Re: Production up, size down

[Don Camp]

It is not an engineering failure at the fish hatcheries that produces salmon with smaller eggs. Smaller eggs are exactly what is most efficient and best for the reproduction of fish in that environment. Salmon will adapt to produce smaller eggs when that is a benefit to the continuation of the species. (It is not evolution, BTW. It is simply a change of frequency in the alleles for egg size.) But, and here's the key, they will adapt again and produce larger egg sizes if they begin to reproduce in the wild and larger egg sizes are more beneficial. Natural selection will select for larger sizes just as natural selection selected for smaller sizes.   There may be a time when returns are down as the population changes. But it will change. As usual the media reports either euphoria or doom. The truth is somewhere in between.   -----Original Message----- From: Dan Hall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Saturday, March 15, 2003 8:50 AM Subject: Production up, size down What is it that chickens know and fish don�t.  Yet another expose� about engineering failures at fish hatcheries. Out of yesterday�s Times, additional questions are posed by further revelations of what we don�t know about engineering fish.   Dan