Engineered Salmon ?, opinions ?

http://www.redding.com/news/2014/apr/06/engineered-salmon-may-be-tough-sell/

Hasn't the human race learned its lesson enough times in its history to know playing God never turns out well?

There isn't enough information in the article to make an informed opinion on these engineered salmon.

My primary concern (since I don't buy Salmon in the store) is the potential damage that aquacultured fish (genetically modified or not) have on the environment.

I think some questions to ask would be:

How are the modified fish prevented from breeding with wild populations?  I presume that the modified fish will be sterilized by polyploidy induction.  If that is the case, then what percentage are sterilized in the process, and what sort of monitoring will be done to ensure that these fish do not breed with wild populations?

There are lots of other questions to be asked about the future of aquaculture and gen-mod fish, but my brain won't be working properly until I recover from yesterday's Sac-Almanor-Sac day trip.

Disaster waiting to happen. They are not all sterilized and can pass on the transgene, not only to other salmon but also breed with brown trout.
http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/press-releases/2254/new-study-indicates-ge-salmon-can-contaminate-wild-brown-trout#
These hybrids will quickly out compete true salmon and trout and be the end of these fish as we know them.
At the same time the FDA won't let me label my hook and line, wild caught salmon as "organic" because they are wild and I cannot definitively say that they haven't been roaming around some farmers field in the Midwest happily munching on GMO crops. I mean it could happen right?
The FDA is a bad joke.
Just say no to frankenfish.

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Disaster waiting to happen. They are not all sterilized and can pass on the transgene, not only to other salmon but also breed with brown trout.
http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/press-releases/2254/new-study-indicates-ge-salmon-can-contaminate-wild-brown-trout#
These hybrids will quickly out compete true salmon and trout and be the end of these fish as we know them.
At the same time the FDA won't let me label my hook and line, wild caught salmon as "organic" because they are wild and I cannot definitively say that they haven't been roaming around some farmers field in the Midwest happily munching on GMO crops. I mean it could happen right?
The FDA is a bad joke.
Just say no to frankenfish.

I don't know about commercial operations, but we have achieved 98-99% sterilization rates in the salmonids that we have triploided (flow cytometry confirmed).

I think another issue with most aquaculture operations is that we primarily feed these farmed fish fish-meal.  Since the fish-meal is harvested from the ocean and typically has a very high bycatch rate, the result is short term increase in lower quality salmon with relatively high (direct and indirect) damage to fish stocks. I am in favor of more sustainable hook and line methods (like Sharky's) that have hugely lower by-catch rates, and don't put our wild stocks in jeopardy.

The problem is convincing people to pay higher prices and consuming less.


The rockfish trawlers can label their catch " Pacific red snapper", but Sharky label his salmon "organic".... What a world we live in.

Just off of the top of my head I believe the protein conversion equation for pen raised salmon is around 20 to 1. In other words it takes 20 tonnes of yummy anchovies to raise 1 ton of shitty quality salmon.
My wholesaler, Kenny Belof, of Two by Sea sustainable seafood, has a trout farm in the Sierras. It's a closed system which eliminates escapes and possible contamination of wild fish. The fish are fed a diet that is 99 per cent organic vegetarian and only 1 per cent fish protein. Not perfect, but a good start. Of course they can't be labeled "organic" because that 1 per cent of anchovies in their food may just have been roaming around some farmers corn field eating round up ready GMO corn...

The feed conversion for farmed salmon is below 2:1, not 20:1 - that's more like cows. There may be some discrepancies depending on how you measure conversion (wet/dry weights), but fish are efficient compared to mammals. Replacing forage-base fish in aquaculture feeds is much needed, though.

Anyway, there's an informative editorial by Alison van Eennanaam (UC Davis) called "Transgenic salmon: a final leap to the grocery shelf?" that is one of the best go-to articles I've found on transgenic salmon. Unfortunately, I can't find a public version of it online (available on PubMed, etc., though, if you have access), which is a shame, because most discussion on the topic is sensationalized and ill informed to my experience (not pointing at anyone here - more of a media criticism). Since politics often follows the popular discussion more than the scientific discussion, I think the GMO issue is overburdening aquaculture, no less because it deals with farmed salmon, which are already controversial.

The danger of escapement can't be trivialized, for certain, but these farmed fish don't have impressive survival skills to begin with ("fitness disadvantage"). The sterilization rate of farmed fish is probably high enough to significantly drop the odds of an escaped fish surviving and then also reproducing competent offspring. If so, then I'd argue that that degree of risk is lost in the noise of how much we already have and continue to alter fisheries with fishing, pollution, land use, etc., though.

Another hot issue that hasn't been mentioned is food safety; however, the biological effect of the additional growth hormone gene (or IGF-I, which is regulated by GH) on your health as a consumer is a non-issue. Growth hormone/IGF-I are highly desirable in any farm animal (or you), but they don't enter your system if you eat it (unlike steroids in milk, etc.). The hormone argument is a sign of ignorance, or evidence that the left is just as guilty as the right of scare tactics. There are real concerns, but that's not one of them. 

I'm all for wild salmon, but there's not enough to meet demand and never will be. I try to keep in perspective that, whether we like it or not, people have taken over and changed just about every corner of the earth, and now we have 7 going on 9 billion of us to feed. GMO food arguably has it's place in the discussion in how to deal with this challenge, as long as it's done responsibly, but of course it's not the only solution, either - like living disciplined lives! Nor is aquaculture without its problems, but trying to feed the world on wild animals is clearly not even an option anymore. Anyway, I'm glad to see that some seafood distributors are at least providing options, wild or farmed.

http://ucanr.org/sites/SFS/files/122266.pdf

The feed conversion for farmed salmon is below 2:1, not 20:1 - that's more like cows.

ok, so I was wrong about the conversion. It isn't 20:1, it's 6: 1. Those discrepancies you speak of are facts. The farm industry calls it 2 to 1 and that's a lie. It takes two tonnes off dried, rendered fish meal to make a ton of salmon. It takes 6 tonnes of fresh, high in omega 3s, fish to make one ton of low grade, omega 3 deficient farmed salmon. That doesn't take into account bycatch and in the pelagic finish purse sein industry, which can be significant. So at least 6;1.

And then from the quoted PDF:

" Wild-caught fish deplete the oceanic stocks and do not present a long-term, ecologically sustainable solution to rising global fish demand.

So from this I'm getting that we have to catch six times as much wild fish to save wild fish.....

So far i I have been debating the merits of farmed salmon produced to current industry standard, which GMO salmon would be if they are allowed to be farmed.

My biggest concern with the GMO salmon is what happens WHEN they escape. The PDF quoted this:

" Farmed fish are known to have a fitness disadvantage, called a genetic load, in natural environments because domestication genes are only favorable in domestic environments. "

What farmed fish are they speaking of? The industry assures us that they won't escape and presumably have not been planted, so how did they study the possible advantages of this particular GMO?
Off the top of my head I cannot think of a domesticated animal farmed in large scale without escape.
Throughout the editorial they talk of sterile fish while in the same article they admit that not all the fish are sterile.
The GMO industry at large has a terrible record on predicting escapement cross breeding. They assures us that GMO corn would not escape from planted field and contaminate non GMO crops. It quickly did and the patent holders sued and won to straight confiscate the crops they had contaminated!

To me the editorial reads more like an advertorial.

I have no proof, but I'm willing to bet UC Davis is awash in grant money from corporate farming concerns. I think anyone following the MPA process is aware of how scientists can be bought for surprisingly little in the way of grant money.