My otherwise very intelligent father can not stand tuna. In fact he can barely able stand watching other people ahem, like my self, enjoy a great tuna salad sandwich. So I was munching away at one over at his house and he up and says, “You know what tuna eat dont you?” “other sealife no doubt” replied. He says, “Nope! Dolphin dung! They follow under schools of dolphins and thats why dolphins are always caught in the net.”
Now I understand this wouldn’t make great marketing for tuna companies but I think I would have heard that sometime before now.
Yep, and I totally misread it! Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
:smack:
Of course, that doesn’t make a bit of difference as to why tuna tastes good. Remind Dad that alcohol in yeast shit, and see how he reacts to eating it straight, without having it converted into something yummy.
Tuna are predators. The typical diet of Yellowfin Tuna, for example, is given here:
“dolphin” here is of course the dolphin fish, aka dorado or mahi-mahi, not the mammal.
Tuna and dolphins take the same kind of prey, and that’s why they are often found together. I have seen both very actively feeding on large schools of mackerel.
Some fish are coprovores, but tuna certainly aren’t one of them.
All this dolphin shit aside…I did a report about 10 years ago on the tuna industry and the levels of contaminants found in the canning of tuna. You would be appalled to know all of the shit (literally) found in samples taken from cans of tuna. I don’t have the figures anymore but it turned me off of tuna for years.
The acceptable levels for bird parts ie: feathers and feces
“” rat parts fur and feces
“”" human feces
etc.
etc.
At the time Starkist was the worst and Bumblebee was the cleanest.
Since then there have been some changes made in the tuna industry but eating canned fish will never be the same for me.
The clincher for me was going through numerous cans as an aside experiment and using a large magnifying glass to pick out pieces that weren’t tuna.
sheesh…no more tuna for me. Damned shame too 'cause I really did like it. Everynow and then I’ll try some but it still lingers in the back of my mind.
Well, it’s a dirty old world, t-keela. For most of human history, mankind’s diet contained 10 times as much filth as our western diets these days, if not more.
In fact, some studies suggest that our reduced level of exposure to such “natural” contaminants is reducing our immune systems, and making us more prone to allergies, asthma, eczema, and a host of other problems.
Granted, we’re dying of salmonella and botulism less often, but there is a trade-off.
So Qadgop? are you saying theres no truth to the saying “eat shit and die”?
I am a serious aquarium hobbyist, I know for fact that there is no marine animal that prefers to live off other animals offal. I dare anyone to point out an example. This challenge includes invertebrares.
That’s for sure. At least I believe it to be true. It’s one thing to read about a study finding shit in your food. It is a whole nuther thing to find it in there yourself. If you went to salt a burger and found some non-burger particles on(lets say 1 out of 3 burgers you checked) not even big stuff…say an occasional maggot or hair, how many burgers you gonna eat from now on without checking what’s under the lid.
Forget it…I had to do that one too. I can’t eat fast food anymore.
It was part of a study done while I was at UT. Gross you completely out. It’s not that the samples showed huge contaminants in food stuffs. It is the fact that they are allowed to be there legally.
What the tuna eats…hey that’s no problem. People eat chicken (you don’t want to know), if they can eat chicken then consuming a fish is like a piece of cake.
Just cook the shit out of it.
BTW What we make up for in our “clean” food, we more than make up for in the toxic chemicals we add to get it that way.
Do tuna eat shit? They are fish. I doubt it is their preferred sustenance but most fish when really hungry will eat practically anything. Including each other. I’m not a marine biologist but as in most examples like this there is probably some symbiotic relationship here.
PS…the OP said “They follow under schools of dolphins and thats why dolphins are always caught in the net.” This implies mammals not fish.
See these article by my esteemed colleague D. Ross Robertson:
Robertson, D. R. 1982. Fish feces as fish food on a Pacific coral reef. Marine Ecology Progress Series, 7:253-265.
Bailey, T. G. and D. R. Robertson. 1982. Organic and caloric levels of fish feces in relation to its consumption by coprophagous reef fishes. Marine Biology, 69:45-50.
You can quite easily tell that tuna are predatory just by eating them; predatory fish typically have dense, meaty flesh - partly (well, mostly) because they need that kind of muscle to pursue their prey, but probably partly also because a high-protein diet makes it possible to build that kind of flesh.
Even if they did eat dung …shrug. It used to be common to feed pigs and chickens on the dung of corn-fed cattle. It’s the meat you end up with that counts, not what the beast ate to produce the meat.
