UK Nuclear industry killing billions of fish

The nuclear industry in Britain is killing billions of fish every year and taking a devastating toll of stocks, an Oxford University academic suggests.

The impact can be so severe in the worst-affected regions of the seas around Britain that death rates are equivalent to half the commercial catch for some species.

Coastal power plants that have cooling systems that extract water from the sea are to blame for the destruction, according to Peter Henderson, an environmental researcher.

Figures he has compiled suggest that the damage to fish stocks is much more severe than records have indicated previously. He calculated that had the young fish killed in power stations survived they would have added thousands of tonnes of fish annually to Britain’s stocks.

Dr Henderson is concerned that too little account is taken of the impact on fish stocks of the deaths of many billions of eggs and young caused by coastal power plants, both nuclear and conventional.

From the Times Online:

Shock: first animal on earth was a complex jelly fish

Earth’s first animal was the ocean-drifting comb jelly, not the simple sponge, according to a new find that has shocked scientists who didn’t imagine the earliest critter could be so complex.

The mystery of the first animal denizen of the planet can only be inferred from fossils and by studying related animals today. To get to the bottom of that, scientists analyzed massive volumes of genetic data to define the earliest splits at the base of the animal tree of life.

The tree of life is a hierarchy of evolutionary relationships among species that shows which groups split off on their own evolutionary path first.

The new study surprisingly found that the comb jelly was the first animal to diverge from the base of the tree, not the less complex sponge, which had previously been given the honor.

From Live Science: Read more