Recognize fish as food in policy discourse and development funding.

The international development community is off-track from meeting targets for alleviating global malnutrition. Meanwhile, there is growing consensus across scientific disciplines that fish plays a crucial role in food and nutrition security. However, this 'fish as food' perspective has yet to translate into policy and development funding priorities. We argue that the traditional framing of fish as a natural resource emphasizes economic development and biodiversity conservation objectives, whereas situating fish within a food systems perspective can lead to innovative policies and investments that promote nutrition-sensitive and socially equitable capture fisheries and aquaculture. This paper highlights four pillars of research needs and policy directions toward this end. Ultimately, recognizing and working to enhance the role of fish in alleviating hunger and malnutrition can provide an additional long-term development incentive, beyond revenue generation and biodiversity conservation, for governments, international development organizations, and society more broadly to invest in the sustainability of capture fisheries and aquaculture.

SKELETAL STRENGTH OF ENCRUSTING CHEILOSTOME BRYOZOANS.

Encrusting cheilostome bryozoans structurally resemble aggregates of small boxes, with both frontal and vertical walls capable of resisting forces generated by water-borne debris or predators. Both the skeletal strength and design of the walls are important in determining the relative ability of the colony to resist damage. Two mechanical tests, puncture and compression, performed on nine species of tropical bryozoans reveal significant differences in skeletal strength both between species and between the outer and inner regions of colonies. Puncture stresses required to break through the frontal walls of zooids range from 0.8 to 291.0 MNm-2 for edge zooids and from 1.1 to 457.4 MNm-2 for inner zooids; compressive stresses required to damage the colony range from 4.4 to 16.9 MNm-2 for edge regions and 6.5 to 27.2 MNm-2 for inner regions. Ecological implications for these differences in skeletal strength are discussed with particular reference to resisting predation. From the mechanical test results, the material properties of shear strength (2.6-90.5 MNm-2) and compressive strength (8.2-110.0 MNm-2) are estimated for the frontal and vertical walls, respectively. Bryozoan wall material appears to be comparable in strength to such biological ceramics as coral, echinoid spine, bivalve shell, and vertebrate bone, but lower in strength than gastropod shell.