Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)
A childhood book, Two Little Savages, pointed out the blue hepatica as the first woodland wild flower of spring. Hepaticas hide their heads among their three lobed leaves and only open their starry blue or pink blooms when they’re ready. The more eager bloodroots seem to open all at once, ten days of joyful white blossoms at the edge of the garden and scattered throughout the meadow. Their fat reddish roots (that bleed when cut) choke out other plants, but not all: dutchman’s breeches send up their lacy leaves and stems of nodding pantaloons from tiny bulbs that sit below the roots of the larger plant a few weeks later. Bloodroot grows along the river and some lowland streams in our area. Like false hellbore (which outcompetes it), it favors pockets of rich soil. I moved a single clump from the riverbank to my garden forty years ago and now it grows throughout my garden and much of my meadow, especially where the grass is thinner. So it does well enough in our uplands away from water though I have never seen it in the wild there. Perhaps it hasn’t reached more distant areas in its post glacial travels or perhaps clearing and cattle grazing on the uplands in the nineteenth century led to its retreat to the center of its distribution.
Bloodroot sets lots of seed in plump scimitar shaped pods that poke up under its leaves in June. The seeds must germinate well: ants or birds have spread the plant all over my garden and meadow. I usually however reproduce bloodroot by root division, which is simpler than from seed. The naked reddish rhizomes lie just under the ground. A clump is easily lifted to pot or put elsewhere in the garden. You must do this if the bloodroots are encroaching on your yellow lady’s slippers or trilliums. (Even some hostas are vulnerable.) Bloodroots do well in sun or shade in any garden soil. Their leaves start to look messy in July, when you may cut them off.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Biology Comics
Aliens
My immigrant friend gets defensive when I brake and start pulling up purple loosestrife from the roadside. Another dastardly invasive, I say! What’s wrong with it, he says? It’s pretty!
We’re the invasives of course. Even the Indians only came here 10,000-30,000 years ago, some walking across the Bering Strait with their wary companions the moose and buffalo, others following the fish and manatees of the kelp beds around the coasts of Siberia and Alaska in skin boats. For them it was a new world too, with tame mammoths on the steppe, giant sloths lumbering across the Great Plains, a fruit eating rhinocerous in the forests of Central America.
Hunters and gatherers tend to live in the natural world, though they change it. Agricultural people have been taking apart ecosystems for the last 10,000 years. Industrial people have been creating entirely new worlds for 200.
Vertebrates (except herbivores) access much of the energy in sunlight through insects, which have more protein then beef. Herbivores eat plants (transformed sunlight) directly.
Frogs eat mosquitoes, songbirds caterpillars, falcons dragonflies, many birds beetles, the Everglade Kite snails (an invertebrate, not an insect). Mice eat insects, invertebrates and plants and are eaten by foxes, coyotes, hawks, owls, weasels and men. (Mouse skeletons have been found in fossilized human dung.)
Green plants, the terrestrial transformers of sunlight (let’s ignore the bacteria and archaea), engage in chemical warfare with each other and with the insects that graze on them. (Maybe 20% of the leaf mass of a forest tree is lost to leaf eating insects in a summer.)
The trees and other plants defend themselves by producing so called secondary metabolites (those chemicals not involved in their primary metabolism, that of converting sunlight and carbon dioxide to carbohydrate). These glycosides, phenols, terpenes and alkaloids affect the taste, digestibility and toxicity of plant leaves (and other parts). A caterpillar biting into an aspen leaf begins the production of tannins that will in hours make the leaf indigestible to it. The release of secondary metabolites into the air warns nearby trees of an insect infestation; they also begin producing defensive chemicals.
The insects evolve methods of detoxifying what the trees produce. Some make use of the toxins: thus monarch caterpillars store the glycosides produced by milkweed; the bitter taste of the butterfly keeps the birds from eating it: chemical warfare carried to the next generation.
Insects and plants thus coevolve, for tens of thousands or tens of millions of years. Perhaps 90% of herbivorous insects are thought to be specialists on a few species of plants, which they have evolved the capacity to eat (detoxifying their secondary metabolites). The rest are generalists, that take their chances.
New plants (say, asian rhododendrons in eastern North America) have chemical defenses to which the local insects are not adapted. The new plant thus has an advantage over the natives. New insects, diseases (meeting organisms without immunity), fungi, predators (meeting defenseless populations) and parasites may have similar advantages. The European genotype of Phragmites (giant reed) is eaten by 5 species of insects in the northeastern U.S. and by 170 in Europe, with the result that it is replacing the native strain of Phragmites (eaten by numerous native insects) here. The plants are the same species (they can interbreed) but have different chemical defenses (and their inedible offspring will be selected for).
Over 400 arthropods (insects and spiders) eat the Melaleuca tree in Australia, where it is rare, but 8 eat it in Florida, where it is far too common. (Over time, native insects will learn to eat Melaleuca and also the European Phragmites; but the time may be long.)
Europeans had a similar effect on their own species in the New World, as they brought with them the crowd diseases of the Eurasian agriculturalists to which the native peoples of the Americas had no immunity. So, in seventeenth century opinion, “the good hand of God” cleared the New World of its native peoples. (Europeans suffered a similar fate in Africa, where people and disease had been evolving together longest; approximately half the Europeans emigrating to West Africa died of disease in a year.)
Anyway, the point is that native plants are more edible to native insects and so produce up to 4 times the insect biomass of nonnative plants, and 35 times more caterpillars (a primary food of songbirds). They support a far greater biomass of insect eaters above them.
So I pull the (inedible) purple loosestrife out of the swamp.
Not all native species are equal. A hundred years ago the chestnut was the primary nut producer in the eastern forest (its production dwarfing that of the oaks and hickories). Its mast supported turkeys, deer, mice, squirrels, bears, decomposers, buffalo and people, and the caterpillars that fed on its tasty leaves supported huge populations of songbirds. The chestnut was killed by an imported fungus and its place (partly) taken by the tulip tree (a native), which supports little wildlife.
How to construct an ecosystem?
The problem is breaking ecosystems apart. In intact ecosystems aliens may establish a niche but are less likely become invasive. Their flowers and fruit may be used by the natives, even if their leaves are inedible. (In 10,000 years the leaves will become edible.)
Against some introductions— some predators, fungi, bacteria, insects, parasites, amphibians—there is no defense. For some time, as ships and planes spread plants and animals around, the world will become poorer (until, say, elms develop resistance to Dutch elm disease, American toads to chytrid fungus, chestnuts to chestnut blight).
As the abundant world fades, few will remember it.
Eventually a new world will blossom.
My immigrant friend gets defensive when I brake and start pulling up purple loosestrife from the roadside. Another dastardly invasive, I say! What’s wrong with it, he says? It’s pretty!
We’re the invasives of course. Even the Indians only came here 10,000-30,000 years ago, some walking across the Bering Strait with their wary companions the moose and buffalo, others following the fish and manatees of the kelp beds around the coasts of Siberia and Alaska in skin boats. For them it was a new world too, with tame mammoths on the steppe, giant sloths lumbering across the Great Plains, a fruit eating rhinocerous in the forests of Central America.
Hunters and gatherers tend to live in the natural world, though they change it. Agricultural people have been taking apart ecosystems for the last 10,000 years. Industrial people have been creating entirely new worlds for 200.
Vertebrates (except herbivores) access much of the energy in sunlight through insects, which have more protein then beef. Herbivores eat plants (transformed sunlight) directly.
Frogs eat mosquitoes, songbirds caterpillars, falcons dragonflies, many birds beetles, the Everglade Kite snails (an invertebrate, not an insect). Mice eat insects, invertebrates and plants and are eaten by foxes, coyotes, hawks, owls, weasels and men. (Mouse skeletons have been found in fossilized human dung.)
Green plants, the terrestrial transformers of sunlight (let’s ignore the bacteria and archaea), engage in chemical warfare with each other and with the insects that graze on them. (Maybe 20% of the leaf mass of a forest tree is lost to leaf eating insects in a summer.)
