/chicken and feed it directly to people.
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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It might be a freshwater version of the same thing... so not brine... but yeah.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If everybody else in the world was vegan, would you still be insisting that it's 'normal' to eat animal products?
Yes, because our teeth are designed to chew meat and our body is evolved to process animal protein.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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.
The large farmed prawns that are grown in the same fields as rice are freshwater prawns. Actually most of the large prawns in stores are freshwater prawns, generally grown in pens in rivers in Asia.