Comment by fhe
18 days ago
I thought this a pretty mature technique? I have seen more than once our local vet using this technique to treat cats with large wounds -- with great results by the way. Interestingly, they too used tilapia fish skin, and not any of the more common local fish species. I wonder if there is something special about tilapia fish skin, or it was simply the species on which the technique was developed, and nobody bothered to try using other fish species.
> I thought this a pretty mature technique? […]
Yes, it is very mature. The article was written in 2017.
Tilapia are cheap and abundant, and the skin is an industrial-scale waste product.
They're incredibly hardy, and unlike most other food fish you can easily grow them in simple container setups.
Horrible to talk about a living creature this way.
(i pick mackerel at random)
A female Atlantic mackerel typically lays between 200,000 and 450,000 eggs during a spawning season. However, larger, healthier individuals can sometimes produce up to a million eggs, often in multiple batches over several weeks.
it is the mackerel themselves who consider baby mackerel lives to be industrial in scale. they produce that many in anticipation of consumption. Each foodfish humans consume has already slaughtered untold thousands of other fish to grow themselves to size.
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"Fish are friends, not food"—Finding Nemo. ;-)
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What's special is that tilapia is probably cheaper than even the local fish since it's farmed in massive quantities and shipped all over the world as food.
If other fish skins were tried it must have been similar results.
Tilapia imports are heavily restricted to Australia, The live fish will not be allowed, they are considered "restricted noxious fish".
The rules are:
Illegal to Keep: You cannot keep tilapia (dead or alive), sell them, give them away, or use them as bait.
Immediate Euthanasia: Humanely kill the fish as soon as you catch it.
Disposal:
Bury: Bury them deep and well away from the water's edge to prevent scavengers from dragging them back in or floodwaters from releasing eggs.
Bin: Place them in a rubbish bin.
No Filleting: You cannot take fillets and dispose of the rest; the entire fish must be destroyed.
Various state departments have hotlines for reporting tilapia.
There are different hotlines per state:
Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF) (13 25 23)
New South Wales Department of Primary Industries (DPI) (1800 675 888)
Victoria (VFA) Reporting hotline (13FISH or 13 34 74)
Western Australia Dept. of Primary Industries & Regional Development (1800 815 507)
I've had rewards for reporting them (fishing reel, free bait, etc).
For those that don't know why, and I didn't, the reason for this is that Tilapia are "mouth brooders", that is they keep the fertilised eggs in their mouth. So throwing away a dead female can cause these eggs to hatch, and reinfect the waters with new Tilapia.
I also hear you can dispose of them by placing them in a pan with fresh pulverized tomato, garlic, olive oil, basil, then a little lemon juice, oregano then finally, salt and pepper to taste. Highly effective, efficient and delicious.
Where I grew up (in northern Australia) a lot of people targeted and ate tilapia out of local estuaries .. there were a lot of them and they were big.
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No need for antibiotics because the fish got ample amounts while growing up in the farm.
It's probably a mix of "this species happens to be unusually well-suited" and "this is the species people bothered to study rigorously first."
>I have seen more than once our local vet using this technique to treat cats with large wounds -- with great results by the way.
I'm not surprised, a lot of vets I know from Iraq and Afghanistan had used Tilapias for battlefield dressing. Worst case there was a Tilapia MRE people kept around for this purpose. Honestly it's great to see them taking those skills from war and translating them into helping street animals such as cats.