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Im not sure if anyone remembers or not, but a few months ago, I posted about the fish that my roommate talked me into eating, after we found it floating well since then, I have eaten two "homegrown" parrots and a sm-med jack dempsy, Although after the second parrot I felt a little loopy, other than that, have had great experience with this. Just curious if any one else has tryed this, or maybe suggests other species??

I wouldn't eat fish kept in an aquarium set-up. Most medicines that you can treat fish with are specifically labeled to not be for fish for human consumption. On top of that, unless you're feeding a highly varied diet, the fish is gonna eventually, well, taste a little more like that processed food they eat; fish fed such stuff just doesn't taste as good, from what I hear.

In any case, that's a pretty expensive meal if you aren't catching them, I dunno why you'd want to. However, I hear Oscars and Plecs are not actually all that terrible, although I'd recommend only cooking those that you manage to fish out of water areas where they've been introduced to such as Florida and possibly Texas. I just wouldn't trust any fish that's been a tank too long, especially one actually big enough to be worth eating.

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The aquarist is one who must learn the ways of the biologist, the chemist, and the veterinarian.

I would never eat my pets...............


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Member of the Malta Aquarist Society - 1970.
http://www.maltaaquarist.com

I'm not so concerned about you eating stuff that tastes gross - hey, if you wanna eat gross tasting things go right ahead ...but i gotta 2nd what metagon says about the meds. Even if you havn't medicated it yourself, there's a good chance that the breeder and/or wholesaler have, & some of the stuff they use is pretty nasty.

Sin

One reason fish food and many other animal foods say not for animals intended for human consumption is because they are preserved with ethoxyquin. Ethoxyquin is known to cause cancer in at least humans as well as many animals and aside from not being used at all in human foods is very highly restricted in feed for animals that will become food. There are many other poor quality or even hazardous ingredients used in fish and pet foods that would make it quite unhealthy to eat those animals.

This is becoming so very , very odd. Anyone else getting that icky , uncomfortable feeling about this? Whats next on the menu? An arthritic dog, perhaps a cat with heart disease? How about hamster pop-tarts? Do you find that pet shops are starting to be mistaken for delicatessens?

How poor can you be? I know college can be tough , but this is getting a little surreal. Maybe counselling is the next step...before you try puffer fish, or maybe a taricha newt.

Yes ..spiders..eat the flies... blood is the life! .

i personally would never buy live fish just to eat, again if it is for giggles than try something that is dangerous like an electric catfish or something that can harm you, it would make it a difficult meal. again i am not against your food tickets, it is just something i wouldn;t do.

I hope this is a late April Fools joke. Even some wild fish caught in the wild can actually kill a human or make you extremly ill.

I have no idea of what chemicals are used in the breeding and keeping of those fish you are eating. Many wild fish caught for the aquarium trade are given a mild poison to stun then making it easer to catch them.

Also fish are given many chemicals,live in most water totally unfit for drinking.

Please settle this are you serious?

Have a look in [link=My Profile] http://www.fishprofiles.com/forums/member.aspx?id=1935[/link] for my tank info

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Keith

Near enough is not good enough, therefore good enough is not near enough, and only your best will do.
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EEEEWWWW are you joking????? That's just awful!

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Those who say they cant, Never will !!!

Leaving the moral questions aside, you do realise that you're opening yourself up to all kinds of "intersting" medical issues don't you?

First of all, I would beextremely wary of eating even a recognised food fish whose provenance was doubtful. Especially something such as Red Snapper, which is a delicacy in the tropics, but which, at certain times of year, is to be avoided because of a nasty little complaint called Ciguatera.

At certain times of the year, various algae species flourish, and are consumed by various filter feeders. These filter feeders in turn are consumed by fishes, and so on up the food chain. The problem here is that the algae species involved produce a substance called Ciguatoxin, which is concentrated more and more in the tissues of each organism higher up the food chain as first the filter feeders eat the algae, then the smaller fishes eat the filter feeders, then the bigger predatory fishes eat the smaller ones. Eventually, your Red Snapper winds up on the dinner table and WHAM - everyone who eats it ends up in intensive care, or worse still, dead.

As for something that has been living in an aquarium, you could be opening yourself up to other nasties. Microsporidian parasites, for example. No-one knows what happens if some of these enter the human alimentary canal because, thus far, no-one has been foolish enough to give it a try. While scientists may have good reasons for being convinced that these organisms don't cross major species barriers, you might just hit upon a poorly researched one that does ... and some protozoans have a nastry track record where humans are concerned. Various amoebae cause dysentery, then there are trypanosomes (sleeping sickness), schistosomes (bilharzia and complications arising therefrom including ending up tetraplegic), there are all kinds of time bombs ticking away there. And if there are snails in the aquarium, you had better seriously hope that you haven't put in a wild caught fish that has brought some schistosomes with it, because those things are life threatening.

