Ancient Dogs Enjoyed Fish Dinner

Phys.org: Ancient Siberian dogs relied on humans for seafood diets

As early as 7,400 years ago, Siberian dogs had evolved to be far smaller than wolves, making them more dependent on humans for food including sea mammals and fish trapped below the ice, a new study showed Friday.

Robert Losey of the University of Alberta, who led the research published in Science Advances, said the findings helped explain the growth in the early dog population, as people put them to work for hunting, herding and sledding.

"The long term changes in dog diet have really been oversimplified," he told AFP, explaining that prior work had focused only on two main ideas to explain how dogs transitioned from wolves, a process that began some 40,000 years ago.

 

The first of these was that friendlier wolves approached human camps during the Ice Age to scavenge for meat, eventually became isolated from their wild counterparts, and were then intentionally bred into dogs.

The second was that some dogs evolved a better capacity to digest starches following the agricultural revolution, which is why some modern dog breeds have more copies of the AMY2B gene that creates pancreatic amylase.

To study ancient dog diets in more depth, Losey and colleagues analyzed the remains of around 200 ancient dogs from the past 11,000 years, and a similar number of ancient wolves.

Not too much need to digest starch in Siberia, not a lot of wheat farming there.

"We had to go to collections all over Siberia, we analyzed those bones, took samples of the collagen, and analyzed the protein in labs," he said.

Based on the remains, the team made statistical estimates for body sizes.

They also used a technique called stable isotope analysis to generate dietary estimates.

They discovered that dogs of 7,000-8,000 years ago "were already quite small, meaning that they just couldn't do the things that most wolves were doing," said Losey.

This in turn led to greater dependence on humans for food, and reliance on small prey and scavenging, rather than prey bigger than themselves, which wolves hunt.

I'm fairly sure some of the process of domestication involved the same process in the Russian fox experiment, where humans tolerated and then adopted and selected for that fraction of wolves that showed some initial toleration of humans.

"We see that dogs have marine diets, meaning they're eating fish, shellfish, seals and sea lions, which they can't easily get themselves," he said.

Ancient dogs were found to be eating fish "in areas of Siberia where the lakes and rivers are frozen over for seven to eight months of the year."

Wolves of the time, and today, were hunting in packs and mainly eating various species of deer.

Interesting, but I'm not sure I see what this is adding to the story.  What I see is that humans around Siberia were subsisting on a primarily fish and seafood diet, and as always, dogs were willing to eat the stuff humans left behind.

The Wombat has Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: Olga Alberti out on time. 

Dinner on Solomons Island

We connected with a couple that we've known since we lived in Florida back in 1983, and haven't seen since March last year, and had dinner at a restaurant on the harbor at Solomons Island.

We managed to observe several unusual aircraft from Patuxent River Naval Air Station across the river. 

I had the simple soft-shell crab dinner, three crabs, with a couple of sides. They were good, but I think I would rather have had them in a sandwich, not that I need the bread. Oh, and a couple of Lagunita IPAs to make up for the lack of bread. Georgia had fish chips, with non-Chesapeake Bay haddock. 

Both Georgia and I opted for Key Lime Pie for dessert, while our friends split a big slice of Smith Island Cake, in non-traditional lemon flavor.  

The sun getting ready to set over the Governor Thomas Johnson Bridge, which connects Solomons with California MD on the St. Mary's side. 

Yum, Yum!

 

 

The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Paulina Porizkova up and running on time and under budget.

Neanderthals Had Crabs

also sharks and dolphins! Neanderthals ate sharks and dolphins

Neanderthals were eating fish, mussels and seals at a site in present-day Portugal, according to a new study.

The research adds to mounting evidence that our evolutionary relatives may have relied on the sea for food just as much as ancient modern humans.

For decades, the ability to gather food from the sea and from rivers was seen as something unique to our own species.

Scientists found evidence for an intensive reliance on seafood at a Neanderthal site in southern Portugal.

Neanderthals living between 106,000 and 86,000 years ago at the cave of Figueira Brava near Setubal were eating mussels, crab, fish - including sharks, eels and sea bream - seabirds, dolphins and seals.

The research team, led by Dr João Zilhão from the University of Barcelona, Spain, found that marine food made up about 50% of the diet of the Figueira Brava Neanderthals. The other half came from terrestrial animals, such as deer, goats, horses, aurochs (ancient wild cattle) and tortoises.

