Risky Fish: The Thrill Of Fugu

There's a certain weird appeal to the Japanese delicacy known as fugu. After all, it's not every day that the food on your plate could bring about almost instant death. Fugu is the Japanese name for the blowfish, also known as the pufferfish, which has the ability to puff up to twice its size and project poisonous spikes to defend itself from predators. The spikes of a blowfish contain tetradotoxin, a poison considered to be at least one thousand times deadlier than cyanide. Theoretically, the poison from one blowfish could kill up to 30 people. Fugu is served raw, and its widespread fame and notoriety doesn't come from its taste. In fact, it's been described as a fairly bland, delicately flavored fish that doesn't hold a candle to the more popular forms of Japanese seafood. It's a widely accepted fact that the danger element is what draws people to this peculiar delicacy. In the world of Japanese cuisine, it takes approximately 10 years of rigorous training and a special licensing program before a chef can consider himself skilled in the art of preparing fugu. It is estimated that about 6 people a year in Japan die from eating improperly prepared fugu, and the deaths are usually those of inexperienced chefs who are testing their own handiwork. Approximately 60% of people who consume improperly prepared fugu will die from the poison, which leads to paralysis and respiratory failure. Japanese lore holds that a chef who prepares fugu incorrectly and thus kills his consumer must take the honorable way out and disembowel himself. Licensed fugu chefs are carefully taught which parts of the fish are edible, and which parts contain the deadly tetrodotoxin. The slices required to remove the toxic parts of the fish are delicate and require a skilled hand and a knowledge of exactly what to cut away. Fugu chefs study and memorize the exact layout of the fish and the location of every drop of poison, and learn how to remove it without removing the precious meat surrounding it. Understandably, with all of this training and care required, eating fugu is not exactly a cheap thrill. Fugu first arrived on American shores in 1989, during the boom of Japanese economy, but since the 1990s it has dwindled in popularity and is now mostly found only in areas of New York and the west coast. Japanese restaurants in America that serve fugu generally import the fish from Japanese chefs who have already removed the poison and purified the meat. Even without a fugu chef on staff, restaurants can charge upwards of $150 for a plate of this exotic fish. But New York city chefs have adamantly stated that no one in the US has died from improperly prepared fugu since it came to this country in 1989. And for some thrill-seekers, it might be worth the price.

How to Keep Predator Fish

Many people like to have fish for pets because they are low maintenance, and can be very relaxing to watch them swim. Most first time fish enthusiast like to keep cold water fish, because they are cheap and most of the different types of these fish will get along together. These fish have some bright colors and have some very fancy fins, but they are mostly large goldfish, and eventually switch to tropical fish to get a larger selection of fish. But keeping tropical fish can be a bit of a gamble, the fish cost more and some of them are very aggressive and will eat your other fish.

There are more different types of tropical fish for you to choose from, and they have a larger variety of colors then cold water fish and keeping them in an aquarium together with other tropical fish does not have to be a gamble, it is not like a trip to the casino to play blackjack, if you do things right there is no gambling involved at all.

The first thing you need to do is some reading before purchasing any fish for your tank. Reading about fish will give you an idea of what species of fish eat other fish, and which ones do not. It will also let you know which meat eating fish will live with what other fish, and make it less of a gamble that you are just buying one fish an expensive meal.

Cichlids are a type of fish that eat other fish but they are a school fish and prefer to be in a tank with other Cichlids, but you want all the other Cichlids to be about the same size, or one day you will come home from a day of playing the most Popular Casino Games in the casino to find several fish missing and one fat fish swimming around slowly.

Cichlids are a surface to medium depth fish. This means they will swim on the top and middle of the tank and will generally not go to the bottom of the tank for very long.

So many people with Cichlids will get a bottom swimmer to fill the tank out. A very popular type of bottom swimmers is catfish. There are many different fish in the species of catfish. Some of these fish are non aggressive and do not get very big, but a fish like this may not be aggressive enough to be in a tank of Cichlids.