Then we have bacteria to think about. Pseudomonas and Aeromonas are implicated in certain cases of gangrene. Fancy those taking up residence in your body? Or how about Vibrio species - the best known of these to doctors causes cholera.

Tapeworms are another nice hazard you're opening yourself up to. Ever seen how big a tapeworm grows in the human gut? Try 20 feet. Fancy having a 20 foor tapeworm inside you?

Then of course, you might discover the hard way that the fish you've just decided to eat is poisonous. Just as well you didn't try this experiment with puffer fishes because you'd probably be dead. Quite a few puffer fishes manufacture tetraodotoxin - this is the poison that kills quite a few Japanese people each year when they eat improperly prepared fugu. Fugu? Raw flesh of the porcupine fish. Can only be prepared in Japan by a specially trained Fugu chef, who spends seven years learning how to do it. Which involves careful removal of skin, gonads and certain other organs in which the toxin is concentrated. Tetraodotoxin is a fast acting nerve poison - only takes a small amount of it to kill you - and you don't get a merciful lapse into unconsciousness before death. Not pretty to watch someone die of that.

So, next time you decide to branch out and indulge in some experimental culinary diversions, bear this little lot in mind.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

I have read a lot of interesting articles on FP and have gained a lot of knowledge in doing so. I have got to say that since I became a member of FP not one post has made me feel as sick to the stomach as this topic has done so today. We all love to watch our fish swim in their aquariums and take pride in the way we look after our pets. Yes fish are pets too. Call me silly but I do talk to my fish, on occassions I even 'pat' them when hand feeding or they just come up for a nosey when my fingers go to the water. I feel sad when I lose a fish. And this is how I believe you should be with any animal you take under your care. Calilasseia great write up on the medical side, let's hope that your words are to and taken in. Jgillece I hope you'll think twice before you 'indulge' again and decide to pop down to the local 'fish and chip shop' instead.

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My Fish like swimming all day long,
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i've eeaten an iridecent shark or something that looks like it. the picture of the bag is a small iridecent shark like the ones on petstores=P. I found it on a store called T&t some chinese specialty store in canada. the meat was ok i guess, but i still like tilapia more.

Doubt it was ID shark. Being chinese myself, and living in BC, there are many T&T supermarkets and I don't think I've ever seen them sell any.

Anyways, I thought that jgillece said he ate his homegrown parrot when he "found it floating" as in it was dead, floating on the water? Or did he see it swimming up there and he decided to eat it? Anyhow, eating your fish is a bad habit and it'll possibly kill you, as Calilasseia has well explained.

How do you know all this stuff anyways Calilasseia...you scare me.

well, moral issues aside, i mean, you are posting this on a fish lovers site that regards fish as pets...and even health issues aside...I have to ask the question...what gave you the urge to eat a fish out of a aquarium??? i mean really? did you run into walls to much as a child without your helmet on or what?

honestly, the only way i would regard you as more than someone with half a brain is if you told me how drunk or stoned you were...

seedkiros, I'm surprised you haven't seen Irridescent Sharks. I see'em down here at the Philly Chinatown, frozen and bagged. They're even labeled "Pangasius" and come with characteristic stripes. In Asia, since Pangasius catfish and relatives (namely Pangasiodon gigas...) can attain such large sizes they can be important food fish.

In any case, rocker23 raises a good point. Go to a big asian food store and you might find all sorts of Asian fish that we might consider aquarium fish up for sale as food, including Pangasius, Loaches, Tinfoil Barbs, and Snakeheads.

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The aquarist is one who must learn the ways of the biologist, the chemist, and the veterinarian.

How do you know all this stuff anyways Calilasseia...you scare me.

I spent time sharing my university accommodation with a brace of medical students. You'd be amazed what you pick up when you share your lodgings with people who bring their studies home with them - including dissections!

Makes for interesting fridge sharing issues I can tell you ...

And yes, Pangasius catfishes grow large enough to be important food fishes in SE Asia, particularly in Laos, which has the Mekong River as one of its borders. Snakeheads, Helicopter Catfishes and (when it wasn't critically endangered) the giant Mekong Catfish are all on the list. Let's face it, a 10 foot catfish is going to feed a LOT of people in a fishing village - catch one and it keeps the entire village in fish meat for a week. Mind you, I'd be wary of sharing their lunches for the reasons outlined - chances are that in the more impoverished areas, tapeworms and river flukes are just some of the chronic health problems that the locals face.

