Precious little is known about the giant manta ray fish, and Biologist Andrea Marshall got to know them slightly better thanks to a first hand experience with the fish. She calls them “the most beautiful underwater birds” and simply looking at the images, we can clearly understand what she means.
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In the early 1800s, the ocean around New Zealand contained about 27,000 southern right whales – that is, about 30 times more than today. This has been revealed in one of several startling reconstructions of ocean life in olden days and presented at the Census of Marine Life conference on May 26-28, 2009, in Denmark.

Night Fishing with a Lamp and a Net, 11th Century

According to British researchers, while large pods of blue whales and orcas, blue sharks and thresher sharks were plentiful in the waters off Cornwall, England, herds of harbour porpoise chased fish upriver, and dolphins played in waters inshore.

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Traditionalist anglers and environmentalists have expressed concern over the obsession of making the fish fat by overfeeding, which will make them too easy to catch.

British Ian Chillcott, a leading coarse angler and a fishing writer, says that “fishery owners are guilty of overfeeding and if you are making the fish more reliant on bait, the fish consider it their natural food source and they will have no fear of diving into a pile of pellets until they find the one with a hook in it.”

Big fat carp

“As things are going now,” Chillcott adds, “it is going to be very easy to catch very big fish, but that is missing the point. People are creating big fish with no regard to the essence of fishing or to the fish’s welfare. It is tearing the heart out of fishing.”

Ian Chillcott and the traditionalist anglers of his ilk are worried about the growing number of fishing lakes that are being heavily stocked with fish, particularly carp, which are becoming increasingly dependent on high-protein pellets.

A study has found that carp fishing is getting very popular in the United Kingdom in recent years and is the fastest growing angling market in country. Anglers are willing to pay huge sums a year to fish at lakes that are known to have fat fish.

Data shows that the size of carp in Britain has increased in the last 30 years – by 30%, from about 50 lbs to 65 lbs.

Chillcott says bitterly about the new, unhealthy trend: “The way some fish are being force-fed is an abomination to the word angling. Carp are like any other wild animal. The least amount of energy they have to expend in meeting their dietary needs, the better. The pellets give them a very easy meal.”

Richard Lee, editor of Angling Times, shares Chillcott’s concern when he says, “angling is becoming a bit like intensive farming and the concerns are where this leaves the romance of fishing.”

Britain’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) have also warned that “feeding young animals an inappropriate diet can be one of the precursors to skeletal deformities and how feeding salmon the wrong kind of protein can cause digestive disorders.”

So what now? Put the fish on a diet?

Source – Image by TimJC513

In an interesting development, a fish that can induce LSD-like hallucinations when consumed has been found in the waters of the United Kingdom.

The fish in question, the sarpa salpa species belonging to bream, is normally found in the Mediterranean and around South Africa.

The sarpa salpa fish that causes LSD-like hallucination

Britain’s DailyMail reported that Andy Giles, a fisherman, has said that he caught a sarpa salpa and right away recognized it by its gold stripes. Giles, 38, said he found the fish near Polperro in Cornwall, located at the tip of the south-western peninsula of Great Britain.

“We were trawling for lemon sole and hauled it up at the end of the day. After taking a photograph, I put it in the fish box and brought it back for experts. Perhaps, I should have taken it into town to sell to some clubbers!”

Experts say that, before this, there have only been three recordings of finding sarpa salpa in Britain’s waters and that the fish might have been attracted towards the north by warmer waters.

The fish is usually served in restaurants in the Mediterranean. However, there is but one catch— if the head of sarpa salpa is eaten, hallucinations, caused by the plankton that the fish eats, can last for many days!

It has been reported that, in 2006, two men in southern France – one of them aged 90 – suffered hallucinations and nightmares for days together after eating sarpa salpa.

LSD (d-lysergic acid diethylamide), one of the most potent mood-changing chemicals, was discovered in 1938. It is made out of lysergic acid, which is found in ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and other grains.

So anyone for some sarpa salpa?

I know you guys can read, but I just feel like saying it out loud, again.

“Only when the last tree has died, and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught, will we realise that we can not eat money“

There’s so much truth in that … – via AmericansAreBrainwashed

There’s a beauty salon in Virginia that is tapping into a natural resource to clean their clients’ feet … fish! The salon is using bottom feeders to suck on, nibble away at, eat at the dead skin on the feet of their customers.

This sounds like something that might come out of America. Too lazy to bend over and scrub their own tosies, the people apparently stick their tootsies into the fish tank (notice the toenail polish) and let the fish chomp away at the dead skin.

Yuck! Poor fish, indeed.

So, what about humans using animals to do their dirty work? This is not farming either. What do you think about using fish in this manner? What I am interested in knowing is, how in the world did anybody come up with this idea?

“Honey, I got so much dead skin on my feet.”
“That’s nice, dear.”
“Huh!? I said I have too much dead skin on my feet.”
“Why don’t you stick your feet in the fish tank?”
“Stick my feet in the fish tank?! Hmm, maybe.”
“Thank you, honey.”
“You’re welcome, dear.”

Seriously, how could someone come up with this idea?

A Chinese dude landed a 32.5kg (71.5lb) big head carp. Yeah, I suppose if a fish weighed in at the size of the maximum weight for a piece of luggage, it would have a big head.

The carp was also 1.38m (4′6″) tall. The man was fishing in a 60-meter deep water pit and the fish was caught with a net after waiting for an hour and a subsequent 40-minute fight to haul it in.

I don’t know about you, but if all fish were this big, the world’s food problem would be solved, unless, all fish this big were made this big from some sort of outside, you know, contamination or such.

I don’t think we want to go there. At any rate, this isn’t the guy in the pic, but it is an image of what a fish that big looks like.

The biggest fish I ever caught was about the length of my thumb and I used a net and carried it home in a plastic bag only to watch it die after about a week even though I took really good care of him.

No gold there, for sure. How about you? Do you have a fish story to tell?

source

There’s a saying, “give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, feed him for life”. What do they say when monkeys learn how to fish? And, don’t they say things like when cows fly or pigs play the piano?

In Bangkok, the long-tailed macaque monkey can grab fruit from trees or bananaz from tourists, in India, the “cute little” monkeys are considered thieves and pests but in Indonesia, the silver-haired (retired and collecting a pension maybe?) macaque knows how to fish.

Big deal! I mean you get a pole, some string, a hook and some bait, right? Not these little primates. They just reach in and grab the little Nemos.

Though baboons, orangutans, and chimpanzees have been known to fish as well, researchers say this is a “rare and isolated” behavior. Now I wonder, can these monkeys teach us how to fish?