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Peter Macinnis wrote, on 9/9/2002:

Brief answer: Schmeiser got seed from somewhere, planted it, sprayed the crop around there with Roundup, kept the seeds, planted them, and so on, through several generations.  This was deliberate selection, MacKay found.  Given what he had done, he ought to have known that these were Roundup Ready plants.

If Schmeiser keeps seed now, and there is small-scale recruitment of Roundup-Ready genes, this is not a criminal act -- he has no way of knowing -- UNTIL HE TESTS OR SELECTS.

This bloke was a successful politician -- even if he is short in brights, he is not short in cunning of the sewer rat variety. You can't be blamed for what you don't know about, but when your every act has been directed to achieve an end, you have to expect to be thumped.  He got himself into this by tryinmg to be too smart -- and that leaves open who dobbed him in.  I suspect that he boasted to other farmers that he had for free what they were paying for . . . and somebody dropped him in it.

Meanwhile, real worries like farmed superfish are being ignored, and there is evidence to suggest that they could cause real problems if they get out, because they will have an advantage.
 

From: Toby Fiander:

Peter wrote:

> >  farmed superfish

When you have a minute, can you give some more detail of this? ... or did you, and I missed it?
 

Put <GM salmon farm escape> into your search engine of choice.

GM salmon are far larger than their counterparts, and according to a spokesman for FOE , "Farm salmon have been selectively bred to forget the species' habits in the wild. That means they forget when and where to migrate in order to breed." I don't buy that straight out, but these salmon would not have any knowledge of where to go, and that, by itself, could be a problem.

There is at least a prima facie case for these having the potential to cause damage to wild stocks by outcompeting them. I am less certain that they would do harm by interbreeding, although this is what gets  the more excitable campaigner concerned. The simple FACT is that farmed fish WILL escape, WILL compete, and WILL PROBABLY interbreed with wild stocks.  A reasonable SUSPICION that should be treated as probable until there is evidence against it is that the interbreeding MIGHT cause harm.  It is a FACT that the novel genes, once in the wild population, would be hard to recall. On the other hand, nature has a way of maintaining the status quo, called predators that will eat the biggest food first.

You could still conceivably see a catastrophic decline in wild stocks if 200,000 GM salmon escaped in one place.  If the GM fish then failed to go off to the rivers to breed, there would soon be no salmon, and all without any interbreeding.

From: Peter Macinnis  to Mark O'leary

<snip>

Easier said than done, I fear. In this case, the motivation for GM is NOT to feed the starving, but to maximise profits in the luxury trade. Given the potential for harm, I cannot see that even that is justified.  Mark, do you know why they are bigger?  hazy recollection says it is growth hormones
 

Mark replied:

You are partly right as they are fed a controlled and highly modified diet, but also have a gene that says what size they should naturally grow to turned off or one that increases their ability to metabolise turned on (can't remember which, but I would imagine it depends on who's pool you swim in), so they just keep growing as long as they get fed until other systems fail.

Due to both, you get fish growing faster and larger that are harvested earlier, thereby increasing yield and the return on the feed used to grow them. It is the fish version of increasing crop yield per hectare.

I need to take off the rose coloured glasses and remember that so long as there is a buck to be made, the hungry stay that way, and with salmon around $30kg I'm glad I'm not wondering where my next meal is coming from.

One question.  If these fish will have such an advantage in the wild because of their fast growth, how come that fast growth facility is not found in non-Gm salmon?  It should be a fairly easy evolutionary "tweak" which surely would most likely have already occurred (but not exactly the same way as the GM variety).

It isn't like there was an additional function grafted on holus-bolus as for Roundup immunity.
 
 

At 19:06 10/09/02 +1000, Ray wrote:
>Well Peter, at the least if they're the type of salmon which spawns upsteam
>(if they can still remember how to?) then a group of bears will be very
>grateful.  :)
 

No, the FOE people seem to be claiming that the homing gene is bred out (which I think unlikely), but if the farmed GM fish are bred in captivity, I would expecet that they will have no idea of what stream to go to --
meanwhile, they have outcompeted or eaten the wild stock, so the bears go hungry . . .

As I have said, I am against junk science when it comes from idiot campaigners, but I am equally opposed to the use/misuse of technology that has a clear risk attached, especially so when there is no clear humanitarian benefit.  There is no mitigating circumstance here.

Or is there a secret "smoked salmon for Ethiopia" scheme out there somewhere?
 

Toby Fiander responded:

Thank you all for the discussion on this topic... it appears to me that no one has any firm idea what the consequences would be of release of genetically modified fish, at least in the general case.

The 1999 work summarised in the well-known online encyclopedia (sic - id est, meaning spelt like this on its site but quoted here even though it is normally spelt another way) seems to present a case in which a some female fish will breed with the largest male of their species.  The largest male might be one that is genetically modified, but it might also have some disadvantages for survival.  This seems a clearer case for extinction in the long term - the work itself suggested about 40 generations to extinction from the limited data of the study it
reported.

Empirically, I assert that it is always later than you think in these matters, so I suppose the world is already conducting a full-scale trial with genetically modified fish.  Being a country where marine research jobs are at a premium now (see excellent article in September, Australasian Science), I suppose it will be a long time before we have any idea what effects there are or will be.

... it would be nice to wrong.

Much water has passed under the bridge, and many salmon as well -- the most recent research is yet to be written up, mainly because most of it seems dodgy and driven by dogma.  My recommendation: asume it is a
risky business, but don't look for reliable peer-reviewed assessments just yet.