Incidentally, when Flowerhorns started being dumped in Thailand (which is, for the record, illegal and carries severe judicial penalties including imprisonment) some locals took to eating them. Trouble was, many of the dumped Flowerhorns were hybridisation failures with all kinds of associated disease problems, so I would expect a rash of interesting and temporarily 'inexplicable' human health issues to arise among the people who have eaten them. Would you even touch a fish whose lips were covered in suppurating sores and practically falling off? Bad enough eating an otherwise healthy fish that you don't know much about, let alone one that's carrying around with it all kinds of public health baggage (another reason why the penalties for dumping them are severe - apart from the ecological issues of introducing an aggressive alien into native waters, there's the risk of contaminating native food fish stocks with unwanted diseases that they're not resistant to).

The mere fact that eating fish about which you don't know enough can be risky is one of the reasons why in such places, freshwater fish flesh is salted heavily. Any freshwater disease organisms that might be lurking in the flesh are killed by the process if you use enough salt, through osmotic dehydration.

Having said that, the venerable Innes book mentions Snakeheads - on page 362, where he covers Channa asiatica, he writes:

The Snakeheads are long, slim, snaky, air-breathing fishes from Africa and Asia, having no spines in the fins. In this they differ from their close relatives, the Anabantids. The Snakeheads are important food fishes in the Orient. They are tough and stand transport in tubs with little or no water. Chinese fishmongers can chop a good many steaks off the end of a fish before it sees fit to expire.

A fairly gruesme quote that illustrates just how tough these fishes are in an aquarium, incidentally - they'll live in water that would kill many other fishes, not that this is an excuse for skimping on maintenance in a Snakehead aquarim of course ...




Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Ok, this topic is making me not want to eat ANY fish much less aquarium fish! Seriously gross, jgillece.

So...(calilasseia) given all the nasty parasites and diseases out there, how come it IS ok to eat a halibut steak or some salmon, or a trout for example? Is it mainly freshwater fish that cause problems?

First of all let's divide our potential food fishes by source. The first division is between those from temperate zones, and those from the tropics. Of these, fishes from the tropics are likely to be considerably more risky. The second division is between open ocean fishes, inshore sea fishes and freshwater fishes. Open ocean fishes are usually the least hazardous, inshore sea fishes carry a somewhat enhanced risk, and freshwater fishes are decidedly more risky.

The reasons for this are multi-fold. Open ocean fishes stay out in the open ocean, and so, any pathogenic organisms that might affect them have never come into contact with anything other than yet more open ocean creatures. Since they have never come into regular contact with humans, the opportunity for species jumping simply hasn't arisen. Plus, any pathogens in the open ocean have precious few opportunities to affect fishes as it is - at any one time, a given planktonic organism, for example, could find itself separated from the nearest fish by several cubic miles of water. The oceans are BIG!

Inshore sea fishes have more opportunity to pass organisms on to humans, particularly fishing communities, but again, any 'species jumping' upon the part of a marine pathogen requires that a whole host of adaptations take place facilitating this, which requires, among other things, a certain frequency of contact to get off the ground. There is a separate hazard involving passing toxins up the food chain that involves inshore seawater fishes (and for that matter some open ocean species), but that's a separate issue I'll address in due course.

Freshwater fishes have the greatest opportunity to become unwitting 'partners in crime' with pathogens, because the likely frequency of contact between those pathogens and humans in a freshwater environment is much greater than in the previous two cases. Humans need drinking water among other things, so humans have historically settled around bodies of fresh water, be they rivers or lakes. Since many other land animals habitually do the same, i.e., gather around sources of fresh water, the opportunity for pathogens to evolve that have aquatic life cycle stages is enhanced considerably. Malaria is one prime example (it lives for part of its life cycle in aquatic mosquito larvae); the Schistosoma Genus of trematodes that cause serious human disease (these spend their larval lives reproducing asexually inside aquatic snails) are another. Now, how many aquarists have snails in their aquaria? Fortunately, the particular snail species chosen by schistosomes isn't a regular feature of tropical aquaria, but, that risk exists and should be noted!

Two pages that cover schistosomes and their less than delightful effects, by the way, are :

Natural History Museum on Schistosomes

Connection between Schistosomes and human cancers among other disease symptoms

The tropical freshwater environment is replete with species of organisms with no counterparts in temperate waters - there are whole taxonomic families of organisms that are restricted to the tropics. Many of our aquarium fishes are thus restricted (e.g., you only find Loricariid catfishes in South America), so it should come as no surprise to learn that the same holds for various micro-organisms too.