Crab claws smashed open by Neanderthals at the cave

It's long been dogma that Neandertal specialized in hunting large animals with their stabbing spears. This work shows that Neandertal was far more versatile than we had imagined. I would like to know how they wrangled dolphins!

Most of our archeological evidence has been wiped out, or at least drowned due to the 300 feet of sea level rise in the last 40,000 years.  Most of the evidence of Neandertal living by the sea has been eliminated but some may remain from the Eemian Interglacial.

Too Much Cucumber

My Doctor says I need to eat more fish. pic.twitter.com/MKkCbFopsd

— Dan Osborne (@LaziestofDans) October 6, 2017

Seafood for the Landlocked?

Bounty from the Bay

Meet the farm-to-table movement’s salty-aired cousin: dock-to-dish. Like CSAs providing produce to folks without a farm, Old Line Fish Company is the region’s first Community Supported Fishery (CSF), bringing fresh and local seafood to community members who do not have access to the water. Every other Thursday over a 10-week span, Old Line Fish Company program director Kelly Barnes coordinates pickup of safely packed cooler bags containing the Bay’s bounty like soft shell clams, blue catfish, rockfish, oysters and occasional specialty items like Jonah claws. The community, it turned out, was hungry for it.

Debbie Ellen, a CSF member and fresh seafood enthusiast, was keen on the camaraderie that comes about through this community endeavor. “We really look forward to it!” she exclaims, having just picked up her prize on September 5, the last pickup day of the CSF season. “We all get together on Friday to discuss what we got and what we made.”

Kelly Barnes, program director of Old Line Fish Co., delivered
 biweekly allotments of seafood to 35 customers during the latest season. 

The “we” includes Ellen and a few of her coworkers at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, who all joined the Old Line Fish Company’s CSF together and make an event of the pickup. The seafood is always a fresh off-the-boat catch, and the CSF members waste no time in closing the circle from boat to cooler to taste buds. Assisting them in their culinary adventures are recipes for their week’s catch and informational handouts about unfamiliar species in each delivery. “The whole purpose is to get [CSF members] comfortable with the seafood,” explains Barnes.

Barnes became the coordinator of Old Line Fish Company through her work at the Oyster Recovery Partnership, an organization that has been recycling oyster shells and working with the watermen community for years. Seeing the growing demand for fresh seafood as well as the untraversed distance between land-dwellers and watermen, the Oyster Recovery Partnership, with the financial support of the Ratcliffe Foundation, formed Old Line Fish Company. Barnes uses Old Line Fish Company to educate consumers on seafood and to knit more closely the lives of those who live and work in the region.

What I'm not seeing in this article is whether or not the seafood is given away or sold; but given that she's a state employee, I'm just guessing it's being given away.

I do my part, Georgia gives away the majority of the fish I catch to friends and neighbors who don't have a fisherman in the family. But we don't provide recipes.

Anyone for Clams in Mustard Sauce?

Clammer is Injured Dredging up Old Bomb, Chowder Gets Tossed

A fishing crew apparently pulled up unexploded ordnance while clamming, leading to a fisherman being hospitalized with second-degree burns and the destruction of more than 700 cases of chowder, officials said.

It's unclear what the ordnance was, but fishing vessels along the Atlantic Coast routinely dredge up munitions, including mustard agent, that were dumped at sea decades ago when environmental laws were far more lax.

The injured fisherman was treated at a hospital in Philadelphia for burns and blisters, said U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Seth Johnson.

Such injuries are consistent with mustard agent exposure.

The crew of the fishing vessel the William Lee found what they believed was an old or discarded ordnance canister on Aug. 2 and threw it back into the ocean 30 miles east of Barnegat Inlet, Johnson said.

Larry Hajna, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, said the agency wasn't told about it until Tuesday - a week later. The agency immediately reported it to the Coast Guard, he said. The boat was impounded in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and inspected Wednesday, but no hazardous materials were found, Johnson said. He said the Coast Guard is investigating why it wasn't immediately reported.

My guess is that it happens more often than you imagine, nothing much happens most of the time, and the fishermen resent the time lost to official dithering and paperwork. It's not like the military or OSHA is going to pay them for lost time.

