What do you think about this?

Also RFA WA made the Tribune today

RFA WA in the Tribune

------------
From ABCnews.com

FDA Petitioned to Halt Release of Bio-Engineered Salmon.

May 9 — A group of scientists and environmentalists today asked the government to delay approval of a genetically engineered salmon to be sure it poses no threat to salmon produced by Mother Nature, or to people who eat it.

The environmentalists, fishermen and politicians also presented a petition to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, calling for a moratorium on the marketing and importation of genetically engineered fish.

The petition comes as Aqua Bounty Farms, a company based in Canada and Waltham, Mass., is seeking FDA approval for a salmon that was created by inserting a growth hormone gene from another fish. It grows 10 times faster than natural salmon, and would be the first genetically engineered animal approved for human consumption.

The petitioners say that not enough study has been done on what effect the genetically engineered fish would have on wild populations, should they escape from the ocean pens where they would be raised, or on what health hazards there might be for people.

Andrew Kimbrell, the executive director of the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, referred to a Purdue University study that found that if 60 transgenic salmon entered a wild population of 60,000, the fish would be extinct in 40 generations.

The reason, he said, is that the male engineered fish would have a breeding advantage over wild salmon because they would be bigger when they reach sexual maturity, but at the same time have a one-third higher mortality rate than their wild counterparts.

He pointed to recent incidents off the coast of Maine, when 300,000 fish escaped from an ocean pen, and in Washington state, when 115,000 escaped, as evidence that there is no way to be certain that the transgenic salmon would be kept separate from native fish.

"The only way this could work would be on-shore tanks where they would breed these fish," Kimbrell said. "I think the problem there is that with the low cost of salmon it's not cost-effective."

Salmon, Just Rearranged

Elliot Entis, the president of Aqua Bounty, said the critics have completely misunderstood what the company is proposing.

"If you start with the wrong premises, you end up with the wrong conclusion," Entis said.

He said that though the salmon developed by his company grow faster, they are the same size if not smaller at sexual maturity than native fish, which would give them no breeding advantage. And he said that the entire female population would be sterile.

Regarding concerns about the health threats to consumers who eat the fish, Entis said there is nothing to fear from genetically engineered fish.

"There is nothing in our salmon that is not in the salmon you already eat, except a gene from another fish," he said. "We have simply rearranged things so that the salmon can make better use of its own growth hormone. We've made great pains to have this be a fish-to-fish transfer."

A Precedent Setter?

According to the petitioners, not enough study has been done to determine the long-term effects of genetic engineering on organisms. They say it is not known whether new allergins or toxins could be created in a food, or whether a plant or animal could be degraded at the cellular level by genetic engineering, eventually making it less nutritious.

Kimbrell said that Aqua Bounty's request for approval points up the lack of adequate legislation regarding genetically engineered foods. The FDA is treating the salmon as a "new animal drug" because it has no regulations in place for the fruits of bio-technology, he said.

With 35 other transgenic fish being developed, the matter must be dealt with, he said.

"This is really the precedent-setting case for all genetic engineering," he said. "The threat here is not just to wild salmon."

Wow! Interesting dilemna.

I agree that more study is needed, but I for the life of me can't think of a study design to prove that the fish will not impact natural populations. You could do juvenile fish stuff in the laboratory--feeding behavior, territoriality, aggression--how would you study adults?

The wiping out of runs in 40 generations I think is worst worst scenario. If the fish were that much superior, don't you think mother-nature would have found such a breed through thousands of years of natural selection? She's a little more experienced then us.

Ultimately, I don't think we would ever know the answer until a mass escape actually happened and we could monitor. Given that, to be totally safe, both the males and females should be sterile. Since the article says the females are already sterile, would it take much more effort to make the males sterile as well?

if i was gonna genetically engineer A salmon, i would go salmon/ musky/ pirahna, for one, you wouldnt see sea lions and seals chasing salmon, it'd be the other way around, which leads to lower counts of sea lions, and a more aggressive biter, no more lock jaw, more like pry the mouth off the k-13...jus a idea.....berkley boy

Why dont they engineer salmon that are steryl and grow large enough to eat sea lions.

What makes me most nervous is the industry rep's certainty. We've seen that before... It doesn't mean much to me that the adults are about the same size, I would be more concerned about larger size at age. Like hatchery plants onto populations of smaller wild fish, this could be a competition issue. Of course, these fish can't reproduce, right? Triploidy is an imperfect tool, unfortunately, as demonstrated by grass carp. We already know domestic hatchery-wild out-crosses have an effect on survival and reproduction of the wild fish. That is with just a half dozen or more generations of domestication from the wild in hatcheries. A trans-genetic change that confers a much larger change from the wild, when back-crossed to wild, will do what? The industry doesn't know...nobody knows.

I ate a triploid steelhead the other day, dyed orange flesh and all, so it's not that I'm completely against hatcheries, or even aquaculture. But I am more than a little concerned about wild fish.