The trees and other plants defend themselves by producing so called secondary metabolites (those chemicals not involved in their primary metabolism, that of converting sunlight and carbon dioxide to carbohydrate). These glycosides, phenols, terpenes and alkaloids affect the taste, digestibility and toxicity of plant leaves (and other parts). A caterpillar biting into an aspen leaf begins the production of tannins that will in hours make the leaf indigestible to it. The release of secondary metabolites into the air warns nearby trees of an insect infestation; they also begin producing defensive chemicals.
The insects evolve methods of detoxifying what the trees produce. Some make use of the toxins: thus monarch caterpillars store the glycosides produced by milkweed; the bitter taste of the butterfly keeps the birds from eating it: chemical warfare carried to the next generation.
Insects and plants thus coevolve, for tens of thousands or tens of millions of years. Perhaps 90% of herbivorous insects are thought to be specialists on a few species of plants, which they have evolved the capacity to eat (detoxifying their secondary metabolites). The rest are generalists, that take their chances.
New plants (say, asian rhododendrons in eastern North America) have chemical defenses to which the local insects are not adapted. The new plant thus has an advantage over the natives. New insects, diseases (meeting organisms without immunity), fungi, predators (meeting defenseless populations) and parasites may have similar advantages. The European genotype of Phragmites (giant reed) is eaten by 5 species of insects in the northeastern U.S. and by 170 in Europe, with the result that it is replacing the native strain of Phragmites (eaten by numerous native insects) here. The plants are the same species (they can interbreed) but have different chemical defenses (and their inedible offspring will be selected for).
Over 400 arthropods (insects and spiders) eat the Melaleuca tree in Australia, where it is rare, but 8 eat it in Florida, where it is far too common. (Over time, native insects will learn to eat Melaleuca and also the European Phragmites; but the time may be long.)
Europeans had a similar effect on their own species in the New World, as they brought with them the crowd diseases of the Eurasian agriculturalists to which the native peoples of the Americas had no immunity. So, in seventeenth century opinion, “the good hand of God” cleared the New World of its native peoples. (Europeans suffered a similar fate in Africa, where people and disease had been evolving together longest; approximately half the Europeans emigrating to West Africa died of disease in a year.)
Anyway, the point is that native plants are more edible to native insects and so produce up to 4 times the insect biomass of nonnative plants, and 35 times more caterpillars (a primary food of songbirds). They support a far greater biomass of insect eaters above them.
So I pull the (inedible) purple loosestrife out of the swamp.
Not all native species are equal. A hundred years ago the chestnut was the primary nut producer in the eastern forest (its production dwarfing that of the oaks and hickories). Its mast supported turkeys, deer, mice, squirrels, bears, decomposers, buffalo and people, and the caterpillars that fed on its tasty leaves supported huge populations of songbirds. The chestnut was killed by an imported fungus and its place (partly) taken by the tulip tree (a native), which supports little wildlife.
How to construct an ecosystem?
The problem is breaking ecosystems apart. In intact ecosystems aliens may establish a niche but are less likely become invasive. Their flowers and fruit may be used by the natives, even if their leaves are inedible. (In 10,000 years the leaves will become edible.)
Against some introductions— some predators, fungi, bacteria, insects, parasites, amphibians—there is no defense. For some time, as ships and planes spread plants and animals around, the world will become poorer (until, say, elms develop resistance to Dutch elm disease, American toads to chytrid fungus, chestnuts to chestnut blight).
As the abundant world fades, few will remember it.
Eventually a new world will blossom.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Biology Comics
Biochar and Silicate Rocks
Heavy rains are increasing, Arctic ice is melting, Russian peat bogs are burning, methane is bubbling out of the East Siberian Sea, the summer’s heat and humidity grows and grows. Alone each means nothing, together they add up to a changing climate, which only demagogs and idiots ignore.
Of course it may all turn around and (especially here in the U.S. northeast) turn cold for the next 1000 years. We are poking the climate beast, with unpredictable results, as Wallace Broecker remarks.
The problem is too much carbon dioxide (and other heat trapping gases, such as methane, nitrous oxide and the chlorofluorocarbons) in the atmosphere. And too much soot and black carbon in the air and falling out on Arctic ice.
We’re putting the gases (and the soot and dust) there. Since modern life runs on fossil fuels, we aren’t likely to stop; or stop fast enough. Is anyone going to make China stop? Or India? Or the U.S. for that matter?
Saving energy is boring, nuclear power risky, wind and solar are expensive and require storage schemes (pumped water reservoirs, chemical batteries) that are expensive, destructive or dangerous. Forget about sequestering carbon from smokestacks, it’s too complicated, it takes too much energy, it’s a pipe dream. What free lunch?
So what about continuing to dig up coal and geoengineer the planet? Launch tiny mirrors into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back to space. (Of course the ocean and atmosphere would continue to acidify.) Spray sulfur dioxide from planes into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, or hey!—just remove the controls on sulfur from fossil fuels. Or spray seawater into the atmosphere to increase the reflectivity of clouds. Or pump seawater onto Arctic ice to thicken it. (Why not, to the last two.)
Lime the planet to counter acid rain!
The main downside of schemes to reduce incoming sunlight is that the planet will continue to acidify. As for spraying sulfur dioxide, the sulfur dioxide will eventually fall out on the land and ocean. There are probably other downsides—changes in rainfall or airflow, changes in stratospheric chemistry or the growth rate of plants. To think all such effects are predictable is nonsense.
So what about taking carbon dioxide directly from the air. One idea is to fertilize the oceans with urea (a nitrogen fertilizer), or finely ground iron (a limiting nutrient in the sea), or by installing huge pipes to increase the transfer of nutrients from deep water (where they are common) to the sunlit surface (where they fuel algal growth). The fertilized algae on the surface divide and grow, are eaten by fish (or die), and sink as tiny corpses or fish poop to the bottom of the ocean where the carbon (taken by the algae from the air) is locked up for thousands of years. Unfortunately, fertilization schemes don’t seem to work (the carbon stored is negligible compared to the effort put into fertilization). Their other effects on the sea are also unknown.
On the other hand, our overfishing of the oceans (a natural result of unregulated capitalistic effort) is reducing them to ecosystems of algae and jellyfish, while our heavy fertilization of large continental watersheds, with the resulting dead zones of maximized algal growth at the mouths of major rivers, may be storing more carbon than we realize. (The oil in farm fertilizer producing more oil in sediments.) Of course destroying the oceans to save the planet is nuts.
What to do? Well all that boring stuff (fast breeder reactors, reducing population, cars that get 200 miles to the gallon, insulating houses, reducing poverty, empowering poor women—both the last tend to reduce population growth) helps. Reforesting or revegetating degraded lands stores carbon in soils, plants and trees. Reducing numbers of cattle and sheep on overgrazed lands (say in the U.S. Great Basin and High Plains) lets shrubs and perennial grasses store carbon in soils. So does rotational grazing of dairy cattle on eastern or midwestern pastures. Proper management of croplands lets them store some carbon (or lose less). Some writers claim the soils’ carbon stores are full after 15-30 years, but soil storage capacity undoubtedly varies with the site.
Reforesting degraded lands lets trees store carbon in their tissues and in the soil. Billions of acres of degraded lands are candidates for reforestation: much of the Mediterranean basin, including the mountainous islands; much of China; the Tibetan plateau; the Andean altiplano (both were deforested by people thousands of years ago for their crops and animals); the Himalayan foothills; much of the U.S. Southeast and Midwest; some deserts.
In the Sahel in the 1970s, millet farmers let acacia trees grow in their fields. This was a folk technique that had been mocked by modern agronomists. The trees provided forage for the animals, which meant more manure for the crops. More trees grew, sprouting in the dung of the (more numerous) grazing animals. This let the farmers raise more animals, which meant more dung and more cropland. Eventually several million acres of the Sahel were reclaimed for agriculture. The trees store carbon in the soil and have slightly increased rainfall over the northern Sahel.
