The USGS researchers also documented that the highest prevalence of TO came attached to areas with the highest human populations and most intensive farming activity. This type of birth defect is connected to environmental exposures to endocrine disrupters (hormone precursors that affect the endocrine system), which are found in most agricultural pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, and in many human/animal drugs. The prevalence of intersex had been at that time documented in other wild fish populations, including spot-tail shiners in the St. Lawrence, white suckers in Colorado, shovelnose sturgeon in the Mississippi, white perch in the Great Lakes, and in several species in the UK, Europe, Africa and Japan.
Intersex associated with endocrine disrupters in wastewater and farm runoff is nothing new, as reproductive anomalies in amphibians has been on the rise especially in farming regions for decades. Now the USGS has published new results of research on intersex in bass in the journal Aquatic Toxicology. They found that a third of all male smallmouth bass and a fifth of all male largemouth bass tested were intersex. The fish came from many different rivers and basins, including the Apalachicola, Colorado, Columbia, Rio Grande, Savannah, Pee Dee and Yukon. The Yukon is the only river basin where researchers found no intersex fish.
The Pee Dee river basin appears to have the biggest problem, though intersex bass are prevalent throughout the agricultural southeast. Relatively high incidence of intersex was also found in the lower Rio Grande basin, the Colorado and Gila in Arizona, and the Colorado basin. Lead author and USGS biologist Jo Ellen Hink suggested that “the widespread occurrence of intersex in fish would be a critical environmental concern.”
Well, duh. Any prognostications on when (or if) EPA and the USDA might get around to being critically concerned about it? Will “Intersex” become the new macho?
University of Illinois crop sciences researchers released results of the largest-ever field trial of its kind in the US for growing a giant perennial grass Miscanthus x giganteus, reporting that this crop could significantly reduce the acreage necessary to meet government biofuels production goals.
Rather than re-dedicating a full 25% of US cropland to biofuels – something that would put a serious dent in food production and increase the price of everything grown – Miscanthus would require re-dedication of just 9.3% of current agricultural acreage. The findings were reported in the August issue of the journal Global Change Biology.
Researchers were judging raw amount of biomass generated each year from this perennial (meaning it regrows itself every season from roots without reseeding), and you can see from the accompanying photo that this grass takes up some vertical room. Even better, Miscanthus requires fewer chemical and mechanical inputs than corn, which is a consideration for water quality and soil fertility. Moreover, in many parts of the country farmers could reap two or more ‘crops’ a year (by mowing, as with hay). Highest productivity, in fact, came from the south in the poorest of agricultural soils. Thus Miscanthus may be a very good crop for marginal land and land not even used for crop production at present, which would lower its demand on food producing cropland further.
Miscanthus also serves as a ‘carbon sink’, accumulating and binding carbon in the soil at greater efficiency than any annual crops, such as the great biomass annual industrial hemp. Which is also a good biomass crop for fuels, fiber, oil and land conservation.
Perhaps some combination of alternatives may yet allow independence from fossil fuels, and that comes with improvements in global warming, general civilizational peace and prosperity, etc. If we were to plan ways to power our homes, churches, community buildings and businesses while at the same time developing biofuels for transportation and shipping, we might find the world economy and standards of living rising quickly instead of falling fast.
It would seem that we do still have some useful scientific creativity and inventiveness to offer the world in these trying times. All we need to do now is see to it that Big Oil doesn’t shove it all under the rug, and that we get the necessary government investments in these technologies.
Links:
Giant Grass Miscanthus Can Meet US Biofuels Goal Using Less Land
Hemp: Our Original Industrial Crop
MIT Scientist Offers Solar Revolution
It was bound to happen. Science Daily reports that research from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil entitled The non-equilibrium nature of culinary evolution has established that regional cuisines don’t evolve much. Even in a small world.
The researchers examined historical food preferences for ‘national’ diets in Britain, France and Brazil, and found that certain staples as well as unique ingredients remain in the cuisines despite modern access to restaurants specializing in regional or ‘national’ foods. And despite the modern availability of regional foods in grocery stores.
In other words, the Irish still love potatoes, the French still eat snails and frogs’ legs, the Germans still love sausages and sauerkraut, the Japanese still rely on fish stock and Central and South Americans still choose tortillas over Wonder Bread. Mediterranean peoples still consume lots of olive oil, and still have longer lives, less heart disease and lower cholesterol than the average American.