You may want to get a more aggressive type of catfish, but if you get a large one it will surely eat the Cichlids, but if it too small you are gambling that the Cichlids will not pick its eyes out.

Just remember that no matter how much you read each fish does have a personality of their own and no matter how much you read that one fish will be friendly with another it putting them in an Aquarium together is gambling.

There is always the possibility that some of your fish will get eaten, but the only way to make keeping fish not a gamble is to keep each fish in their own separate fish tank in the hope that this will keep them all safe, but this will not make for happy fish. With trial and error you will learn what can live with what types of fish and save the gambling for Las Vegas casinos.

How to Clean a Dirty Aquarium

A fresh water fish tank requires about 30 minutes to an hour of work a week depending on the size of the tank.

Waht you will need:
1) You will need a clean 5 gallon bucket that has never had chemicals or soap inside of it.
2) A hose or gravel cleaner
3) A bag of natural or synthetic sea salt

I have split the work into two parts the tank which needs to be cleaned ever week on the same day and the filters which can be cleaned every 2 or 3 weeks.

The very first thing you have to do before you start cleaning your fish tank is to unplug your tanks heater if you have one. The heater can not be allowed to be removed from the water while it is hot so make sure to leave it unplugged at least 20 minutes before attempting to remove it. The water help cool the glass on the heater if removed it could crack, or the glass could totally shatter. You should also remember to never stick your hand inside of any fish tank before making sure the heater is not only off but unplugged from the wall. A small crack in the heater could be more then enough to cause a shock to you that can be fatal.

After the heater has ha time to cool you can safely remove the heater from the tank or it the heater is submersible you can just push it down to the bottom of the tank.

Now take any decorations you may have placed in the tank, so all you have are the small gravel at the bottom, this will allow you to get any dirt that those decorations may have been covering up. Now if you do not have a gravel cleaner you are going to have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands wet. You will need to stir up the gravel to get the dirt that has settled between the gravel into the water, and start removing the water into the bucket with the hose. Do not throw out the water you will still need it to clean the filters.

If you have a gravel cleaner, push the plastic tube into the gravel until it hits the bottom of the tank, then start a siphon into the bucket, every second or 2 move the gravel cleaner over an inch or 2 and repeat this process until either you have removed 15 percent of the tanks water of you have cleaned all the gravel.

Now at this point you can clean the Aquariums filters. The insides of the filters are used to grow bacteria, that help break down the nitrites and nitrates that are in the water from fish waste and uneaten food. To make sure we don’t kill all these Aquarium friendly bacteria, we clean the filter materials and sponges in the dirty water that I also full of the bacteria. Take everything out of the filters and rinse them of in the bucket of dirty Aquarium water, then give the sponge a couple of squeezes in the bucket and reassemble the filters, and put them back on the tank.

Now before adding the water sea salt must be added to the tank. All water has some amount of salt in it and to replicate the natural habitat of the fish there must be salt in your tank as well. Add approximately 1 cup of sea salt for every 50 gallons of water.

Now you can add water to the tank, but you must make sure the water is the within a degree or two of the temperature of the water in the tank. A drastic change in the tanks temperature suddenly can throw the fish into shock and kill them or weaken their immunity and help give them a fish disease. I recommend filling the bucket with hot water and checking it regularly till it is the same as the tanks temperature, then slowly add the water to the tank, start the filters and the heater.

Cleaning the filters only needs to be done once or twice a month, but the water in the tank must be cleaned on the same day every week.

