Risk assessment and risk management of transgenic fish

My name is Marja Ruohonen-Lehto and I work at the Finnish Environment Institute in Helsinki, Finland. I give expert advice on biosafety issues and environmental risk assessment (ERA) of GMOs. I am not a specialist in fish but I have followed the field for about 10 years. I am together with colleagues from the US and Norway co-leading the writing of an OECD consensus document on Atlantic Salmon. Moreover, I chaired the fish working group in the Canada-Norway expert workshop on risk assessment for emerging applications of LMOs in Montreal, June 2007.

The working group identified some recommendations: on method development needs (e.g. for collecting basic biological data, including  ecological niches and local genotypes, for baseline data, for identification of critical life stages and critical environmental variables and fitness components); on development of different worldwide scenarios on the introduction of transgenic fish into the environment; on performing sensitivity analysis in models to identify parameters for which we still lack experimental data; on identifying other likely candidate model fish to be used in case studies for ERA; and last but not least to develop case-by-case protocols for transgenic fish risk assessment.

I would especially like to thank the comments provided to this discussion where it was clearly stated that we still lack data on basic biology, physiology and ecology of many of the fish species.

I would like to finish by drawing your attention to some resent work carried out by Kata-Riina Valosaari, Sami Aikio and Veijo Kaitala on mating preference and strategy in growth enhanced fish. The work is published in Oikos in 2008 and in Evolutionary Applications either late 2008 or early 2009.