In the meantime, clams from the vessel had already been delivered to Sea Watch International, a seafood processor in Milford, Delaware. More than 500 cases of clam chowder were impounded at the plant, and a truck was sent to a New Hampshire warehouse to retrieve 192 more cases, according to Michael Globetti, a spokesman for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.

Reviving the Chesapeake Scallop

How to resurrect the Chesapeake scallop? Get diners to eat them on the half shell.

I never knew this before, but Lower Chesapeake Bay used to have a thriving scallop fishery:

The bay scallop has not been commercially viable in the Chesapeake region since 1933, when a combination of disease and a Category 4 hurricane devastated the shellfish’s sea grass habitat on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The scallop industry along the Chesapeake, which produced nearly 2 million pounds of the sweet delicacy in 1930, has never recovered, despite multiple attempts.

But aquaculture experts, fresh off recent successes with oysters, are seeing this as a new opportunity:

Rappahannock may be the perfect company to take on the reclamation project. Cousins and co-owners Ryan and Travis Croxton have already conquered the challenge of Eastern oysters in the Chesapeake, a commercial industry that had nearly collapsed in the early 2000s. Rappahannock was an early adopter of oyster aquaculture in Virginia. The company raised its first crop of 3,000 oysters in 2002. Today, Rappa­hannock harvests 180,000 oysters a week, shipping bivalves all over the country as well as to Asia and Canada.

But it isn't easy:

What the experts and the manual will tell you are the same: Bay scallops are the hothouse flowers of shellfish. They’re finicky creatures that don’t like extreme water temperatures. They don’t grow well in low-salinity waters. They don’t like muddy waters, either. They hate rushing currents, and they require a lot more space than oysters. As if that weren’t enough, bay scallops can suffer other indignities: During spawning season in summer, oyster larvae may affix themselves to a single scallop, which will soon disappear under a bouquet of oyster shells.

During their early development stages, scallops “hate the sediment, but they hate having you rinse them off. They don’t like to get cold, and they don’t like to get hot. They’re just the wimpiest little things,” says Mark Luckenbach, professor of marine science at the Virginia institute.

The Rappahannock crew received an early lesson in bay scallop fragility. The Croxtons bought about 50,000 larvae from a hatchery in New York. As part of the painstaking process to transition the scallops into Chincoteague waters, the Rappahannock team placed the larvae in an upweller system, where the embryonic shellfish are fed nutrients and given a safe space to grow until they’re ready for a natural environment. At least that’s the theory. But a water pump broke on one of the upwellers, and a farmhand didn’t check it for two days.

“We lost a ton [of scallops]. That was just stupidity,” says Ryan Croxton. “That was an easy lesson: Just don’t do that again.”

OK, so it's not that easy, but with practice, I'm sure they can make it work.

Then there’s the marketing side. Part of the reason scallops haven’t recovered in the Chesapeake, says Luckenbach, is that there hasn’t been a consumer market developed for them. The key, Luckenbach adds, is whether diners will be willing to eat scallops on the half shell, with the stomach, intestines and mantle folds visible, looking like an oyster on the half shell that dressed up for a Goth convention. (Typically, only the adductor muscle — a clean ivory nubbin of flesh — is served as a bay scallop.) When eaten on the half shell, a bay scallop tastes like a cross between a sea urchin and the larger sea scallops found in the world’s oceans.

If diners won’t accept scallops on the half shell, there will be little reason for Chesapeake aquaculture farmers to adopt the shellfish. After all, they wouldn’t be able to compete with the major bay scallop producers, whether in Chile or China, who can sell seafood much cheaper.

The lesson is that the scallop can come back to the Bay, if people have an economic reason to do so.

Eat Mo' Fish!

Study claims eating fish and shellfish can reduce risk of Alzheimer's Disease in genetically susceptible people

The study – of older adults who eat at least one portion a week and carry a risk gene for the condition – found fewer signs of brain changes

Seafood may play a role in reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, research reveals.

A new study found older adults with a particular risk gene for the disease who ate at least one seafood serving a week showed fewer signs of Alzheimer’s-related brain changes.

But experts were cautious about the findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Cautions are always warranted with a correlative study like this. It could be that the people who chose to eat seafood just had better brains to start with. Beware of the "wet streets cause rain" type correlations, or even the "preachers pay increase cause rum prices to rise" effects.

Dr Laura Phipps, of Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “This study links moderate seafood consumption with lower levels of Alzheimer’s-related brain changes in elderly people who carry a risk gene for the disease.