Mercury Content Of Fish

We all know that adding fish to our diets can help increase our body’s ability to repair itself, as well as its ability to burn body fat and keep our energy up, but it’s important to choose fish that’s also going to improve your health as opposed to silently poisoning you… Being exposed to too much mercury can cause memory loss, tremors, neurological difficulties, advanced aging, decreased immune functions, and death. But how is all this mercury getting into our body? Well here are the top 4 places that contribute to the levels of mercury in our body (not in any specific order): Vaccines (past and present) Dental fillings The environment And Fish We’re going to focus on fish right now because that’s the prime source of mercury in our diets. When coal is burned, inorganic mercury is released into the air and eventually ends up in our lakes, rivers and oceans. There, bacteria mixes with it and transforms it into methylmercury which is easily absorbed by fish (especially large or fatty fish), and is also easily absorbed by us when we eat those fish. The good new is that our most recent studies indicate that the human body naturally rids itself of mercury over time – assuming we stop ingesting it long enough for our body to do what it was made to do, and to help the process here’s a list of fish that naturally have a low, medium and high level of mercury: High mercury: Mercury levels differ from one species of fish to the next. This is due to factors such as type of fish, size, location, habitat, diet and age. Fish that are predatory (eat other fish) are large and at the top of the food chain, and so tend to contain more mercury. Fish that contain higher levels of mercury include: Shark Ray Swordfish Barramundi Gemfish Orange roughy Ling Canned or fresh tuna Mackerel Grouper Tilefish Chilean sea bass Moderate mercury: Alaskan halibut, black cod, blue (Gulf Coast) crab, dungeness crab, Eastern oysters, mahimahi, blue mussels, pollack. Low mercury: Anchovies, Arctic char, crawfish, Pacific flounder, herring, king crab, sanddabs, scallops, Pacific sole; tilapia, wild Alaska and Pacific salmon; farmed catfish, clams, striped bass, and sturgeon.

Salmon - An Affordable Luxury

Salmon is one of the most versatile fish we can buy, and despite its longstanding reputation as a luxury fish, is nowadays surprisingly affordable.

Salmon are available in both farmed and wild varieties, and while the wild salmon has the edge in terms of both flavour and texture, the quality of the farmed fish has improved greatly over the years and is now a fish that makes thoroughly respectable eating. The comparative rarity of wild salmon, which is only available for half the year between February and August, is at least as responsible as quality for the higher prices it commands compared to its farmed cousins.

Most of the wild salmon you can buy will be from the Atlantic Ocean, both off the shores of North America and Northern Europe, with Scotland being an especially famed source of the fish. Salmon can also be found in the Pacific, although these fish tend to find their way into cans rather than the wet fish counter of your local fishmonger.

An enduring image of wild salmon is of a sleek silver arch of fish leaping up weirs and waterfalls, and this arises because they are are born in freshwater, but spend most of their lives in the sea after migrating while young. They will stay in the sea for between one and four years, before returning to the very same river they were born in to spawn, which is usually their last act before expiring from the exhaustion of the journey upstream.

Farmed salmon, in contrast, spend their entire lives in lochs or river estuaries, swimming in net cages, sometimes at densities higher than is healthy for the fish. Fish farming has gathered something of a bad reputation over the years, and it's true that salmon farms once showed a similar disregard for animal welfare that you'd find in most industrialized farming operations. In recent years, though, public opinion has forced a rethink, and standards have widely improved - you can even find organic farmed fish these days.

When you come to buy salmon, the usual rules for buying fish apply. Make sure you can see a whole fish so that you can get an idea of how fresh it is - the pre-wrapped anonymous fillets packaged in a 'protective atmosphere' you find in many supermarkets is a gamble at best. A fresh fish will have bulging eyes rather than sunken ones, will feel firm to the touch, and should not smell 'fishy' as this indicates that it is past its best.

Depending on how many you are feeding, you can buy a steak which is cut from the shoulder of the fish, a fillet from nearer the tail end, or even a whole fish. Tail end fillets possibly offer the best eating, as they are more or less free of bones apart from the pin bones which can easily be removed during preparation. Steaks, however, are a more meaty cut and are perhaps more suited to cooking methods such as a barbecue or grill.

Whichever cut you buy, you can be assured that your health will benefit - as an oily fish, salmon is high in Omega 3, which has been shown to be of use in preventing heart problems, and is widely believed to be helpful for brain and nervous system development and operation.

Enjoy your salmon!