Genetically Engineered Seafood Coming To a Restaurant Near You (indianapublicmedia.org)

"The first genetically-modified animal for human consumption could be arriving in grocery stores across the United States as early as next year." Long-time Slashdot reader tomhath tipped us off to Indiana Public Media's report on AquaBounty Technologies: AquaBounty will produce a GMO salmon that CEO Ron Stotish says will grow faster than freshwater-raised fish. "It does so because we've given it the ability, using the same biological process that regulates growth in the unmodified salmon, to grow about twice as fast reaching market rate about half the time," Stotish says. The technology has been around since the 1990s, but it took until 2015 to receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, due to concerns about people eating genetically-modified animals. The genetic makeup of the biotech fish takes a growth-hormone regulatory gene from the Pacific Chinook salmon with a promoter gene from an ocean pout and puts it into the genome of an Atlantic salmon. The result causes for the growth hormone to remain on leading to faster growth rate than non GMO salmon.

The modified fish is able to grow to market size using 25 percent less feed than the traditional salmon, increasing cost efficiency... Stotish says his operation causes less harm than traditional fish farming. "We're not using coastal waterways, we're not putting antibiotics and medications into the water," Stotish says. "Our fish are in a controlled environment, we don't need antibiotics, we don't have to treat for sea lice."
The company says that every year Americans consume about 350,000 tons of Atlantic salmon -- more than 95% of which has to be imported.

Comments

Re:all you need to do is refuse to order it.

[skoskav]

The salmon's orange color comes from the caroteniods in its food, and has nothing to do with GMOs. Wild salmon *tends* to pick up an orange color if it has eaten a lot of krill and shrimp, while farmed salmon almost always is orange because carotenoids are added to its feed, as the customers expect it.

Re:Mod parent up please.

[ShanghaiBill]

The objection to gmo in plants has been about increased use of pesticide, namely Roundup

1. Roundup/Glyphosate is not a pesticide. It is an herbicide.

2. Roundup-Ready crops allow herbicides to be applied more effectively after germination, rather than using much harsher herbicides to kill weeds in the seed stage. In many cases, herbicide use goes down, and Roundup is much less persistent in the environment than the chemicals it replaced.

3. Roundup-Ready crops allow for much less environmentally damaging "no-till" farming methods, that reduce erosion, and improve soil nutrient and carbon retention.

"Shanghai" Bill is a known liar many times over.

[Anonymous Coward]

You got caught lying 12-25 times repeatedly stating "Blood plasma is sterile" and then later that "The Chinese Govt does not directly censor Chinese citizens" and other absolute bullshit head-in-ass retard-level lies. You're not trustworthy.

You are not a source of information that anyone should or even could trust, knowing your dishonest history. Sorry. That's what accountability means when you get caught lying repeatedly, over and over, even after directly corrected.

You're a liar, Bill.

Re:Another example of technology that nobody asks

[skoskav]

I'm guessing no one asked for GMO insulin and GMO cheese 30-40 years ago either, but dropping society's dependence on chopped-up cow pancreases and calf stomachs allowed us to significantly ramp up production and lower costs.

Re:Not the first

[skoskav]

I wouldn't be so harsh on people for using the term "GMO" incorrectly, as the term itself is unspecific, and is often broadened to include anything that has had its genes altered[1], even by nature.[2] [3]

It would be so much simpler if people just referred to the specific technologies being utilized, as they all suffer from risk/reward issues, and there aren't clear ethical borders. An incomplete list of the technologies used include:
* Nature's own technique of random mutations with a natural selection filter on top
* Artificial selection by humans, which in ~10,000 years gave us massive, delicious mutants like the modern wheat and corn crops, and docile cows, pigs and dogs
* Cloning started around the 1800s in order to perpetuate popular varieties of e.g. apples, oranges and bananas, whereby a branch of the tree is cut off and re-planted
* Forced hybridization has been around the 1900s, where two distinctly inbred parental lineages are perpetually bred to produce sterile offspring (e.g. seedless watermelons, or mules for use by the British Empire as amazing pack animals)
* Radiation-induced mutation breeding (mutagenesis) has been around since around the 1930s, which forcefully increases the mutation rate and splits chromosomes in order to allow breeding with other species -- a technique the EU even calls GMO (see [1])
-- a lot of western staple crops are based on, or hybridized from, crops produced from this technique
* Chemically-induced mutation breeding is a more modern version of mutagenesis that's doesn't cause as much DNA damage -- still a GMO in the EU though (see [1])
* Transgenic modifications, where specific genes can be takes from unrelated species, was invented in the 1970s
* Cisgenic modifications, where the specific genes are taken from a species where it would have been possible to acquire it naturally through conventional breeding,[4] have been a classification of GMOs since around the year 2000

So GMO debates could be untangled massively if people just spoke about the specific technologies. For instance, I suspect based on your comment that you would be against transgenic GMOs and mutagenesis, but for cisgenic GMOs... while being on the fence about forced hybridization?

Re: Mod parent up please.

[WindBourne]

While you may eat tuna sandwiches, most tuna sold throughout the world eat it as main dish.