The huarango tree of the Atacama Desert in Peru (one of the driest places in the world) captures water from ocean mists. Its roots draw up water from 150 feet down. It breaks the wind over the desert and, by condensing mists, moistens (slightly) the upper layers of the soil. It lives a millennium and (a mesquite) produces a sweet edible pod, which can be used for fodder, ground into flour, or made into a syrup or beer. Its fragrant blossoms support bees. The Nazca of 1500 years ago cut down huarangos to plant irrigated cotton and corn in the river valleys, exposing the desert to floods and wind erosion. Modern residents of the Atacama cut the trees for firewood. The tree is thorny, not particularly attractive, and invasive where successful and could support a life based on carbon storage, goats, honey and beer.
Agricultural revegetation of degraded lands (acacia trees, camels and millet; salicornia, a forage crop irrigable with seawater; huarango trees; jojoba, a shrub with oil bearing seeds; grapevines; mangoes; pomegranates; other fruit and nut trees) lets carbon accumulate in soils. If the prunings from the trees and the crop wastes are converted to charcoal (biochar) and spread on farmland (where the char promotes plant growth) their carbon will be stored for tens of thousands of years. (Perhaps 50,000 years: this will work in industrial agriculture; with poor peasant farmers, the charcoal will be used for cooking.)
Turning the crop residues of industrial agriculture into biochar would store billions of tons of carbon a year. Estimates range from 1-2 billion tons a year. (We release 8-9 billion tons of carbon as carbon dioxide a year to the atmosphere.) The equipment to turn corn stalks or wheat straw into charcoal is cheap, the process simple. Since biochar makes an excellent fertilizer, and reduces fertilizer runoff, the equipment would pay for itself in a year or two.
Revegetated forestlands store carbon in the trees and in the soil. The carbon in the trees is released to the atmosphere when the trees are cut (most processed trees return as carbon to the atmosphere in ten years); or when they die and decay. While growing, the forests continue to store carbon (say, for 300-2000 years). When storage slows, the best way to cut the trees is selectively, so as to expose the soil as little as possible to sunlight, which speeds up its losses of carbon. The best bottom log could be used as sawn lumber (a carbon loss, factored into any payments for carbon storage; but the trunk represents only a fraction of the tree’s mass) and the rest converted to biochar and spread back on the forest; or sold to spread on farmland. If landowners are to be paid for storing carbon, the way to maximize a forest’s carbon storage would have to be worked out; and calculated by the year or decade. We have 300 years to do that. Any payments for carbon storage should be based on real numbers, not guesses. Payments from, say, a tax on fossil fuels.
Changing agricultural practices to capture carbon; revegetating degraded lands; producing biochar involve no downsides of which I am aware. Such practices would produce a return on investment and improve the nutrient storage capacity of watersheds, and thus improve the health of riverine and ocean fisheries. We might store a quarter of the carbon dioxide we currently produce by such methods, perhaps more.
One other technique offers carbon storage, but with a limited downside. This involves capturing carbon dioxide through its natural (exothermic) reaction with magnesium oxide or calcium oxide rocks. The reaction forms stable carbonates (limestones). One can foster this reaction by mining and grinding the rocks and spreading them on land or on the sea. The energy involved in the mining and pulverizing is inconsequential in comparison with the carbon stored. Spreading the powder on the ocean (especially over the productive continental shelves) lets one reduce the acidification of the sea as well as capture carbon dioxide from the air. (A free lunch?) One picks cliffs of the appropriate rocks on a seacoast (volcanic rocks are good), sets up a mine and sends the powder down to slow moving ships that spread it over the sea. (Schemes like this have been suggested for the Scottish coast to produce builders gravel.)
In biologically appropriate situations, the mine could be made into a pit for pumped storage of seawater (another munch at lunch). This isn’t appropriate where marine life would be harmed, thus not, say, on the Palisade escarpment north of New York City, above the Hudson estuary, where the rock is appropriate and the pumped storage capacity could use the photovoltaic output of the city, but the damage to the estuary would likely be great.
The variability of solar power means it has to be backed up. The power supply for a modern grid cannot be interrupted or the system will crash. Since the output from the sun and wind is unpredictable, one must either invest in double the capacity—the fossil or nuclear fuelled grid as well as the unreliable photovoltaic or wind capacity— or have some storage that can be switched on when the solar supply falters. Flywheels; chemical batteries; compressed air in abandoned mines; pumped storage all work. Pumped water from the sea is a natural (say, on Oahu in Hawaii; in the Canaries; in California or Maine; in Scotland). A pumped storage scheme was suggested for Storm King Mountain on the Hudson in the late sixties but was abandoned after an outcry from environmentalists (me included). The high dams on the ruined rivers of the U.S. west (the Colorado, the Yellowstone, the Columbia) offer obvious sites for pumped storage: all they lack are the pumps and a safe way (for the riverine biota) to pump sufficient volumes of water back up behind the dams. (A nonbiologically invasive way to extract water from rivers would make many things better.)
Of course, the ultimate solution to climate change is fewer people, saving energy, fast breeder reactors, the electrification of transport and the energy supply (so all energy can be provided by the sun). Alleviating poverty and empowering women, the projects of the “skeptical environmentalist,” a foolish and publicity hungry Dane, will also reduce population.
Let’s do it all! Make biochar, mine silicate rocks, have one child, and plant trees.
Heavy rains are increasing, Arctic ice is melting, Russian peat bogs are burning, methane is bubbling out of the East Siberian Sea, the summer’s heat and humidity grows and grows. Alone each means nothing, together they add up to a changing climate, which only demagogs and idiots ignore.
Of course it may all turn around and (especially here in the U.S. northeast) turn cold for the next 1000 years. We are poking the climate beast, with unpredictable results, as Wallace Broecker remarks.
The problem is too much carbon dioxide (and other heat trapping gases, such as methane, nitrous oxide and the chlorofluorocarbons) in the atmosphere. And too much soot and black carbon in the air and falling out on Arctic ice.
We’re putting the gases (and the soot and dust) there. Since modern life runs on fossil fuels, we aren’t likely to stop; or stop fast enough. Is anyone going to make China stop? Or India? Or the U.S. for that matter?
Saving energy is boring, nuclear power risky, wind and solar are expensive and require storage schemes (pumped water reservoirs, chemical batteries) that are expensive, destructive or dangerous. Forget about sequestering carbon from smokestacks, it’s too complicated, it takes too much energy, it’s a pipe dream. What free lunch?
So what about continuing to dig up coal and geoengineer the planet? Launch tiny mirrors into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back to space. (Of course the ocean and atmosphere would continue to acidify.) Spray sulfur dioxide from planes into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, or hey!—just remove the controls on sulfur from fossil fuels. Or spray seawater into the atmosphere to increase the reflectivity of clouds. Or pump seawater onto Arctic ice to thicken it. (Why not, to the last two.)
Lime the planet to counter acid rain!
The main downside of schemes to reduce incoming sunlight is that the planet will continue to acidify. As for spraying sulfur dioxide, the sulfur dioxide will eventually fall out on the land and ocean. There are probably other downsides—changes in rainfall or airflow, changes in stratospheric chemistry or the growth rate of plants. To think all such effects are predictable is nonsense.
So what about taking carbon dioxide directly from the air. One idea is to fertilize the oceans with urea (a nitrogen fertilizer), or finely ground iron (a limiting nutrient in the sea), or by installing huge pipes to increase the transfer of nutrients from deep water (where they are common) to the sunlit surface (where they fuel algal growth). The fertilized algae on the surface divide and grow, are eaten by fish (or die), and sink as tiny corpses or fish poop to the bottom of the ocean where the carbon (taken by the algae from the air) is locked up for thousands of years. Unfortunately, fertilization schemes don’t seem to work (the carbon stored is negligible compared to the effort put into fertilization). Their other effects on the sea are also unknown.
