Debate Continues: Did Your Seafood Feel Pain?

Debate Continues: Did Your Seafood Feel Pain?: The scientific debate on the subject has intensified recently, with a team of British researchers proposing this month that electroshock tests suggest crabs indeed feel pain. But the study has drawn scrutiny, while another study late last year pushed back on the idea that fish, more closely related to humans than are crabs, feel pain.

Lobsters, Giant and Strangely Colored

Lobster items in the news. Another giant lobster spared story, this one from New England, about a 21 lb. lobster that was caught in the waters of Cape Cod:21-pound lobster released to New England Aquarium (UPDATE) | The Sideshow - Yahoo! News A woman won a lobster raffle who said she had planned to spare the lobster's life all along:

My plan was always to donate the lobster to the Aquarium was to generate awareness and allow people to see the creature, and of course, to keep the lobster from being trapped again and, this time, ending up on someone's dinner table," she told Yahoo! News. "The only thing I requested from the Aquarium was a chance to see the lobster when I visit Boston on August 6th and they were kind enough to grant my request."

Another lobster item in the news today. A shipment of lobster's received by a Massachusetts restaurant contained several orange lobsters. This AP item appeared in the "Lighter Side" section of our local paper. Among others, The Huffington Post published the item. This designation frustrates me. The following is not a cutesy feel good item about a child's lost puppy now found safe, but an increase in unusual colorations in lobsters. The reason for these coloration are potentially disturbing reasons: global warming/climate changes, signals of things going wrong in our oceans due to pollution, etc. But the item in the local paper, concluded with comments from Michael Thusty, who is the director of research at the New England Aquarium at Boston: "Right now you can make a lot of explanations, but the actual data to find them out out just isn't there." One possible explanation for this increase in colorful lobsters was the "active Twitter sphere" and "people get [getting] excited about colorful lobsters." Another possible reason: increase in lobster harvests; more lobster hauling, more lobsters, chances increase for oddly colored lobsters. (Blue, orange, bi-colored, yellow...)

Canibal Shrimp Invasion

Cannibal shrimp: The invasion has begun

---

A Dead Whale In Tokyo Bay

A Dead Whale In Tokyo Bay

As for the dead blue whale in Tokyo Bay (see below), it probably was while still healthy...feeding somewhere between the Bering Strait and the Sea of Okhotsk, unknowingly ingesting radioactive and chemically-contaminated krill at depths of 100 meters or more. These krill are spawned over the Japan Trench were the warm Kuroshio meets the cold Liman currents.

Upon feeling strange symptoms in its gut and having difficulty in holding in air, the huge cetacean rose to the surface for easier breathing and slowly swam southward in the Liman/Oyashio Current in search of warmer waters. Once past Choshi Point, it headed toward the brackish water flowing out of Tokyo Bay in hopes of reaching the estuary of the Edo River, where it could rest in the shallow bed of running fresh water. It senses filth in the water, however, and decides to push further south in search of a cleaner river.

Giant shrimp raises big concern as it invades the Gulf - Houston Chronicle

The Gulf will never be the same; and the invasion of giant shrimp adds to the problems in the area: Giant shrimp raises big concern as it invades the Gulf - Houston Chronicle

Though no one is sure what the ecological impact will be, scientists fear a tiger prawn takeover could knock nature's balance out of whack and turn a healthy, diverse marine habitat into one dominated by a single invasive species.
"It has the potential to be real ugly," said Leslie Hartman, Matagorda Bay ecoystem leader for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. "But we just do not know."