Where Have All the Salmon Gone?
May 5 at 4:04pm by Aileen
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
Giant Antarctic Sea Creatures!
Mar 24 at 7:07pm by Aileen
Photo by John Mitchell - Antarctic explorers Sadie Mills and Niki Davey holding giant Macroptychaster sea stars.
During an 8-week survey expedition to the Antarctic Ross Sea south of New Zealand, researchers discovered a host of giant sea creatures. In addition to the starfish pictured above, there were “…huge worms, giant crustaceans and sea spiders the size of dinner plates,” according to Dr. Martin Riddle, leader of the Aurora Australis expedition.
The expedition collected some 30,000 specimens - including jellyfish with 12-foot tentacles - hundreds of which may be new to science. Riddle attributed the large size of polar species to cold water temperatures, few predators, high oxygen levels and longevity.
The expedition was a project of the International Polar Year program, where experts from 23 countries expect to mount 10 more expeditions to examine Antarctic sea life. The specimens collected so far will take a couple of years to fully categorize. It is hoped that the project’s cataloguing of Antarctic ocean biodiversity will help scientists monitor the impact of environmental change, as Antarctic waters should be among the first to respond to ocean acidification caused by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
10 Earth Science Questions for the 21st Century
Mar 15 at 5:05pm by Aileen
The National Research Council has identified and reported on Ten Questions that will shape 21st century earth science. Some may be a little surprised that these questions are still unanswered, having been told in no uncertain terms in science classes in the last century that science already had definitive answers to questions like how the earth and other planets in our solar system formed. Live and learn. Here’s a bare list of the identified questions…
1. How did earth and other planets form?
Scientists still do not know enough about how our planet got its elements to understand its evolution, or why other planets in our system are very different.
2. What happened during the first 500 million years?
Current scientific belief is that another planet collided with ours during the late formation stage, creating the moon and melting this planet all the way to its core. Yet unknown is how (and when) the Earth developed its atmosphere and oceans.
3. How did life begin?
Scientists hope to obtain evidence from rocks and minerals, as well as investigations of Mars and other members of our system.
Uneven Ecological and Economic Impacts of Rich vs. Poor
Jan 25 at 4:04pm by Aileen
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.
Human ETs, Tropical Polar Regions, and Self-Eating Cells as a Treatment for Cancer
Dec 31 at 5:05pm by Aileen
Earth scientists have managed to discover a lot of not-earth planets in the last couple of decades, though none of them look to be very much like Earth. Now Eric Ford, a University of Florida astronomer, has published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal that suggests To Curious Aliens, Earth Would Stand Out as Living Planet…
If they could measure our planet’s rotation, its atmospheric gases, the presence of abundant water, and calculate what our temperature range must be, our planet would definitely stand out as life-friendly. To intelligent life forms a lot like us, anyway. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it kind of neat to consider myself as ET. Even though I doubt we’d qualify as cute enough or friendly enough to other ETs for them to want to actually meet us.
A Candidate Debate on Science and Technology?
Dec 18 at 6:06pm by Aileen
They’re calling it Science Debate 2008. It’s a grassroots initiative to petition for a Presidential candidates forum specifically about issues of science and technology. The list of science bloggers in the Blogger Coalition is impressive, and represents almost all of Seed Media Group’s ScienceBlogs stable. The list of initial signers includes Nobel Prize laureates, academics, corporate CEOs, congresscritters, political science policy advisors, journal editors and regulatory agency veterans.
I heard about the initiative from Steven “DarkSyde” Andrew’s front page post announcing it over on Daily Kos on December 10th. He called for bipartisan and independent science bloggers to sign up, so I emailed the group through their form and offered my support. I didn’t get a reply and I’m not listed as a supporter, but I’m going to talk about it anyway.
Worried About Global Warming? Don’t Get Divorced!
Dec 6 at 8:08pm by Aileen
Researchers Jianguo “Jack” Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University have published data in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science demonstrating that getting divorced isn’t a ‘Green’ thing to do.
Soaring global divorce rates - even in places with strict religious policies against it - are driving urban sprawl and increasing consumption of resources like water and fuel for electricity.
Liu and Yu started with the obvious - when a couple divorces they require two housing units instead of one, even if the children share time at each. These require resources to construct and they take up space. They require fuel to heat and cool. The story in Science Daily, A Really Inconvenient Truth, notes that a refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to one person or to a family. Among the findings when they started digging deeper:
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