SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the two-cars-in-every-garage-and-three-eyes-on-every-fish dept.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the green light Friday to genetically modified salmon that grow about twice as fast as normal.
The FDA lifted an alert which
Prevented AquaBounty from importing its salmon eggs to its Indiana facility, where they would be grown before being sold as food. The agency noted the salmon has already undergone safety reviews, and that it lifted its alert because the fish would be subject to a new regulation that will require companies to disclose when a food is bioengineered.
Compliance with the disclosure regulations will start showing up in 2020 and becomes mandatory in 2022.
As one might expect, the FDA is under suit by various groups opposed to the sale of the fish.
Called AquAdvantage, the fish is Atlantic salmon modified with DNA from other fish species to grow faster, which the company says will help feed growing demand for animal protein while reducing costs.
The fish are bred female and sterile in containment tanks to help allay fears about them entering the environment.
Previous Coverage here
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday March 11 2019, @04:49PM (1 child)
That's not the problem. The problem is that the ecosystem has only a limited amount of space for species to live in, and we're already pushing fish out of it. It's not clear whether this fish is even a part of a solution. It certainly isn't going to end up feeding poor people, so that's pure PR gibberish. They are designed to out-compete native salmon and to require artificial support to keep the species going. I don't find this at all desirable. And genes don't stay confined within even a phylum. This is probably due to viral "accidents" attaching a part of a species gene to the reproducing virus, and then infecting the other species and embedding itself in the DNA, but that's just my guess as to the mechanism. It's a low frequency event, though, so expecting to see it happening is unreasonable. (That said, merging the genomes of various salmon species shouldn't prove a risk if they weren't sterile.)
For salmon to be feasible the fish needs to swim free in the ocean to eat and put on mass. Then it needs to return to it's spawning site (to either reproduce or be captured). The limiting feature here is probably mainly the spawning sites...but in that it's competing against the unmodified salmon.
I worry about environmental degradation caused by these modified salmon, not about whether the meat is safe to eat. But it's also worrying that they are engineered to grow extra large. This probably means that it will require artificial support, as there's usually a good reason for a species to be the size it is.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday March 12 2019, @04:47AM
I feel I jumped to an assumption here. Though I'm not sure. Indiana doesn't sound like a place that has native salmon to compete with. That being the case, they're probably growing them in holding tanks, so the main problem is likely to be "How do they get the stuff to feed them?"
At all events, other comments have made it seem as if these salmon are being grown confined, so the viral vectors are the only genetic problem, and that's a really low frequency event. I don't see how the fish could get from Indiana to the ocean, but that may be my lack of geography. Perhaps salmon migrate up the Mississippi. But fish grown in holding tanks still need to eat, can they can't feed themselves, so someone has to get the food for them. Salmon are carnivorous, so that means other fish. This will either not be cheap or will be very destructive...unless you can feed them on something like jellyfish.
I'm a lot less worried about the genetics than I am about environmental destruction. I doubt that these salmon could compete against wild salmon without artificial supports, because there's usually a reason a species has a particular set of characteristics. And mixing the genes from a variety of different salmon strains/species shouldn't cause any real problem...except a bunch of fish that can't compete on their own. Fish farms, however, have a record of being hugely destructive. I heard of one approach being taken in Norway that sounded ecologically sound: they were going to put a fence across an entire fjord and keep the fish that were large enough within it, while allowing the smaller fish that the big fish ate to swim in and out. Done right that should be a sound way to farm fish. But I don't think it would work with salmon. Salmon generally swim away from their spawning areas when they're small, swim around in the ocean eating what they can find for a few years (I was told 5, Google says 3 to 8), and then come back to spawn when they're large. So small holes in the net would keep them out.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.