Love eating healthy salmon? Not so fast!
"As the majority of the farmed salmon, they are not a healthy fish. More than 50% of them carry some kind of malformation, it’s not fully developed, with such a huge difference. So mixing the genes of this beautiful animal, the wild fish, strong and adapted to the river for thousands of years, with a domesticated animal, has terrible consequences for the wild fish."
"This is lice. Do you see how they've eaten all the way into the skull? And you see the fin, it's all torn. This is a tell-tale sign, usual of a farmed salmon."
Many Icelanders fear the region's wild salmon is being pushed out by its farmed counterpart. Offshore aquafarms are highly profitable, and industrially farmed salmon sells well. But could the DNA of wild salmon be irreversibly changed – say because wild fish breed with farmed salmon? Jörn Breiholz and Michael Marek went to find out more in Iceland. Neil King has the story.
Why should we care about the Southern Right Whale?
"We see the Right Whale as the right sentinel to show us how climate change is affecting the Southern Ocean and Antarctic regions. These whales basically come to our coast in South Africa with these messages of ecosystem changes and therefore we call them the right whale."
South Africa hosts the largest global breeding population of these endangered whales. And in one of the world's longest continuous studies, South Africa's Mammal Research Institute checks up on these whales along the Cape Coastline. Every year since 1969 - researchers charter a helicopter to photograph the breeding population of these whales to help ID and track the population. The survey was established to monitor the recovery of this population after the banning of whaling. Jennifer Collins has this report by Jason Boswell.