On the other hand, our overfishing of the oceans (a natural result of unregulated capitalistic effort) is reducing them to ecosystems of algae and jellyfish, while our heavy fertilization of large continental watersheds, with the resulting dead zones of maximized algal growth at the mouths of major rivers, may be storing more carbon than we realize. (The oil in farm fertilizer producing more oil in sediments.) Of course destroying the oceans to save the planet is nuts.
What to do? Well all that boring stuff (fast breeder reactors, reducing population, cars that get 200 miles to the gallon, insulating houses, reducing poverty, empowering poor women—both the last tend to reduce population growth) helps. Reforesting or revegetating degraded lands stores carbon in soils, plants and trees. Reducing numbers of cattle and sheep on overgrazed lands (say in the U.S. Great Basin and High Plains) lets shrubs and perennial grasses store carbon in soils. So does rotational grazing of dairy cattle on eastern or midwestern pastures. Proper management of croplands lets them store some carbon (or lose less). Some writers claim the soils’ carbon stores are full after 15-30 years, but soil storage capacity undoubtedly varies with the site.
Reforesting degraded lands lets trees store carbon in their tissues and in the soil. Billions of acres of degraded lands are candidates for reforestation: much of the Mediterranean basin, including the mountainous islands; much of China; the Tibetan plateau; the Andean altiplano (both were deforested by people thousands of years ago for their crops and animals); the Himalayan foothills; much of the U.S. Southeast and Midwest; some deserts.
In the Sahel in the 1970s, millet farmers let acacia trees grow in their fields. This was a folk technique that had been mocked by modern agronomists. The trees provided forage for the animals, which meant more manure for the crops. More trees grew, sprouting in the dung of the (more numerous) grazing animals. This let the farmers raise more animals, which meant more dung and more cropland. Eventually several million acres of the Sahel were reclaimed for agriculture. The trees store carbon in the soil and have slightly increased rainfall over the northern Sahel.
The huarango tree of the Atacama Desert in Peru (one of the driest places in the world) captures water from ocean mists. Its roots draw up water from 150 feet down. It breaks the wind over the desert and, by condensing mists, moistens (slightly) the upper layers of the soil. It lives a millennium and (a mesquite) produces a sweet edible pod, which can be used for fodder, ground into flour, or made into a syrup or beer. Its fragrant blossoms support bees. The Nazca of 1500 years ago cut down huarangos to plant irrigated cotton and corn in the river valleys, exposing the desert to floods and wind erosion. Modern residents of the Atacama cut the trees for firewood. The tree is thorny, not particularly attractive, and invasive where successful and could support a life based on carbon storage, goats, honey and beer.
Agricultural revegetation of degraded lands (acacia trees, camels and millet; salicornia, a forage crop irrigable with seawater; huarango trees; jojoba, a shrub with oil bearing seeds; grapevines; mangoes; pomegranates; other fruit and nut trees) lets carbon accumulate in soils. If the prunings from the trees and the crop wastes are converted to charcoal (biochar) and spread on farmland (where the char promotes plant growth) their carbon will be stored for tens of thousands of years. (Perhaps 50,000 years: this will work in industrial agriculture; with poor peasant farmers, the charcoal will be used for cooking.)
Turning the crop residues of industrial agriculture into biochar would store billions of tons of carbon a year. Estimates range from 1-2 billion tons a year. (We release 8-9 billion tons of carbon as carbon dioxide a year to the atmosphere.) The equipment to turn corn stalks or wheat straw into charcoal is cheap, the process simple. Since biochar makes an excellent fertilizer, and reduces fertilizer runoff, the equipment would pay for itself in a year or two.
Revegetated forestlands store carbon in the trees and in the soil. The carbon in the trees is released to the atmosphere when the trees are cut (most processed trees return as carbon to the atmosphere in ten years); or when they die and decay. While growing, the forests continue to store carbon (say, for 300-2000 years). When storage slows, the best way to cut the trees is selectively, so as to expose the soil as little as possible to sunlight, which speeds up its losses of carbon. The best bottom log could be used as sawn lumber (a carbon loss, factored into any payments for carbon storage; but the trunk represents only a fraction of the tree’s mass) and the rest converted to biochar and spread back on the forest; or sold to spread on farmland. If landowners are to be paid for storing carbon, the way to maximize a forest’s carbon storage would have to be worked out; and calculated by the year or decade. We have 300 years to do that. Any payments for carbon storage should be based on real numbers, not guesses. Payments from, say, a tax on fossil fuels.
Changing agricultural practices to capture carbon; revegetating degraded lands; producing biochar involve no downsides of which I am aware. Such practices would produce a return on investment and improve the nutrient storage capacity of watersheds, and thus improve the health of riverine and ocean fisheries. We might store a quarter of the carbon dioxide we currently produce by such methods, perhaps more.
One other technique offers carbon storage, but with a limited downside. This involves capturing carbon dioxide through its natural (exothermic) reaction with magnesium oxide or calcium oxide rocks. The reaction forms stable carbonates (limestones). One can foster this reaction by mining and grinding the rocks and spreading them on land or on the sea. The energy involved in the mining and pulverizing is inconsequential in comparison with the carbon stored. Spreading the powder on the ocean (especially over the productive continental shelves) lets one reduce the acidification of the sea as well as capture carbon dioxide from the air. (A free lunch?) One picks cliffs of the appropriate rocks on a seacoast (volcanic rocks are good), sets up a mine and sends the powder down to slow moving ships that spread it over the sea. (Schemes like this have been suggested for the Scottish coast to produce builders gravel.)
In biologically appropriate situations, the mine could be made into a pit for pumped storage of seawater (another munch at lunch). This isn’t appropriate where marine life would be harmed, thus not, say, on the Palisade escarpment north of New York City, above the Hudson estuary, where the rock is appropriate and the pumped storage capacity could use the photovoltaic output of the city, but the damage to the estuary would likely be great.
The variability of solar power means it has to be backed up. The power supply for a modern grid cannot be interrupted or the system will crash. Since the output from the sun and wind is unpredictable, one must either invest in double the capacity—the fossil or nuclear fuelled grid as well as the unreliable photovoltaic or wind capacity— or have some storage that can be switched on when the solar supply falters. Flywheels; chemical batteries; compressed air in abandoned mines; pumped storage all work. Pumped water from the sea is a natural (say, on Oahu in Hawaii; in the Canaries; in California or Maine; in Scotland). A pumped storage scheme was suggested for Storm King Mountain on the Hudson in the late sixties but was abandoned after an outcry from environmentalists (me included). The high dams on the ruined rivers of the U.S. west (the Colorado, the Yellowstone, the Columbia) offer obvious sites for pumped storage: all they lack are the pumps and a safe way (for the riverine biota) to pump sufficient volumes of water back up behind the dams. (A nonbiologically invasive way to extract water from rivers would make many things better.)
Of course, the ultimate solution to climate change is fewer people, saving energy, fast breeder reactors, the electrification of transport and the energy supply (so all energy can be provided by the sun). Alleviating poverty and empowering women, the projects of the “skeptical environmentalist,” a foolish and publicity hungry Dane, will also reduce population.
Let’s do it all! Make biochar, mine silicate rocks, have one child, and plant trees.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Biology Comics
Suburbs are for the Birds!
In an earlier Comic I mentioned the local cowbirds terrorized by sharpshinned hawks and merlins. The cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and let them raise their young; the growing cowbirds push the competing young out of the nest. Over the last century cowbirds have spread from the plains and prairies east into the artificial human prairie that has replaced the eastern forest in North America and (along with midsized predators like raccoons, opossums, house cats and skunks) have helped reduce songbirds populations by 50% or more (habitat change and industrial pollution also helped). When I moved to the Adirondacks in 1972 the spring sighting of a male cowbird gurgling from the top of our bare apple tree, the glossy black singer perched above his two dove gray companions, made me smile. The cowbird was a common bird in central New York, where I grew up, but (like the raven or the turkey vulture) uncommon in the Adirondacks in the 1950s.
