Letters.Stop slammin' salmon "Salmon hatcheries can deplete de·plete v. 1. To use up something, such as a nutrient. 2. To empty something out, as the body of electrolytes. wild stocks" (SN: 6/2/01, p. 342) ignores a basic fact. Hatchery hatchery a commercial establishment dedicated to the hatching of bird eggs to provide day old chicks and poults to the poultry industry. hatchery liquid the contents of unfertilized eggs. Used in petfood manufacture. stocks came from wild stocks. Their DNA DNA: see nucleic acid. DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid One of two types of nucleic acid (the other is RNA); a complex organic compound found in all living cells and many viruses. It is the chemical substance of genes. is the same. There is an abundance of underused habitat in our northwest rivers. Some hatchery salmon would use these habitats if they were left alone. Instead, hatchery fish are clubbed to death to prevent their mixing with the wild population. This is nonsense. We breed endangered animals in zoos and return them to the wild. Why not salmon? Jack DeWitt Milton-Freewater, Ore. There is considerable question as to whether hatchery and wild salmon contain the same genes, observes Oregon salmon biologist Jim Lichatowich. "Some hatchery stocks were started with fish from whatever rivers [biologists] could get eggs from," sometimes far from the rivers into which they were released, he says. Moreover, he points out, some fish were selected--"domesticated do·mes·ti·cate tr.v. do·mes·ti·cat·ed, do·mes·ti·cat·ing, do·mes·ti·cates 1. To cause to feel comfortable at home; make domestic. 2. To adopt or make fit for domestic use or life. 3. a. "--for a genetic makeup that facilitates their spawning and maturation in captivity. These genes might also, however, render them more vulnerable in the wild, he says. Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington in Seattle also notes that fish in hatcheries are more prone to epidemics, and so they may later introduce diseases to wild fish. He concludes that "for lots of reasons, hatcheries have been bad for wild fish." --J. Raloff Right there in front of us It may help to understand where that "missing antimatter antimatter: see antiparticle. antimatter Substance composed of elementary particles having the mass and electric charge of ordinary matter (such as electrons and protons) but for which the charge and related magnetic properties are opposite in sign. " is if we just look around us ("Antimatter mystery transcends new data," SN: 7/14/01, p. 20). A proton has a positive charge--the sum of the quark polarities. If the (negative) electrical charge resident on the proton is in a reverse-time continuum, we would see it as positive. The mass remains the same. Hence, we have within the proton the antimatter charge of the electrical charge resident on the electron, that is, the electrical characteristics of a positron positron: see antiparticle. positron Subatomic particle having the same mass as an electron but with an electric charge of +1 (an electron has a charge of −1). It constitutes the antiparticle (see antimatter) of an electron. . Think of antimatter as being locked up in our protons. Harold E. Blake Tupper Lake Tupper Lake is the name of several locations in the State of New York in the USA.
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