“But we must be careful when drawing conclusions about the wider population.”

She added: “The omega-3 fatty acids found in oily fish are an important part of a balanced diet, and previous studies suggest they could play an important role in keeping the brain healthy.

So maybe you're not in the population with special genetic risks, but why take chances? Seafood tastes good too!

“Current research is underway to investigate the benefits of a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids in those at risk of memory and thinking problems.

“But at this time there is no evidence to suggest fish oil supplements could prevent dementia.

Fish oil is usually extracted from Menhaden, often from Chesapeake Bay. Bad.

“While higher seafood consumption is linked to greater levels of mercury in the brain, it is encouraging to see that this did not appear to be associated with Alzheimer’s changes in the brain in this study.”

But not unexpected.  The effects of mercury have been linked mostly to developing brains in fetuses and children, and to a lesser extent heart disease in adults.

"Rule 5 Sunday: Super Bowl L"  is ready at The Other McCain, courtesy of Wombat-socho.

This May Help Explain Maryland

Environmental toxin linked to dementia, study shows

Chronic exposure to a toxin found in some lakes and desert topcrusts contributes to neurological problems commonly associated with ALS, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, a new study shows – but at least in certain animals the damage appeared to be offset by increasing an amino acid in the diet.

The study, published Wednesday by the Royal Society of London, found that vervets chronically exposed to the neurotoxin BMAA developed neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaque deposits in the brain.

The finding stunned researchers, who were looking for preliminary signs of disease, but were not expecting to find advanced tangles and plaques.

“They looked identical to what you see in Alzheimer’s Disease, to the point that Dr. Robert Switzer (one of the neuropatholigists) mistakenly thought we had been looking at Alzheimer’s slides,” said Paul Alan Cox, the study’s lead author and an ethnobotanist at the Institute for Ethnomedicine in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “No-one had seen tangles in an animal before...and the higher the exposure, the denser the tangles.”

OK, very interesting, and a good reason to avoid lakes and some desert topcrusts (do they mean dessert topcrusts? - If so, that's bad). But why Maryland?

BMAA is produced by cyanobacteria, which are found in many algal blooms. It has been identified in sharks, bottom-dwelling fish, and shellfish; in desert dust in the Middle East, and in water containing toxic blue-green algae blooms, which data suggests are becoming more prevalent worldwide.
. . .
Relatively high levels of BMAA have been found in oysters in the south of France, in blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay, and in shrimp and crab in southern Florida.

Yes, Chesapeake Blue crabs may be slowly causing your brain to congeal and make you forget stuff, but still, it's totally worth it.

Wombat-socho has the mega "Rule Five Sunday: The Two Faces Of India" and "FMJRA 2.0: Jetpack Blues" ready at the Other McCain.

Not Only Does Fishing Keep Your from Going Crazy . . .

Blues are a nice oily fish

Maybe eating fish can be the difference between going crazy or not, especially for teenagers: Fish oil helps minimize disorders for those at risk of schizophrenia, study finds

As long as seven years after getting a 12-week course of Omega-3 fatty acid supplements, new research has found that young people at very high risk of developing schizophrenia were much less likely than those who did not get the supplements to develop full-blown psychosis, or to manifest a range of psychiatric disorders that commonly afflict such young adults.

The new research is the first to document rigorously the impact of fish oil supplements as a means of preventing severe psychiatric disease. The apparent effects of a brief regimen of fish oil capsules were both lasting and far-ranging in a population of young adults whose mental health is fragile.

So are Reds

In the new study, researchers focused on a population of young people who are uniquely vulnerable to developing severe mental illness. The trial drew subjects between the ages of 13 and 25 who were reporting low-level or transient hallucinations or delusional thinking, or who had a family history of severe mental illness and whose functioning at school, work or home had begun to deteriorate.

and mackerel

On average, young people who fall into one or more of these categories are thought to have a 35% to 40% chance of developing schizophrenia--a lifelong condition marked by disabling disturbances of thinking and perception. And nearly 7 in 10 will develop other psychiatric disorders, including major depression, bipolar disorder and substance dependency.