While doing his laundry in a nearby village a friend watched a merlin (a fierce little falcon the size of a robin) harassing the starlings that nested in the eves of the laundromat. Merlins were extremely uncommon 40-50 years ago but over the last decade have been on a roll.
Until fairly recently it was legal to shoot hawks (many of them ate domestic chickens and ducks) and in the early twentieth century thousands were shot each fall as they slid south on air currents above Appalachian ridges, or cruised along Atlantic beaches. Walkers in the woods shot them. Pennsylvania had a $5 bounty on goshawks in the 1930s (not a small sum at the time) when Hawk Mountain Sanctuary was established. Bird books from the early twentieth century debated which raptors should be eliminated: usually the verdict fell on the bird killers, the three short winged hunters of the forest, the sharpshin, the Cooper’s hawk, the goshawk, birds of similar form and abilities in different sizes. The merlin’s rarity made it unimportant. The writers of the books were ornithologists (they favored more songbirds). The story is the same as for mountain lions and wolves (to which many hawks were compared): shot to save the deer.
These books have tales from when hawks were more abundant. Goshawks, the largest of the accepters (and thus the least common, but commonly seen) would strike a rabbit or a hen with such force that the animal’s side would be torn off. When shot at while striking a hen, a goshawk would attack the man with the gun. In thick cover they would bound under trees after rabbits they had missed. Anything that flew or ran was fair game. One battle between a goshawk and a barred owl ended with both birds dead, the owl bleeding to death, the goshawk beheaded.
Large hunters are used to getting their way. They don’t like to be told what to do. Their fierceness helps them survive.
Hawks also suffered from eggshell thinning during the age of DDT (1945-1972 in the United States; approximately the economic life of the manufacturing facility). DDT interfered with calcium metabolism in birds; the result was eggshells that broke under the weight of a brooding bird. Not only hawks suffered, smaller birds did also, but being at the top of long food chains that accumulated the chemical, hawks suffered the most. Peregrine falcons more or less disappeared from Great Britain and the eastern United States. Goshawks, which eat gamebirds and small mammals, which eat leaves, berries and grass (thus situated at the end of shorter foodchains), suffered less.
Lately other chemicals, including other industrial chlorinated hydrocarbons that act as hormone mimics, like DDT, and heavy metals like mercury, a neurotoxin released by burning coal, have become problems for some birds (gulls, cormorants, thrushes); but some raptors seem to be increasing.
Not only hawks were more abundant. Flocks of black billed cuckoos followed infestations of tent caterpillars and would clear small orchards of their nests in a day. One of the common names for the rose breasted grosbeak was potato bug bird; but I have never seen grosbeaks eating potato bugs (or in numbers that could eat enough to help). Cuckoos are now rather uncommon and the silken nests of tent caterpillars on roadside trees (most birds won’t eat the hairy adults) go unmolested.
Such stories make one suspect that populations of North American breeding birds are really down 90-95% from the time of European settlement.
Conservationists who want to restore large animals speak of the three Cs: cores, corridors, carnivores. Cores are ecosystems restored as much as possible to their wild state (thus without people in the developed world). Corridors connect cores, turning separate populations of plants and animals into metapopulations. Carnivores influence the growth of plants and the abundance and types of animals and so are necessary for the health of cores.
This influence of carnivores happens on all size levels, from microbes to moose. Large carnivores influence forest succession by eating large herbivores like deer and moose, which through their feeding habits influence forest succession and the plants of the forest floor. Large carnivores also eat midsized carnivores (their competition; or a tasty snack) and so influence songbird numbers. (Many so called mid size predators are nest predators of songbirds.)
The same is true in birds. Large raptors like goshawks eat crows (a nest robber, also on the increase since shooting of crows has been regulated) as well as rabbits and squirrels. Some great horned owls specialize in crows, which roost communally. Thus one sees flocks of crows roosting at night in the bright lights near malls or superhighways. Smaller raptors eat jays (another nest predator) as well birds the size of starlings and waxwings and also smaller ones like indigo buntings, house wrens and English sparrows.
North Americans are unlikely to live with mountain lions or wolves, despite the fact that deer, which are involved in 1.5 million car accidents yearly in North America, kill many more people than either. (Mountain lions will stalk and kill people but wolves, at least in North America, avoid them.) From a purely utilitarian point of view, we would be better off if mountain lions were abundant enough to control deer numbers and so reduce the number of people killed in collisions with deer (about 225 annually), even if the lions killed 10-20 people a year.
But the emotional difference between dying from a collision with a long legged herbivore that dashes into the road and from being stalked by a large cat that pounces on you from behind, breaks your neck, opens your chest and eats your heart and lungs, is of course considerable.
North Americans may manage to live with coyotes (many millions of Los Angelenos already do), which kill feral (and pet) cats, a major predator of songbirds (and keep many house cats, terrified, indoors). Coyotes have a major influence on songbird populations in Californian canyons: where there are coyotes there are songbirds, where not, not. Coyotes probably have some influence on deer populations through capturing fawns. (They may have more as, in the absence of the wolf, some populations evolve into a larger animal, better able to deal with larger prey.) Coyotes also eat chipmunks and white footed mice, a carrier of Lyme disease.
All this brings us to the suburbs, the modern barnyard, where dogs, cats and cars replace cattle, pigs and chickens: the home of modern people.
In dry climate suburbs are oases of damp. Screech owls are more abundant in Texas suburbs with their sprinkled lawns, and abundant insect life (a major part of the owl’s diet), than out in the dry countryside. (How long the sprinkling will last is another matter.) Many people feed songbirds, attracting at the same time raccoons, Norway rats, skunks, coyotes, crows, bears, red squirrels, chipmunks, white footed mice and other animals, whose presence they often come to regard as a problem. So suburban homes are equipped with pellet guns.
There are two problems. The first is deciding which animals we want to live with; the second is managing the habitat so as to provide a more complete compliment of species and so help control animals like crows, jays, opossums, English sparrows, feral cats and perhaps infections like Lyme disease. (The more species for the Ixodes ticks to bite, the less their level of infection—most animals are not competent carriers of the disease.)
Large undeveloped areas help. Not building the suburb but rebuilding the city to be more livable with trees, parks and public transportation, and still holding more people, helps the most. Deer may retreat to the wooded parts of cemeteries or golf courses during the day. Foxes, skunks and raccoons will make do with little cover, living under porches and becoming mostly nocturnal. More bears in Nevada live in Las Vegas than in the countryside. The city bears grow larger and have more young (on abundant dumpster food); but die more frequently in automobile accidents.
Keeping bears out of Las Vegas thus means bear proof dumpsters, and probably hunting; while keeping mountain lions out of western suburbs means keeping out deer, and probably shooting lions.
But we can deal with coyotes, as we do with (much more dangerous) pet dogs. Thus the undeveloped areas in the suburbs, ideally near watercourses. Coyotes need a retreat, as do great horned owls, barred owls and goshawks. Goshawks prefer a substantial tree (though not as substantial as those favored by the long winged ospreys and eagles), owls like dense cover for resting and nesting (a clump of hemlocks in a larger wood). Some owls will use nest boxes and, like bluebirds or wood ducks, their number can probably be increased this way, with salutary effects on populations of small rodents (like white footed mice).
Resident Canada geese can be controlled partly by manipulating their landscape: letting the grass grow. Geese will avoid tall grass or other cover in which coyotes can hide, while large areas of freshly mowed grass are ideal for them: long vistas; and a new meal, every day. Actually the cycle of grass, goose poop, grass is a virtuous circle which intelligent landscape managers could use (and thus save their fertilizer expenses) by devising a machine to pick up the poop to pile and compost (or pulverize and scatter). Clever construction of golf courses or playing fields would help keep geese away from people and their sandals. Some tolerance is necessary in any situation with animals, as is some predation on the geese, young or old, by humans, egg eating foxes, neck snapping coyotes, owls, goshawks and eagles.
