Rising carbon dioxide confuses brain signaling in fish

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/337677/title/Rising_carbon_dioxide_confuses_brain_signaling_in_fish

[font face=Times,Times New Roman,Serif][font size=5]Rising carbon dioxide confuses brain signaling in fish [/font]
[font size=4]Nerve cells respond to acidifying waters[/font]

By Janet Raloff
Web edition : Sunday, January 15th, 2012

[font size=3]A new study may explain how rising carbon dioxide concentrations — and the ocean acidification they induce — can cause topsy-turvy changes in the behavior of fish. Like a flipped switch, the normal response of nerve cells can reverse as acidifying seawater perturbs how a fish regulates acids and bases in its body, including the brain.

“This could be a big deal,” says neurobiologist Andrew Dittman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. Dittman, who was not affiliated with the study, says the new findings could go a long way toward explaining curious sensory changes observed in fish exposed to acidifying waters. The scary scent of predators, for example, can suddenly become alluring.

For the new study, published online January 15 in Nature Climate Change, Göran Nilsson of the University of Oslo and his colleagues homed in on brain chemistry.

The idea emerged after Philip Munday of James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, told Nilsson of behavioral quirks his laboratory fish were exhibiting in a high–carbon dioxide environment — conditions exemplifying ocean waters a half-century or more from now. Nilsson, a neurophysiologist, speculated that a connection between nerves and chemistry might be involved. “It was very much an ‘Aha’ moment,” Munday says.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1352

[OKIsItJustMe]

1. Carbon dioxide is "driving fish crazy"

http://www.coralcoe.org.au/news_stories/braindamage.html

[font face=Times, Serif]16 January 2012

[font size=5]Carbon dioxide is "driving fish crazy" [/font]

[font size=3]Rising human carbon dioxide emissions may be affecting the brains and central nervous system of sea fishes with serious consequences for their survival, an international scientific team has found.

Carbon dioxide concentrations predicted to occur in the ocean by the end of this century will interfere with fishes’ ability to hear, smell, turn and evade predators, says Professor Philip Munday of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.

“For several years our team have been testing the performance of baby coral fishes in sea water containing higher levels of dissolved CO2 – and it is now pretty clear that they sustain significant disruption to their central nervous system, which is likely to impair their chances of survival,” Prof. Munday says.

In their latest paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Prof. Munday and colleagues report world-first evidence that high CO2 levels in sea water disrupts a key brain receptor in fish, causing marked changes in their behaviour and sensory ability.

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[Dov Henis]

2. The Brain IS The Organism

The Brains IS The Organism


A. Rising carbon dioxide confuses brain signaling in fish.
Nerve cells respond to acidifying waters.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/337677/title/Rising_carbon_dioxide_confuses_brain_signaling_in_fish

B. The brain IS the organism.
The brain of multicellular organisms is the evolutionary progeny of communities, cultures, of earlier unicellular organisms.
The drive and purpose of life, of self-replicating mass formats, is the natural selection of life’s primal organism, which are life’s RNA nucleotides, the RNAs. Life IS an RNA world, evolving from and maintaining-replicating the RNAs.

C. Quote: “Fish normally show a preference for turning one direction versus another, the piscine equivalent of a human’s left- or right-handedness.”
This sentence requires two correction:

1. The “fish direction preference” is towards enhanced feed or oxygen or energy supply. Normal for all organisms. Normal natural selection for all mass spin formats, BOTH animate AND inanimate.

2. “human’s right-handedness” is an evolution product of human tooling culture. ALL genetic modifications are products of RNAs (genes) response-adaptation to culture. It is the culture horses that pull the genetic modifications (including addictions), NOT the genetic wagon that pushes the culture horses.

Dov Henis (comments from 22nd century)
http://universe-life.com/

[pscot]

3. Humans too, apparently.