One thing that struck me odd in the article’s conclusion was the statement that…
“Some low fitness ingredients present in the initial recipes have a strong difficulty of being replaced and can even propagate during culinary growth. They are like frozen ‘cultural’ accidents.”
“Low fitness?” As in ‘fit’ for what? Last I checked, amaranth was still a high quality grain as well as greens supplying as much nutritional value as spinach (which, next to peppers, are highest in certain vitamins of all foods). Parsley and cilantro are still high-value greens as well, whether in salsa or tabouli. Potatoes – which originated in Peru – are still the closest thing to a ‘perfect food’ that exists, and the lowly chayote of Central America (singled out in this article) is rich in amino acids and vitamin C. It’s an important vegetable not just in Central and South America and the Caribbean, but also in Australia, Africa, Asia and Europe.
I expect that the foods one grows up with, the ones most associated with both family history (grandma’s pasta sauce) as well as ethnic heritage, are strongly imprinted in us as preferences at a young age. So while we might look forward to eating Thai on Wednesday or Mexican on Friday or Italian whenever the opportunity arises, day to day food choices will tend to be those we’re most familiar with. That’s cabbage and potatoes for me. What is it for you?
Fun Links:
American Recipes & History by Region
Chinese Regional Cooking Styles
Hawaii Regional Cuisine
Indian Regional Cuisine
When I started college in the late 1960s in Oklahoma, I could buy gas for my Volkswagon Bug for 19.9¢ a gallon. That’s 5 gallons for a dollar, enough to drive home to visit the folks, drive around town to see friends, and get back to college without having to stop at a gas station. This past weekend I drove our little pickup to Gatlinburg, Tennessee to see an old Navy buddy, a round trip equivalent to that past Oklahoma weekend trek. Gas for the journey cost us right around $50. A dollar’s worth won’t get me to the grocery store and back any more, and it doesn’t look like the price is ever going to come down.
The going price per barrel of petroleum is pushing $150 hard and will probably go over $200 before the end of the year. Diesel fuel is a dollar more expensive than gasoline, and the price of everything grown on a farm and transported by ship, train or truck must go up accordingly.
The good news – or, at least the hopeful news is that progress is being made in deciding what replacement fuels we should be developing. Most people are skeptical of corn-based ethanol and the diversion of food crops as well as crop land to biofuels. And while new techniques can make biofuels from native vegetation like switchgrass or even algae, the fact is that plants aren’t very efficient at converting solar energy into the biomass required.
Biotech researchers are now turning to engineered microorganisms as both helpers in turning biomass into fuels and as fuel themselves – photosynthetic bacteria that can capture sunlight energy 100 times more efficiently than plants – that can be grown in massive amounts without competing for cropland.
It does appear that the time has finally come when human civilization must change its ways, the only questions being how much it’s going to hurt regular people and which nations and/or multinational corporations will corner the markets. Perhaps biotechnology can be put to good use creating new fuel sources instead of turning staple foods into pesticides. That would be a positive change of focus, help get the tarnish of public resistance off the biotech bus, and maybe even save the planet.
But you and I will probably be paying at least $5 a gallon to fill our tanks, no matter what kind of fuels are developed. Just something we’ll have to get used to.
Links:
New Source for Biofuels Discovered
Harnessing Microbes to Meet Future Energy Needs
Are microbes the answer to the energy crisis?
The 2007 Farm Bill – now the 2008 Farm Bill, was passed by both chambers of Congress, vetoed by President Bush, then the veto was overridden by both houses and is now the ‘Law of the Land’. Politically, the bill isn’t perfect, there is still too much pork and payments to rich agribusiness concerns for their poor farming practices, and not enough clarifying guidelines for biofuels production and organic farming.
But it’s a lot better than no bill at all, which would have kept the last support bill in place for the foreseeable future. The new bill has incentives to clean up residue discharges in important watersheds, and supports for best practices in crop rotations, cover crops and low-chemical input farming. It’s still strong on commodity production (corn, wheat, rice), but does put some real support into farmer’s market promotions and expansion of organic markets. It does somewhat limit subsidies to near-millionaire commodity farmers, requires more fresh fruit and vegetables to be available in schools, increases food stamp benefits as tied to the price of food, allots priority funding to research into the bee die-off situation, and supports rural enterprise and microenterprise investments.
Research into the “typical American diet” and its relationship to serious health issues and obesity informs us that Americans eat way too much junk and not nearly enough healthy food. Which, in a country that rations health care by income level and allows insurance companies to exclude people who actually need health care, would seem to be an important issue to address with education and real food availability in public institutions such as schools.