So I imagine suburbs as fingers of settlement in larger swaths of desert, prairie or forest; the people generally on higher ground, away from water, near the breezes. Trees shade suburban roads, deciduous trees shade the south side of houses, clumps of evergreens block northwest winds. Banks of solar collectors shade roofs, laundry decorates the yards. Water drains in open ditches with cattails, frogs, nesting wrens, and probably a few mosquitoes. Such drains also absorb runoff from streets and parking lots (some also covered with solar collectors). The open land near the houses has playing fields and places for dogs to run, while the land further away (or near damper habitat) is left alone, with a few trails for birdwatchers or budding naturalists. Dead trees in the woods are left standing. Fallen trees are left on the ground. Larger streams run through the suburbs as corridors of native habitat, thus further filtering (along with the open vegetated drains) the runoff water that reaches them. Ideally, the sewage effluent from the town, purged of toxins (or free of them, since none go down the drain) only add sufficient nutrients to the water to improve the fishery (as that notable one for brown trout in the Bow River that runs through Calgary, Alberta; the brown trout is not native to the Bow and is out competing the native cutthroat trout—the same story as with browns and brook trout in the East—but nothing’s perfect). This is a matter of the volume of nutrients and of the stream.
Of course most of the nutrients in the sewage belong back on nearby farmland, with which, like the urban center, the suburb is allied.
In an earlier Comic I mentioned the local cowbirds terrorized by sharpshinned hawks and merlins. The cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and let them raise their young; the growing cowbirds push the competing young out of the nest. Over the last century cowbirds have spread from the plains and prairies east into the artificial human prairie that has replaced the eastern forest in North America and (along with midsized predators like raccoons, opossums, house cats and skunks) have helped reduce songbirds populations by 50% or more (habitat change and industrial pollution also helped). When I moved to the Adirondacks in 1972 the spring sighting of a male cowbird gurgling from the top of our bare apple tree, the glossy black singer perched above his two dove gray companions, made me smile. The cowbird was a common bird in central New York, where I grew up, but (like the raven or the turkey vulture) uncommon in the Adirondacks in the 1950s.
While doing his laundry in a nearby village a friend watched a merlin (a fierce little falcon the size of a robin) harassing the starlings that nested in the eves of the laundromat. Merlins were extremely uncommon 40-50 years ago but over the last decade have been on a roll.
Until fairly recently it was legal to shoot hawks (many of them ate domestic chickens and ducks) and in the early twentieth century thousands were shot each fall as they slid south on air currents above Appalachian ridges, or cruised along Atlantic beaches. Walkers in the woods shot them. Pennsylvania had a $5 bounty on goshawks in the 1930s (not a small sum at the time) when Hawk Mountain Sanctuary was established. Bird books from the early twentieth century debated which raptors should be eliminated: usually the verdict fell on the bird killers, the three short winged hunters of the forest, the sharpshin, the Cooper’s hawk, the goshawk, birds of similar form and abilities in different sizes. The merlin’s rarity made it unimportant. The writers of the books were ornithologists (they favored more songbirds). The story is the same as for mountain lions and wolves (to which many hawks were compared): shot to save the deer.
These books have tales from when hawks were more abundant. Goshawks, the largest of the accepters (and thus the least common, but commonly seen) would strike a rabbit or a hen with such force that the animal’s side would be torn off. When shot at while striking a hen, a goshawk would attack the man with the gun. In thick cover they would bound under trees after rabbits they had missed. Anything that flew or ran was fair game. One battle between a goshawk and a barred owl ended with both birds dead, the owl bleeding to death, the goshawk beheaded.
Large hunters are used to getting their way. They don’t like to be told what to do. Their fierceness helps them survive.
Hawks also suffered from eggshell thinning during the age of DDT (1945-1972 in the United States; approximately the economic life of the manufacturing facility). DDT interfered with calcium metabolism in birds; the result was eggshells that broke under the weight of a brooding bird. Not only hawks suffered, smaller birds did also, but being at the top of long food chains that accumulated the chemical, hawks suffered the most. Peregrine falcons more or less disappeared from Great Britain and the eastern United States. Goshawks, which eat gamebirds and small mammals, which eat leaves, berries and grass (thus situated at the end of shorter foodchains), suffered less.
Lately other chemicals, including other industrial chlorinated hydrocarbons that act as hormone mimics, like DDT, and heavy metals like mercury, a neurotoxin released by burning coal, have become problems for some birds (gulls, cormorants, thrushes); but some raptors seem to be increasing.
Not only hawks were more abundant. Flocks of black billed cuckoos followed infestations of tent caterpillars and would clear small orchards of their nests in a day. One of the common names for the rose breasted grosbeak was potato bug bird; but I have never seen grosbeaks eating potato bugs (or in numbers that could eat enough to help). Cuckoos are now rather uncommon and the silken nests of tent caterpillars on roadside trees (most birds won’t eat the hairy adults) go unmolested.
Such stories make one suspect that populations of North American breeding birds are really down 90-95% from the time of European settlement.
Conservationists who want to restore large animals speak of the three Cs: cores, corridors, carnivores. Cores are ecosystems restored as much as possible to their wild state (thus without people in the developed world). Corridors connect cores, turning separate populations of plants and animals into metapopulations. Carnivores influence the growth of plants and the abundance and types of animals and so are necessary for the health of cores.
This influence of carnivores happens on all size levels, from microbes to moose. Large carnivores influence forest succession by eating large herbivores like deer and moose, which through their feeding habits influence forest succession and the plants of the forest floor. Large carnivores also eat midsized carnivores (their competition; or a tasty snack) and so influence songbird numbers. (Many so called mid size predators are nest predators of songbirds.)
The same is true in birds. Large raptors like goshawks eat crows (a nest robber, also on the increase since shooting of crows has been regulated) as well as rabbits and squirrels. Some great horned owls specialize in crows, which roost communally. Thus one sees flocks of crows roosting at night in the bright lights near malls or superhighways. Smaller raptors eat jays (another nest predator) as well birds the size of starlings and waxwings and also smaller ones like indigo buntings, house wrens and English sparrows.
North Americans are unlikely to live with mountain lions or wolves, despite the fact that deer, which are involved in 1.5 million car accidents yearly in North America, kill many more people than either. (Mountain lions will stalk and kill people but wolves, at least in North America, avoid them.) From a purely utilitarian point of view, we would be better off if mountain lions were abundant enough to control deer numbers and so reduce the number of people killed in collisions with deer (about 225 annually), even if the lions killed 10-20 people a year.
But the emotional difference between dying from a collision with a long legged herbivore that dashes into the road and from being stalked by a large cat that pounces on you from behind, breaks your neck, opens your chest and eats your heart and lungs, is of course considerable.
North Americans may manage to live with coyotes (many millions of Los Angelenos already do), which kill feral (and pet) cats, a major predator of songbirds (and keep many house cats, terrified, indoors). Coyotes have a major influence on songbird populations in Californian canyons: where there are coyotes there are songbirds, where not, not. Coyotes probably have some influence on deer populations through capturing fawns. (They may have more as, in the absence of the wolf, some populations evolve into a larger animal, better able to deal with larger prey.) Coyotes also eat chipmunks and white footed mice, a carrier of Lyme disease.
All this brings us to the suburbs, the modern barnyard, where dogs, cats and cars replace cattle, pigs and chickens: the home of modern people.
In dry climate suburbs are oases of damp. Screech owls are more abundant in Texas suburbs with their sprinkled lawns, and abundant insect life (a major part of the owl’s diet), than out in the dry countryside. (How long the sprinkling will last is another matter.) Many people feed songbirds, attracting at the same time raccoons, Norway rats, skunks, coyotes, crows, bears, red squirrels, chipmunks, white footed mice and other animals, whose presence they often come to regard as a problem. So suburban homes are equipped with pellet guns.
