Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 26, 2014 (II)

choi

(5) Brendan Borrell, Why Won’t the Government Let You Eat Superfish?  Grow faster, eat less, makes people madder. Will genetically modified salmon ever reach the dinner table?
www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... to-win-fda-approval

Quote:

salmon farmers “sell about $12 billion worth of [farmed] salmon every year [likely worldwide]

“In December 2012 the FDA, in its draft environmental assessment, which is considered the last step before approval, wrote that the salmon was safe to eat and poses no threat to the environment. The agency has made no further announcements over the past year and a half

“Salmon is the third most popular seafood in the US after shrimp and canned tuna, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). Americans eat approximately 300,000 tons each year, but only a third of that demand is met by five wild-caught species native to the Pacific. The other two-thirds, about $1.7 billion worth, comes from farmed Atlantic salmon, a distantly related species that is raised in floating cages off the coasts of Canada, Chile, Norway, and Scotland. US salmon farms, primarily in Maine and Washington State, accounted for just 20,000 tons in 2012, valued at $130 million, according to the NMFS.

Note:
(a) “Prince Edward Island is Anne of Green Gables country * * * AquaBounty Technologies facility on Fortune Bay”
(i) AquaBounty Technologies (Founded 1991; Headquarters Waltham [a Boston suburb], Massachusetts; trademark: AquAdvantage salmon)
(ii) This report is incorrect. The facility is on “Bay Fortune, Prince Edward Island,” NOT “Fortune Bay”--a bay or body of water.
(A) Fortune Bay
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Bay
(island of Newfoundland, Canada)
(B) The Government of Prince Edward Island, undated
www.gov.pe.ca/placefinder/index.php3?city=Bay Fortune
("Bay Fortune, an unincorporated area, is located in Kings County in the eastern portion of Prince Edward Island, SW of Souris")
(C) Souris, Prince Edward Island
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souris,_Prince_Edward_Island
("founded * * * in 1727 as a fishing settlement at the mouth of the Souris River. These early settlers experienced several plagues of field mice in the surrounding area during the 1720s-1760s (the name is French for ‘mouse’)")
Atlantic salmon
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_salmon
(Salmo salar; section 2 Nomenclature)

(b) “Atlantic salmon, a distantly related species”

salmon
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon
(Salmon are native to tributaries of the North Atlantic (genus Salmo) and Pacific Ocean (genus Oncorhynchus [Greek onkos ("hook") and rynchos ("nose"), in reference to the hooked jaws of males in the mating season]; section 1 Species; graphic whose legend reads: “Commercial production of salmon in million tonnes 1950–2010”: wild salmon + farmed salmon)

Both genera Salmo and Oncorhynchus belong to the same family: Salmonidae.

(c) “Raising salmon at sea isn’t so different from raising livestock on land and, as currently constituted, can be just as environmentally hazardous. In every available nook of Canada’s Bay of Fundy, near the Maine border, more than 5 million salmon are raised in cages each year, amounting to about 60 percent of Canada’s total production. Salmon may be known for their pink flesh and omega-3 fatty acids, but they don’t produce either of those on their own. The rosy pigments derive from eating crustaceans such as krill, and the heart-healthy oils come from eating smaller fish, such as menhaden and anchovies. As wild stocks of these forage fish have declined, salmon farms increasingly are formulating their feed with soy and other plants, but fish oil remains a limiting factor. Growing a single pound of farmed salmon requires catching up to three pounds of forage fish on the open ocean; the fish meal can make up half the operating cost of a salmon farm.”

Bay of Fundy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Fundy
(read the instruction about name)

(d) Origin of AquAdvantage salmon: “In November 1989, scientists at Memorial University of Newfoundland injected two genes into the pea-size eggs of an Atlantic salmon. Atlantic salmon eggs have an eight-month lag time before they begin growing, and the scientists wanted to see if they could accelerate the process. The first bit of genetic code they inserted replicated the growth hormone from the chinook salmon, the largest species of Pacific salmon. The second gene, which came from an eel-like creature known as the ocean pout, ensured that the salmon pumped out the growth hormone all year round. The strategy worked.
(i) Memorial University of Newfoundland
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_University_of_Newfoundland
(Established 1925; public; in St John's [capital and the largest city])
(ii) ocean pout
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_pout
(Zoarces americanus; The promoter for the antifreeze protein gene is used in conjunction with the growth hormone taken from a chinook salmon, which leads to a higher concentration of the growth hormone in the blood”)

A “promoter” controls the expression of a gene (usually but not always situated nearby).
(iii) I did not read the original reports by Garth L Fletcher, who started out at Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, and now a staff scientist at AquaBounty's facility at Bay Fortune. But I imagine the promoter was chosen because it is active in winter to pump out the antifreeze protein, whereas many other promoters have reduced activity or even become silent in winter.

(e) AquaBounty Technologies CEO “Stotish says the organization [whose aim is to fight acceptance of this genetically modified salmon] cherry-picked its numbers from AquaBounty’s FDA submission. For example, they chose to compare the omega-3s in AquAdvantage salmon to wild-caught Pacific salmon rather than conventional farmed Atlantic salmon, with which it is almost identical.”
(f) In print but not online, two labels points to the salmon on Web page 1: “Always female and sterilized!”  “Engineered by scientists!”