Parasites in these 200 old cans of salmon may spell good news for marine food webs

Parasites plague almost every creature on Earth, from ticks on dogs to lice on whales. But for marine ecologists, it’s hard to analyze the tiny creatures that lurk in big, elusive ones. Now, a new study uses a novel sample—commercially canned salmon—to do just that. The finding of more parasites in recent years may be good news for the health of salmon and other Pacific Ocean creatures, researchers say. Although people “often think of [parasites] as being indicative of sickness … from an ecosystem perspective, they’re a sign of health,” says Jeb Byers, an ecologist at the University of Georgia who was not a part of the study. By monitoring parasite populations, he notes, researchers sometimes can “quickly tell if the ecosystem is intact.” When it comes to marine ecosystems, however, such data on past parasites are sparse. “We don’t have baseline data,” says Natalie Mastick, a marine mammalogist and postdoc at Yale University’s Peabody Museum. So, Mastick was intrigued when she received a call from the Seafood Products Association in Seattle looking to offload 500 cans of salmon from the past 40 years. At the time, Mastick was a doctoral student at the University of Washington, studying endangered orcas, or killer whales. To understand orca parasites, she had been trying to study organisms that parasitize salmon, a favorite orca prey that might pass the parasites along to the whales. But, “There didn’t seem to be enough data,” ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research