There are two problems. The first is deciding which animals we want to live with; the second is managing the habitat so as to provide a more complete compliment of species and so help control animals like crows, jays, opossums, English sparrows, feral cats and perhaps infections like Lyme disease. (The more species for the Ixodes ticks to bite, the less their level of infection—most animals are not competent carriers of the disease.)
Large undeveloped areas help. Not building the suburb but rebuilding the city to be more livable with trees, parks and public transportation, and still holding more people, helps the most. Deer may retreat to the wooded parts of cemeteries or golf courses during the day. Foxes, skunks and raccoons will make do with little cover, living under porches and becoming mostly nocturnal. More bears in Nevada live in Las Vegas than in the countryside. The city bears grow larger and have more young (on abundant dumpster food); but die more frequently in automobile accidents.
Keeping bears out of Las Vegas thus means bear proof dumpsters, and probably hunting; while keeping mountain lions out of western suburbs means keeping out deer, and probably shooting lions.
But we can deal with coyotes, as we do with (much more dangerous) pet dogs. Thus the undeveloped areas in the suburbs, ideally near watercourses. Coyotes need a retreat, as do great horned owls, barred owls and goshawks. Goshawks prefer a substantial tree (though not as substantial as those favored by the long winged ospreys and eagles), owls like dense cover for resting and nesting (a clump of hemlocks in a larger wood). Some owls will use nest boxes and, like bluebirds or wood ducks, their number can probably be increased this way, with salutary effects on populations of small rodents (like white footed mice).
Resident Canada geese can be controlled partly by manipulating their landscape: letting the grass grow. Geese will avoid tall grass or other cover in which coyotes can hide, while large areas of freshly mowed grass are ideal for them: long vistas; and a new meal, every day. Actually the cycle of grass, goose poop, grass is a virtuous circle which intelligent landscape managers could use (and thus save their fertilizer expenses) by devising a machine to pick up the poop to pile and compost (or pulverize and scatter). Clever construction of golf courses or playing fields would help keep geese away from people and their sandals. Some tolerance is necessary in any situation with animals, as is some predation on the geese, young or old, by humans, egg eating foxes, neck snapping coyotes, owls, goshawks and eagles.
So I imagine suburbs as fingers of settlement in larger swaths of desert, prairie or forest; the people generally on higher ground, away from water, near the breezes. Trees shade suburban roads, deciduous trees shade the south side of houses, clumps of evergreens block northwest winds. Banks of solar collectors shade roofs, laundry decorates the yards. Water drains in open ditches with cattails, frogs, nesting wrens, and probably a few mosquitoes. Such drains also absorb runoff from streets and parking lots (some also covered with solar collectors). The open land near the houses has playing fields and places for dogs to run, while the land further away (or near damper habitat) is left alone, with a few trails for birdwatchers or budding naturalists. Dead trees in the woods are left standing. Fallen trees are left on the ground. Larger streams run through the suburbs as corridors of native habitat, thus further filtering (along with the open vegetated drains) the runoff water that reaches them. Ideally, the sewage effluent from the town, purged of toxins (or free of them, since none go down the drain) only add sufficient nutrients to the water to improve the fishery (as that notable one for brown trout in the Bow River that runs through Calgary, Alberta; the brown trout is not native to the Bow and is out competing the native cutthroat trout—the same story as with browns and brook trout in the East—but nothing’s perfect). This is a matter of the volume of nutrients and of the stream.
Of course most of the nutrients in the sewage belong back on nearby farmland, with which, like the urban center, the suburb is allied.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Biology Comics
A cheerful Biology Comic?!
Dooryard Views
Watching from my dooryard I think the local raptor population is increasing. I see more and more small birdeating hawks: sharpshins (a small short winged forest hawk), cooper’s hawks (a larger edition of the same), merlins (a tiny forest falcon, the size of a robin).
Three or four autumns ago I watched an immature Cooper’s hawk perched in the top of a dead aspen in my meadow for an hour. If it hadn’t perched there so long (preening and ruffling its feathers) I wouldn’t have been able to identify it: separating sharpshins and Cooper’s hawks is difficult.
Several times a summer a sharpshin arcs over the yard. If one stands and looks up on a sunny September day with a north wind, one sees them soaring south, flicking their wings like butterflies, among the stately redtails.
The call of our common summer hawk, the broadwing, still drops from the sky on sunny days.
A friend found a Cooper’s hawk nest a few weeks ago in a red pine beside a busy mountain trail. Going to look for the nest, I happened upon the hawk perched in a dead elm next to an abandoned beaver pond. A bronzed grackle was perched in the same tree. Upright and gray, larger than the grackle, the hawk stared straight ahead. Neither bird was moving. Perhaps the hawk wasn’t hungry. The safest thing for the grackle (who glanced at the hawk from time to time) was not to fly.
And so what?
Well such hawks, like the fisheating American mergansers that have become common on the river, occupy the top of the food chain. They eat migratory birds and migrate themselves. Thus they concentrate pollutants (absorbed by the birds with their insect prey) from all over. That, plus shooting during migrations (when they are most vulnerable), is thought to be reason for their enormous decline in the middle part of the last century.
So their increase is a good thing: shooting has stopped; the chemicals that worst affected them are declining in the environment (though many bad boys, including mercury, are rising). Of course their prey species (songbirds) have also been declining.
A good thing in more than one way: raptors (day flying hawks) sculpt their surroundings. Cowbirds are a nest parasite from the prairies. Cowbirds spread east during the last century (clearing the eastern forests for farmland created an eastern prairie habitat for them) and increased in number tremendously. The female cowbird lays its egg in the nests of small songbirds (such as warblers and thrushes). The egg isn’t recognized as foreign by the parents. The young cowbird hatches out quickly, grows quickly and pushes the other hatchlings out of the nest. A warbler raises a cowbird chick several times its size.
A female cowbird will parasitize several nests – nice work if you can get it. So some warblers, wood thrushes and other neotropical migrants have been declining. (There are additional causes for this but abundant cowbirds are a factor.)
Since the 1970s, at least one male cowbird has perched in my apple tree gurgling its liquid notes all spring. Often two females accompany him. This year I saw one once, briefly. Their habit of sitting in a treetop displaying makes them vulnerable to our bright eyed hawks.
Perhaps as a result I have heard wood thrushes singing near the house the last two summers for the first time in 30 years. (But mercury accumulating in the insects of the forest floor also affects wood thrushes, as well as habitat change in the tropical forests where they winter.)
So fewer cowbirds (or scared cowbirds) are a good thing. I see also fewer blue jays. The beautiful blue jay (illuminations in blue and violet) is a nest predator. I once watched a blue jay go from nest to nest in the carved stonework above the doorway of a church, plucking out baby sparrows, one from each nest, while the parents chirped and squawked nearby. What could they do?
Sharpshins enjoy tasty blue jays, though the jays are slightly larger than they. One winter afternoon I watched a sharpie out my window eat the breast meat off a jay too large for it to carry away. Jays eat at feeders and the hawks (not stupid) cruise from feeder to feeder. As the hawk fed, the movements of the jay’s spread wings became feebler and feebler. Finally the little hawk flew off with the still remains through the woods.
So this is good. Though the merlins and the sharpshins will undoubtedly also strike at the indigo bunting that now sings in the dead aspen, the scarlet tanager singing in the pines, the crested flycatcher that whoops from the woods.
That’s how it is! In a better world than ours all these birds would be much more numerous, eat the insects that eat the trees and produce many many young.
Dooryard Views
Watching from my dooryard I think the local raptor population is increasing. I see more and more small birdeating hawks: sharpshins (a small short winged forest hawk), cooper’s hawks (a larger edition of the same), merlins (a tiny forest falcon, the size of a robin).
Three or four autumns ago I watched an immature Cooper’s hawk perched in the top of a dead aspen in my meadow for an hour. If it hadn’t perched there so long (preening and ruffling its feathers) I wouldn’t have been able to identify it: separating sharpshins and Cooper’s hawks is difficult.
