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Documenting the history of fisheries

  • Human fishing and impacts on near-shore and island marine life — including the catching of shellfish, finfish and other marine mammals — apparently began in many parts in the Middle Stone Age — 300,000 to 30,000 years ago — 10 times earlier than previously believed;
  • Passages of Latin and Greek verse written in 2nd century CE suggest Romans began trawling with nets;
  • In the early to mid 1800s, years of overfishing followed by extreme weather collapsed a European herring fishery. Then, the jellyfish that herring had preyed upon flourished, seriously altering the food web;
  • In the mid 1800s, periwinkle snails and rockweed migrated from England to Nova Scotia on the rocks ships carried as ballast — the tip of an “invasion iceberg” of species brought to North America;
  • In less than 40 years, Philippine seahorses plunged to just 10% of their original abundance, reckoned in part through fishers’ reports of each having caught up to 200 in a night in the early days of that fishery.

Just some of the insights that will be shared by participants in the forthcoming Oceans Past II conference, according to EurekaAlert. It sounds absolutely fascinating:

Using such diverse sources as old ship logs, literary texts, tax accounts, newly translated legal documents and even mounted trophies, Census [Census of Marine Life] researchers are piecing together images — some flickering, others in high definition — of fish of such sizes, abundance and distribution in ages past that they stagger modern imaginations.

It’s all part of the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) project. One of the regions being studied is the Mediterranean, and the project website has some great historical photographs of fisheries, for example from the Venetian lagoon. The “scientific area” includes an erudite answer to the question “Did the Romans eat fish?” by HMAP leader of the Black Sea project Tonnes Bekker-Nielsen. Here’s a perhaps surprising snippet:

The fish product most likely to be found in the average Roman kitchen or cookshop was garum, a sauce made from fermented fish and similar to the sauce known as umami or nuac, which is very popular throughout East Asia today. Garum was used to give flavour to stews, soups and many other dishes; it could also be eaten as a relish on bread.

The project includes some interesting data visualization tools.

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Featured: hot cows

back40 has hot news on cool cows:

Cows are hot. Their eponymous rumens run at about 104F due to the furious activity of rumen biota. This means that heat is often a worse problem than cold since it takes energy to stay cool as well as warm, yet they need to eat and so refill the rumen to get energy. The hurrier they go the behinder they get. Shade in summer is as important as wind shelter in winter.

Not a lot of people know that.

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Cows manicure Burren

The limestone outcrop of the Burren is one of the natural wonders of Ireland — if not Europe — it’s criss-crossing grikes supporting a unique microenvironment and a similarly unique and varied flora. Not to mention generations of botanists. It is also, incidentally, “rich in historical and archaeological sites,” and a great tourist attraction for all these reasons. Now, cows are to play a part in maintaining the landscape.

Or rather, they are to continue playing such a role:

BurrenLife has provided the evidence that the role of cattle is the key factor in conserving the Burren: in controlling the spread of scrub; in ensuring increased biodiversity and in improving water quality.

I ran the article past the only Irishman to hand, and Danny said that
he thought the Burren is one of the only places in the temperate regions of the world where cattle are housed outside throughout the winter. Something to do with heat retention by limestone, or some aspect of the geology. Can anyone expand on this?

No word on whether the eco-friendly Burren cows are a local breed, though.

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Verdura di campo needs to be identified

In the first warm days of early spring Caterina’s mother — from the generation that lived through the wars — still roams the fields in search of that wonder of wonders… le verdure di campo (wild “vegetables”).

I bet she does. Read all about it in ItalianNotebook, and you’ll be salivating within seconds, like I was.

But fight the urge to rush out and harvest the roadside verges long enough to read the comment made by Barbara Modica at 2:39 pm on May 24th:

In the spring, there is a weed which resembles a rhubarb plant, except it is smaller, has a green stalk and green leaf shaped and about the same size as rhubarb. My husband’s family (from Sicily) boiled the stems, discard the leaves, then breaded them and fried them in olive oil. They called them gardoni (or something similar to that). Are you familiar with them? They are only edible in the spring, later on turn into a tall plant. We carry on the tradition and our grandchildren love them also.

Any ideas?

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The glut of bugs in your gut

A long article on The Why Files discusses changing attitudes to the human gut flora:

These critters, mainly bacteria, vastly outnumber the cells in our bodies, and we are utterly dependent on them. Bacteria make vitamin K, essential for clotting blood. As they do in cows, bacteria play an essential role converting our food into usable chemicals. And bacteria form a complex barrier against invading pathogenic microbes.

The realization of which has led to an explosion of proper scientific work on probiotics 1, formerly confined to the lunatic fringe.

A springboard for the growing interest, Huffnagle 2 says, was a discovery by Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University, who found that bacteria “can talk to the epithelial cells that line the GI tract, which can turn on different genes depending on who is living nearby.”

What’s the connection to agrobiodiversity? More from the article in The Why Files:

Probiotics can be taken in supplement pills, or in many cultured products, such as yogurt, cottage cheese, tempeh and kefir. It’s not clear which mechanism is better, says Sanders 3, who consults to the dairy industry on microbiology. “Often probiotics are incorporated into the production of a food product, but we don’t really have a good sense of how important that might be. During the fermentation of milk into a dairy product, they may … produce organic acids or peptides that contribute to the health effects of a probiotic yogurt, but unfortunately there is no good research to sort out the benefits of a fermented dairy product versus a dry supplement.”

So microbial agrobiodiversity doesn’t just result in a huge range of delicious products with strong niche market potential. It’s also good for you.