Fish is good brain food

Eating fish is good for your brain. This is hardly news, but wait, there is something new...

In a recent study, eating seafood helped to protect people from aging-related brain decline. The effect seems to be prevention of unnoticed mini-strokes (silent brain infarcts for you medical nerds).

What does this mean? Loss of thinking skills (dementia) and other declines in brain function can be a serious problem in healthy older adults. Silent brain infarcts seem to be a cause of dementia, and it may help quite a bit to eat lots of fish.

Cowabunga, I knew I needed a reason to eat another Dungeness crab, after the 2 I had yesterday and today (with the smoked salmon chaser). That's right, it's crab season in the northwest, and if you're not lucky enough to get some crab, too bad for you. I want to protect my brain, so I guess I'll have to go back to Central Market in Poulsbo to get some more crab and salmon.

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Blue crab collapse in Chesapeake bay

Another sad story, blue crabs are disappearing from Chesapeake Bay.

Why? We're catching too many, at the same time as pollution makes it difficult for blue crabs. Watermen who catch crabs stubbornly persist in catching too many crabs, even though they're killing their own livelihood.

Blogfish has been here before, complaining about killing too many blue crabs. Now the overfishing has come home to roost.

Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

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Removing claws is harmful to crabs

Is this a surprise? Even though the claw can grow back, it's not good for the crab to break off a claw.

Some crab fisheries are called sustainable because they only take a claw and throw back the rest of the crab. Well, now researchers have discovered that breaking off a claw can be harmful to the crabs.

I guess there's a reason crabs have claws, and the crabs would prefer not to have pieces broken off. This doesn't completely overturn the sustainability argument, crabs have a better chance of surviving loss of a claw than being cooked whole. But it's a bit too easy to assume everything's fine if the crab gets thrown back.

I wonder if an ecological study would show that clawless crabs have trouble even if they survive the shock? This study didn't look at survival value of claws, it only looked at death from the direct injury of claw removal.

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