Of 81 young people in Vienna who had sought psychiatric treatment and were drawn into the study, 41 got a daily dose of fish oil that contained 700 milligrams of Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA)  and 480 milligrams of Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) for 12 weeks. Another 40 study subjects got a placebo capsule to take daily.

or Sea Trout

Roughly seven years later, researchers found clear differences in outcomes between the two groups. Among those who had gotten the placebo capsules, 40% had suffered a full-blown psychotic episode and were diagnosed as suffering psychotic disorder; among those who got the Omega-3s, just under 10% had progressed to psychotic disorder. And those who got the placebo had converted to full-blown illness more quickly than subjects who had taken fish oil.

or Pompano and Permit

While 54% in the placebo group were found on follow-up to have been prescribed antipsychotic medication, 29% of those in the fish-oil group had had such medications prescribed. Of the placebo group, 83% had been diagnosed with some other psychiatric condition seven years later. Among those who got fish oil supplements, 53% had received another psychiatric diagnosis.

or Mahi-mahi

 The latest research also suggests that there may be a critical period of brain development, somewhere in mid- to late adolescence perhaps, in which a young person teetering on the edge of mental illness can be pushed back from the brink.

Traditionally, dietary work has been difficult (look at what happened with recent advances in recommendations for fats, cholesterol, salt and even whether or not to skip breakfast so I wouldn't jump on this band wagon (anymore than we already have) too quickly.  But the results don't seem marginal. Often dietary studies have small effects over a very large sample size, which when extrapolated to the entire world should end up saving many lives. But the small effects are often not found or even reversed in subsequent studies. However, for this study, the difference between 83% and 53% is pretty large.

Could the human diet be evolved to consume large amounts of fish and other oily things bearing omega-3 fatty acids, and the relatively recent shift to a agricultural and grain based diet left us with a chronic deficiency which affects some substantial number of people?

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup." Wombat-socho brings the grand Rule 5 roundup with "Rule 5 Sunday: Rebel Girls."

Mmmmm, New Breakfast Treat, Bacon Flavored Seaweed

Hail to thee, my Alma Mater: There’s a New Seaweed That Tastes Like Bacon and Is Better for You Than Kale

Researchers from Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center say they’ve created and patented a new type of seaweed that has the potential to be sold commercially as the next big superfood.

The reason? It tastes just like bacon, they claim.

The bizarre but tasty creation is actually a new strain of red marine algae called dulse that is packed full of minerals and protein and looks like red lettuce.

If red lettuce were allowed to become completely

Dulse normally grows in the wild along the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines and is harvested, dried and sold as a cooking ingredient or nutritional supplement.

“Dulse is a superfood, with twice the nutritional value of kale,” said Chuck Toombs, a faculty member in OSU’s College of Business and a member of the team working to develop the product into a foodstuff. “And OSU had developed this variety that can be farmed, with the potential for a new industry for Oregon.”

Dulse has been collected, and sometimes even cultivated as food for a long time in the Northern European countries, so this is not a real breakthrough in feeding the world from the sea.

It would seem to me that the area suitable for growing dulse, even bacon-flavor dulse, (mostly clean water coast lines) would be far more limiting that the area available for crops that pigs eat. Don't expect dulse to replace bacon soon.

However, you might see it start to show up in specialty sections soon.

Chefs Fight Over Sustainable Fishing

Mmmm, sushi!

Chefs question sustainability of seafood

Sustainability” is a popular buzzword when it comes to seafood.

Usually, when someone mentions "sustainability" I check my wallet, because it means someone is trying to make me pay more for something than it's really worth, whether it's fish or electric power.

Ideally, it means farming or catching fish and shellfish in such a way that the animals will be able to reproduce in sufficient numbers so that we can continue eating them forever. Their habitats will remain intact and their populations will remain fairly constant.

That's the whole goal of fisheries management, which, while having a nice scientific theoretical underpinning, is usually practiced by managers and politicians more interested in what economics has to say more than the science.

But as demand for seafood rises, some chefs wonder whether “sustainability” is a realistic term.

“It just doesn’t make any sense. You can’t just keep harvesting wild fish and expect them to be there forever. It’s not realistic,” Jeremy Sewall, chef-owner of Island Creek Oyster Bar and Row34 in Boston and Lineage in Brookline, Mass., told Nation’s Restaurant News earlier this year.

“We all know it’s a marketing term,” said David Varley, executive chef and culinary director of RN74 in Seattle. “It’s a value-add for the people that are selling it to chefs, and for the chefs who are selling it to customers, but what does it really mean?”