In 2005 the University of Michigan’s Integrative Medicine Clinical Services published a new food pyramid based on “healing” foods. Which emphasized fresh, unprocessed fruits and vegetables over grains, legumes (beans) and the more fatty foods at the top. The Agricultural Research Service published this past weekend a study that showed alkaline-producing fresh fruits and vegetables help preserve muscle mass in older men and women.
And researchers from USDA’s Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory have released findings that demonstrate organic farming methods including crop rotation complexity can offer a 30% greater yield than simple corn-soybean rotations.
As demand for organic meat, milk and basic commodities rises about 20% per year in this country, improvements in the technology of organic production will serve to increase availability. It has long been known that reduced use of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers (most with highly questionable ‘inert ingredients’ such as toxic waste from industry) will also improve water quality and the general fertility of our ‘breadbasket’ agricultural base land. It is hoped that the new farm bill, by emphasizing changes that need to be made in these directions, will speed America’s switch to sustainable practices and improve citizen’s health significantly.
A declaration of commercial fishery failure by Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has paved the way for Congress to allot funds for alleviating financial hardship among the West Coast’s commercial Chinook salmon fishing industry off California and Oregon. The crisis has been building steadily every year since 2000, culminating in this latest action – the commercial salmon fishing industry has essentially been shut down.
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] researchers suggest that changes in ocean conditions – possibly due to global warming – are to blame, along with loss of freshwater habitat for salmon spawning, a chronic problem.
There will be some coho salmon fishing allowed off the coast of Washington and northern Oregon, but there will be financial hardship in that industry as well due to strict limits. This crisis has been building for years, attempts along the way to mitigate it have proven to exacerbate the situation, such as the introduction of farmed salmon. Fish stock collapses in traditionally abundant fisheries off both coasts and elsewhere in the world bode ill for the seafood component of the human food supply, just as the worldwide food crisis heats up around the world for staple crops like corn and wheat and rice.
We could be beyond a tipping point right now, and things could get a bit more than just ‘interesting’ over the next months. Will science be able to come to the rescue, or will it remain helpless to mitigate the collapse of world food supplies? Stay tuned…
Links:
“Fishery Failure” Declared for West Coast Salmon Fishery
Hatchery Controversy Takes on New Significance as Wild Chinook Populations Crash
Escaped Farmed Salmon Infiltrate Fitter Wild Populations
Dramatic Declines in Wild Salmon Populations Linked to Farmed Salmon
For something different and profound, consider the case of a baby girl named Lali born near New Delhi, India on March 11. She has a rare birth defect called diprosopus that gave her two faces on one head. ABC News reported that the resident medical officer of the Saifi Hospital where Lali was born has thus far been unsuccessful in his attempts to convince the parents to allow CT scans or MRI to determine whether there are duplicated internal organs or invisible, life threatening deformities that might be corrected by surgery.
Most babies with this condition are stillborn or die shortly after birth, but Lali so far has shown no breathing or digestion difficulties, both mouths are being fed. She was born normally and left the hospital with her mother 8 hours after birth.
This condition is not technically a case of cojoined twinning, where a single embryo duplicates and does not completely separate. Rather, it is due to malfunctioning in the developing embryo of a single protein called Sonic hedgehog homolog [SHH]. SHH protein governs the width of the face and features, and governs proper development of the brain and spinal cord via a signaling cascade.
Very few two-faced animals (including humans) have survived, usually due to abnormalities of brain or internal organs. The most famous – until now – was a pig named Ditto who finally died from not being able to coordinate his breathing and swallowing.
As interesting as the specific cause and spectacular physical results are, the socio-cultural issue is just as phenomenal. It could be argued that the parents (poor villagers and farm workers) should be forced to allow the medical tests that would determine the extent of deformities not apparent on the outside, but in their situation one might as easily ask “what for?” So long as the baby is in no distress, why interfere?
In her home country Lali is considered to be a reincarnated goddess, one of Ganesh’s manifestations. Hindus from all over the country and world are making pilgrimages to touch her feet, and giving offerings toward her tender care and blessings. Worship is simply not the same sort of thing as a carnival freak show.
Also consider that in India the practice of female infanticide is rampant because couples want sons, not daughters. In this particular case, the girl-child is a great blessing from heaven, with an entire village to protect and defend her! That may be the best way to live a life (no matter how long or short), given what the child has been given.
