Finding alternative feed sources for chickens, pigs and other farm animals will significantly reduce pressure on the world’s dwindling fisheries while contributing positively to climate change, according to University of British Columbia researchers.

“Thirty million tons — or 36 per cent — of the world’s total fisheries catch each year is currently ground up into fishmeal and oil to feed farmed fish, chickens and pigs,” says UBC fisheries researcher Daniel Pauly, co-author of the Oryx: The International Journal of Conservationarticle, recently published online.

“Meanwhile, 25 per cent of infants in Peru — which produces half of the world’s fishmeal using anchovies — are malnourished,” says Pauly.

In the Oryx article, nine of the world’s leading fisheries and conservation researchers — including four from UBC — reviewed the effectiveness of past conservation campaigns and propose new strategies to effect swifter and larger-scale changes.

“Globally, pigs and chickens alone consume six times the amount of seafood as US consumers and twice that of Japan,” says lead author Jennifer Jacquet, a post-doctoral fellow at UBC’s Fisheries Centre. “Ultimately these farm animals have a greater impact on our seafood supplies than the most successful seafood certification program.”

“We should work to eliminate the use of tasty fish for livestock production. It’s a waste,” says Pauly. “Plus, it is not what pigs or chickens naturally eat. When is the last time you saw a chicken fishing?”

Many sustainable seafood campaigns focus on consumers but ignore large-scale market impacts — such as farming demand for fishmeal — and have failed to reach their goals, say the study’s authors, which include Enric Sala of the National Geographic Society and Rashid Sumaila and Tony Pitcher of UBC.

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Bigger Not Necessarily Better, When It Comes to Brains

November 18, 2009

Tiny insects could be as intelligent as much bigger animals, despite only having a brain the size of a pinhead, say scientists at Queen Mary, University of London.

“Animals with bigger brains are not necessarily more intelligent,” according to Lars Chittka, Professor of Sensory and Behavioural Ecology at Queen Mary’s Research Centre for Psychology and University of Cambridge colleague, Jeremy Niven. This begs the important question: what are they for?

Research repeatedly shows how insects are capable of some intelligent behaviours scientists previously thought was unique to larger animals. Honeybees, for example, can count, categorise similar objects like dogs or human faces, understand ’same’ and ‘different’, and differentiate between shapes that are symmetrical and asymmetrical.

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