Indeed, the tropics are home to all manner of exotic relationships that have eveolved nowhere else, because the environments in question have been, if you like, evolutionary crucibles running their own particular experiments for 50 million years. A striking example from land animals is the parasitic fungus that affects certain tropical ants - this fungus actively reprograms an infected ant's brain in order to modify the ant's behaviour and facilitate increased spread of the fungus. That sounds truly astonishing, but you will find it mentioned on some entomology websites. Likewise, there are polygenetic aquatic parasites that have evolved to pass across, in some cases, as many as seven different hosts, spanning molluscs, crustaceans, fishes, birds and mammals among others. With that kind of seething hot bed of evolutionary experimentation, the potential for something to jump from a tropical fish species to humans is considerable. Indeed, some of the bacteria that affect aquarium fishes belong to the same Genera as other bacteria that attack humans and cause serious disease - I've already mentioned Pseudomonas and Aeromonas, which are implicated in gangrene, and Vibrio - the killer disease cholera is caused by Vibrio cholerae.

When you factor in human interference, the picture is even more interesting. Flowerhorns are controversial because of the moral and ecological implications of hybridising fishes that probably do not do so in the wild. However, in Thailand, a second issue has arisen. Unwanted 'reject' Flowerhorns (failed hybridisation experiments) have been dumped in native Thai waters, despite severe penalties for doing so. Some of these dumped Flowerhorns have been deliberately fished by some locals as food fishes, which raises some serious medical concerns because the dumped Flowerhorns have, in some cases, been diseased when dumped. Now I would be wary of eating the flesh of a healthy looking fish if I did not have some knowledge of its provenance, the kind of water it came from, and what was likely to be living alongside the fish in those waters, but would YOU choose to eat some ragged-looking specimen with suppurating sores on its body and lips practically falling off? Of course, starvation motivates desperate people to eat some gruesome things in the battle to stay alive, but this strikes me as a risk I would have to be at death's door to contemplate - a case of "well, if I don't eat it, i'll die horribly of starvation anyway".

Open ocean fishes don't have these problems. Salmon and trout, though they return to fresh water to reproduce, spend the vast majority of their lifespans in the open oceans. Any organisms that they might encounter in a temperate freshwater environment (which in itself will have fewer pathogenic species and consequently fewer risks) will probably not survive the transition to the open ocean.

One problem that DOES arise even with some open ocean fishes is what is called "toxin accumulation". I've already referred to Ciguatera, a natural food poisoning that results from the upward migration of Ciguatoxin from microscopic algae, through filter feeding invertebrates, through the smaller fishes that eat those invertebrates, and so on up to fishes such as Red Snappers that are a delicacy in Australia, for example. Toxins that travel up the food chain like this before striking the organisms at the top are called "biocaccumulative toxins" - they become increasingly concentrated in the tissues of the species further up the food chain. DDT, the pesticide used for mosquito control, is an example - it affected birds of prey as the poisoned insects passed the DDT residues up the food chain. Mercury and other heavy metals are also bioaccumulative - they concentrate in the tissues over time, and migrate up food chains. Japan experienced a particularly bad case in the 1960s, when mercury effluent from a chemical factory poisoned a fishery, resulting in a harrowing disease known as Minamata Disease. The political fallout from this when the disease was brought to worldwide public attention was to Japan what the Thalidomide drug scandal was to Western Europe. There is a classic photograph of the effects of Minamata Disease, which affected not only adults who ate the fish and died painful deaths, but unborn children. I'll link the phot, but with a warning:

DISTURBING IMAGE FOLLOWS - DO NOT CLICK IF OF A SENSITIVE DISPOSITION

Mother tending daughter affected in utero by mercury induced Minamata Disease

Closer to my own home, I would not EVER chance eating a fish that I knew had been caught in the local river, the River Mersey. Why? Despite the multi-billion pound cleanup campaign, there are still long term issues arising from the dreadful pollution of that river by the local chemical industry - heavy metals (lead, cadmium, mercury, zinc and even traces of radium have been found in the past) and chlorinated organic reagents were all dumped in there in the past, and in the 1970s, the river was so polluted that it was possible to use the river water to develop photographic film. I kid you not. Anyone eating a fish from that body of water is opening themselves up to all kinds of medical catastrophes, not least because until recently, it was still possible to detect traces of dioxin in the river. Look up "Agent Orange" and "Seveso" if you want to find out the fun and games that result from dioxin exposure ...

Hopefully, this little lot will answer your question.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

Actually, the safety of consumption of fish at all is debateable. Anyone who's read even a little into the effect of pollution would know at least a little bit about toxic heavy metal build-up in many fish species these days. Farmed fish are another option, but they often tend to have more unhealthy fats. Give and take, I suppose.

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The aquarist is one who must learn the ways of the biologist, the chemist, and the veterinarian.