While it would be great if medical researchers and biologists could trace the specifics of the abnormality, if we could know if Lali has two brains, and whether some environmental toxin in the parents’ rural farming region may have caused the situation, it’s okay for the people in this child’s life to treat her like a goddess.
Links:
Baby with 2 faces born
Baby With Two Faces Doing Well
Will Baby Survive?
Bloomberg reported today that whatever killed the bees last year is back again this year, threatening some $15 billion worth of crops that depend on bees for pollination.
Honeybee Deaths Resume in U.S. Hives cites the USDA’s top honeybee researcher as saying that the effects of continuing Colony Collapse Disorder should become apparent by the end of the month, when growers will see how effective the pollination of California’s huge almond crop has been.
“Colony Collapse Disorder” is a fancy name for an unknown entity, since no one has been able to figure out what’s killing the bees. The bees that have been found (most just disappear) have devastated immune systems, but still no one knows what, exactly, they’re dying of. The US lost a quarter of all hives in 2006 and 2007, and may lose that much or more this year despite the importation of Australian bees to replenish the supply.
Some experts think a virus is responsible, others say that any illness could easily kill bees whose immune systems have been seriously compromised, so it’s whatever is attacking immune systems that is the real killer. Dead bees that remain in the hives are infected with a host of pathogens – “every known bee virus” according to UK’s The Independent newspaper – not just one. Some bees were carrying five or six viruses at the same time, along with fungal infections. That is more likely to be a pesticide or herbicide being used on the crops or on neighboring crops, though others claim it’s just stress.
Some experts in Europe, where Colony Collapse Disorder is hitting Germany hard, are concerned about pollen from genetically modified crops, many of which contain microbial toxins – pesticide – in every cell. If that turns out to be the issue, farmers may end up with restrictions on growing genetically engineered crops in regions where bee pollinated crops are also grown. Research demonstrating that the transgenes in GE crops have migrated to wild plants may make restrictions a moot point, however, and we’ll just have to come up with another way to pollinate crops.
Links:
Honeybee Deaths Resume in U.S. Hives
European Bees Also Taking a Nosedive – Perhaps GM Crops?
Where ecological footprints fall. The environmental impacts of high- (red), middle- (blue) and low- (yellow) income nations fall on other income tiers, as indicated by the footprints. The numbers are in trillions of 2005 international dollars. (Credit: Thara Srinivasan/UC Berkeley)
Rich Nations’ Environmental Footprints Tread Heavily on Poor Countries offers a study led by former UC-Berkeley Thara Srinivasan that examined the impacts of intensive agricultural expansion, deforestation, overfishing. loss of mangrove swamps and forests, ozone depletion and climate change between 1961 and 2000.
For the 3-year project Srinivasan teamed up with Richard B. Norgaard, an ecological economist and professor of energy and resources at UC-Berkeley. This allowed the team to evaluate economic impacts as well as ecological footprints.
Not surprisingly, the team noticed that poor nations are much more adversely impacted than rich nations. The calculation of “ecological footprints” of low, middle and high income nations demonstrated graphically that the large ecological footprints of rich nations unfairly impact poor nations whose footprints are small.
Economically speaking, the impact on poor nations is greater than the entire debt of those nations, about which Srinivasan said, “The ecological debt could more than offset the financial debt of low-income nations.” And middle-income nations had impacts on poor nations equivalent to the rich nations.
The Chicago Tribune reports this week that scientists at Loyola University have established that the pollen, leaves and other plant parts of corn engineered to kill the European corn borer with Bt toxins could endanger the American midwest’s aquatic ecosystems when washed into nearby streams.
When eaten by aquatic insects called caddisflies, the Bt toxin stunts growth and increases mortality. These insects are food for fish and amphibians in the ecosystem. The scientists reportedly ‘feel’ that such unanticipated effects of GE technology need to be investigated, but of course the EPA and USDA (and Monsanto) don’t feel that way at all.
It might be difficult to separate the effects of GE plant wastes from the general toxic overload caused by modern agribusiness mega-farming practices, which also cause death and deformity among aquatic life forms and amphibians in midwestern ecosystems. And while consumers at home and abroad have made it known that they do not wish to consume genetically engineered pesticides disguised as food, the new market for corn as ethanol fodder makes it unlikely that GM corn is going to be phased out any time soon.
Related Links:
Older farmers less likely to plant Bt corn
GM corn might affect ecosystems
Eat to Live: 1 million against GM food
Eat to Live: Agriculture inspectors chided