Fish and Chips!

Like I said, someone trying to sell something for more than it's worth.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which governs American fisheries, claims that any fish harvested in the United States “is inherently sustainable as a result of the rigorous U.S. management process that ensures fisheries are continuously monitored, improved and sustainable.”

However, Varley, who fishes recreationally for steelhead salmon on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, has seen the population of that fish on the Hoh River dwindle as fewer of them return from the ocean.

“The numbers clearly indicate that this is not a sustainable fishery. There’s nothing sustainable about it. The only thing it’s sustaining is the eventual extinction of the fish in this system,” Varley said.

And I could go on and on about oysters, striped bass, cod, and many more. Fisheries management often amount to managing the decline of a desirable species to a sufficiently low rate that all parties concerned can blame all the others.

Wombat-socho has the weekly compendium up at The Other McCain: "Rule 5 Sunday: Pipe Dreams."

A Day in the Life

I started out this morning at the retina guy's. After dilating both eyes, and poking and peering, he gave me a clean bill of health.

The dilation caused me to stay in the dark (and blog) for most of the morning and part of the afternoon until we went to the beach.

Not much exciting at the beach, it was about 60, a little breezy, and we only found 3 teeth, and no antique bottles, although we did pick up some beach glass and beach lace.

When we arrived home, I found this Eastern Tiger Swallowtail sucking on the phlox.

Later in the afternoon, we met friends in Solomons for dinner at the Lighthouse Restaurant recently rebuilt from having been burned to the ground in a huge fire a few years ago.

I had the cream of crab soup, which was, perhaps just a little too thick, nearly solid from flour or cornstarch, but with adequate crab.

To finish it off, I had the "Angry Crabcake", a spicy alternative to the standard Maryland crabcake. It was almost 100% crab with minimal binder, but next time, I'll go with the plain version.

Georgia had the Blue Cheese Bacon Burger with Balsamic Glaze, and liked it. Fortunately, there was more than enough for her so I'll probably get the remainder for lunch tomorrow. . .

We got out of there just in time to catch the sun going down through the Thomas Johnson Bridge across the Patuxent River.

About That Crab Cake. . .

Crabcake fraud: New report finds 38 percent are mislabeled in Chesapeake Bay restaurants - Fraud rate higher in Annapolis, Baltimore; lowest on Eastern Shore

Blue crab, the Chesapeake Bay’s most iconic edible species, also appears to be its most impersonated on menus in the region that say they’re selling local seafood.

A report released today by the conservation nonprofit Oceana found that 38 percent of crab cakes labeled as local were comprised of an entirely different species of crab, predominantly imported from the Indo-Pacific region. In Annapolis and Baltimore, nearly 50 percent of “Maryland” or “Chesapeake Bay” crab cakes were mislabeled.

After releasing seafood fraud reports that found similar levels of mislabeling among certain fish and shrimp, DC-based Oceana decided to tackle a beloved species that's close to home.

Their team used DNA analysis to determine the species used in 90 crab cakes sourced from restaurants across the region, mostly during August and September 2014.

“I’ve put a lot of seafood in my purse over the last few years,” said Dr. Kimberly Warner, author of the report and a senior scientist at Oceana who’s lived in the Chesapeake Bay region for years. The samples she and other testers collected were shipped to a lab in Florida that determined whether the cakes contained blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, and, if not, which species were used instead.

Warner said the fraud rate of 38 percent is a conservative estimate, because the DNA testing couldn’t confirm the geographical origin of the blue crab and whether it was from Maryland or the Chesapeake Bay. The same species of blue crabs is also caught as far north as Canada and south as Argentina.

“So all we could say is, ‘Yes, it’s blue crab,’ but not, ‘Yes, it came from the Chesapeake Bay,’” Warner said.

It's interesting that there's so much fraud in Baltimore and Annapolis, where the relatively ignorant urban consumers are easy to defraud. And frankly, it doesn't matter much because they're getting what they ordered, crab. And it can be very difficult to tell the difference between very similar species. Sapidus isn't the only swimming crab, only the one that's familiar to us in Maryland.

If you really want Maryland Blue Crab, catch your own, steam and pick the crab or at least buy them at a roadside crab merchant who likely gets them from the local watermen instead of the Vietnamese.

Crab Feast!

An old Maryland tradition:



Octopi are pretty amazing creatures.