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The ocean’s mysterious vitamin deficiency

#1
C C Offline
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/t...eficiency/

EXCERPTS: Disoriented little fish caught the attention of staff members at the Coleman National Fish Hatchery in Red Bluff, California, in early January 2020. [...] Grasping for ideas as thousands of fish expired daily, they turned to the internet, where they dug up published research on nutritional deficiencies in trout from the Great Lakes as well as Atlantic salmon on the East Coast. Several decades ago, sick and dying fish in these regions had been found to be deficient in thiamine (also spelled thiamin), or vitamin B1, a basic building block of life critical to the functioning of cells and in converting food into energy.

[...] California researchers now investigating the source of the salmon’s nutritional problems find themselves contributing to an international effort to understand thiamine deficiency, a disorder that seems to be on the rise in marine ecosystems across much of the planet. It’s causing illness and death in birds, fish, invertebrates, and possibly mammals, leading scientists from Seattle to Scandinavia to suspect some unexplained process is compromising the foundation of the Earth’s food web by depleting ecosystems of this critical nutrient.

[...] Thiamine deficiency might not be limited to the water either. Balk says he has tested liver, brain, and blood samples from moose in southern Sweden and measured the levels of enzymes that correlate to thiamine activity. His results, he says, point toward “severe” thiamine deficiency.

In a 2016 paper, Balk and 20 coauthors sounded the alarm with a hypothesis that thiamine deficiency might be driving long-term wildlife population declines. Their paper noted that “population sizes of both terrestrial and marine vertebrate species dropped by half” from 1970 to 2012, “and from 1950 to 2010, the global seabird population declined overall” by 70 percent. These downslides, the authors explained, are happening faster than what would be expected of “known threats to biodiversity,” such as habitat loss.

By then, Balk and other scientists had clearly identified inadequate thiamine levels in species around much of the globe, but a root cause of the deficiency remained evasive. “We’ve thought, It must be something in the air, or something in the water,” says Tracy Collier, an environmental toxicologist based in Seattle, Washington, who has collaborated with Balk on thiamine deficiency research.

Balk is equally mystified, but is confident that humans are to blame. The symptoms he has observed in thiamine deficient animals are so severe, he explains, that if natural phenomena were the cause, affected animal populations would have vanished or adapted long ago. Balk believes human activity is somehow sapping ecosystems of vitamin B1, either by blocking production or obstructing its passage from one trophic level to the next... (MORE - details)
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#2
confused2 Offline
Useful information. I have a friend with terrestrial equivalent of the problem seen in fish with thiamine deficiency. One moment he'll be walking up the drive looking like he almost knows where he's going and the next moment he's upside down in the flower bed. Could be thiamine deficiency - we'll boost his marmite intake and see if that helps.
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