Several times a summer a sharpshin arcs over the yard. If one stands and looks up on a sunny September day with a north wind, one sees them soaring south, flicking their wings like butterflies, among the stately redtails.
The call of our common summer hawk, the broadwing, still drops from the sky on sunny days.
A friend found a Cooper’s hawk nest a few weeks ago in a red pine beside a busy mountain trail. Going to look for the nest, I happened upon the hawk perched in a dead elm next to an abandoned beaver pond. A bronzed grackle was perched in the same tree. Upright and gray, larger than the grackle, the hawk stared straight ahead. Neither bird was moving. Perhaps the hawk wasn’t hungry. The safest thing for the grackle (who glanced at the hawk from time to time) was not to fly.
And so what?
Well such hawks, like the fisheating American mergansers that have become common on the river, occupy the top of the food chain. They eat migratory birds and migrate themselves. Thus they concentrate pollutants (absorbed by the birds with their insect prey) from all over. That, plus shooting during migrations (when they are most vulnerable), is thought to be reason for their enormous decline in the middle part of the last century.
So their increase is a good thing: shooting has stopped; the chemicals that worst affected them are declining in the environment (though many bad boys, including mercury, are rising). Of course their prey species (songbirds) have also been declining.
A good thing in more than one way: raptors (day flying hawks) sculpt their surroundings. Cowbirds are a nest parasite from the prairies. Cowbirds spread east during the last century (clearing the eastern forests for farmland created an eastern prairie habitat for them) and increased in number tremendously. The female cowbird lays its egg in the nests of small songbirds (such as warblers and thrushes). The egg isn’t recognized as foreign by the parents. The young cowbird hatches out quickly, grows quickly and pushes the other hatchlings out of the nest. A warbler raises a cowbird chick several times its size.
A female cowbird will parasitize several nests – nice work if you can get it. So some warblers, wood thrushes and other neotropical migrants have been declining. (There are additional causes for this but abundant cowbirds are a factor.)
Since the 1970s, at least one male cowbird has perched in my apple tree gurgling its liquid notes all spring. Often two females accompany him. This year I saw one once, briefly. Their habit of sitting in a treetop displaying makes them vulnerable to our bright eyed hawks.
Perhaps as a result I have heard wood thrushes singing near the house the last two summers for the first time in 30 years. (But mercury accumulating in the insects of the forest floor also affects wood thrushes, as well as habitat change in the tropical forests where they winter.)
So fewer cowbirds (or scared cowbirds) are a good thing. I see also fewer blue jays. The beautiful blue jay (illuminations in blue and violet) is a nest predator. I once watched a blue jay go from nest to nest in the carved stonework above the doorway of a church, plucking out baby sparrows, one from each nest, while the parents chirped and squawked nearby. What could they do?
Sharpshins enjoy tasty blue jays, though the jays are slightly larger than they. One winter afternoon I watched a sharpie out my window eat the breast meat off a jay too large for it to carry away. Jays eat at feeders and the hawks (not stupid) cruise from feeder to feeder. As the hawk fed, the movements of the jay’s spread wings became feebler and feebler. Finally the little hawk flew off with the still remains through the woods.
So this is good. Though the merlins and the sharpshins will undoubtedly also strike at the indigo bunting that now sings in the dead aspen, the scarlet tanager singing in the pines, the crested flycatcher that whoops from the woods.
That’s how it is! In a better world than ours all these birds would be much more numerous, eat the insects that eat the trees and produce many many young.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Biology Comics
Oily Dreams: the Deepwater Horizon Disaster
The well drilled by the drilling ship Deepwater Horizon in a mile of water continues to pour oil and gas into the deep sea. Some of the oil floats to the surface, where the lighter fractions evaporate (up to half the oil), the rest floats in rafts on the sea, until driven by winds and currents onto the beaches and marshlands of the gulf coast. Turtles or whales that swim through the oil become disoriented; some die. Birds that land in it die. The film of oil kills the larvae of fish and crustaceans that float in the spring waters of the gulf; including the larvae of such long distance swimmers as the western Atlantic population of the bluefin tuna.
Much of the oil and gas disperses underwater to form deep plumes of tiny droplets under the sea surface, that oxidize, or are oxidized by bacteria, and use up the oxygen in the water. The water in the plumes may become too depleted of oxygen for animals to survive. Such plumes are also toxic to the larvae of gulf animals and to the animals (deepwater corals, fish, crustaceans) themselves.
Some summer anoxia in coastal bays and estuaries (like those of the gulf) is normal. The upper layer of the ocean is ventilated by storms mixing surface water, rich in oxygen, with the waters below. Oxygen also diffuses downward into the water column, but slowly. Currents bring deeper waters to the surface, renewing their nutrients and being renewed with oxygen.
In summer storms are fewer. The sun heats the surface waters, which tend to form a lid over the colder waters below. The water column stratifies. Fresh water from rivers pouring into the sea, less dense than salty ocean water, also sits on the sea’s surface, helping keep the lid in place. So the oxygen content of the deeper waters falls.
If the water’s oxygen content falls too low, fish and benthic organisms (corals, anemones, worms, sponges) suffocate. One July evening in 1987, lobsters started crawling out of Long Island Sound onto shore: insufficient oxygen was left in the water. Bluefish gasped in the shallows. Modern summer anoxias are made more extreme by the nutrients (from sewage effluent, pet poop, burning fuel, fertilizer) we put in the ocean. These materials cause algae to grow. The algae grow and die, sink to the bottom of the sea and decay, using up the available oxygen. (This process also sequesters carbon.)
Fertilizer from farms and lawns running off into the Mississippi River has created a so-called dead zone of anoxic water in the Gulf of Mexico for several decades. The size of the zone increased dramatically after the 1993 floods, which increased the runoff of nitrogen and pesticides into the gulf. It continues to grow.
I would guess its growth is related to the size of the American corn crop. The nitrogen runoff is caused by poor agricultural practice in the Mississippi basin: not rotating corn and sod crops; applying too much fertilizer; putting too much land in crops, period. Fertilizing the tens of millions of acres of suburban lawn grasses in the Mississippi basin also adds nitrogen. Rotating cornland into hays would reduce the size of the corn crop by a third and help heal the river and the gulf. With the price of corn so low, people burn it instead of wood and transform it into a motor fuel; but corn is a food. Even agricultural economists say we have too much corn.
The nutrients and soil running off poorly managed farms also degrade rivers, and their fisheries.
So the anoxia caused by the oil adds to the anoxia caused by foolish agricultural policies in the fertile center of the continent.
The rafts of evaporating oil also drift into the marshes at the mouth of the Mississippi and onto coastal beaches.
On the beaches it is removed. (Some sinks below the surface.) Removing it from marshes is more difficult.
Thousands of people have been organized to remove the oil. They drive vehicles through colonies of nesting birds and over low coastal dunes, flattening them. They walk through pelican nests (whose adults will die anyway).
Some biologists say it would be better to leave the oil alone. Over time most of it (perhaps 70%) will evaporate or biodegrade. In Prince William Sound in Alaska, high pressure washing with warm water of rocks along the shore after the Exxon Valdez spill drove the oil underground, where it remains, mobilized from time to time by digging animals or rock shifting storms. (Once out of reach of oxygen oil breaks down extremely slowly. Adding nutrients like nitrogen may help.) The herring fishery in the sound never recovered and other fisheries remain much reduced many years after the spill. Fish living near a 40 year old spill on Cape Cod show elevated levels of liver enzymes many years later. (Fuel oil there also remains under the surface of the beaches, driven down by gravity and storms.) No one knows the continuing effects on fish eggs and larvae and thus on fish abundance; but our use of oil is a sort of tax on the wild world. Oil on the surface of the ocean or land will eventually be broken down by bacteria and archaea (natural asphalt lakes are full of life) but in the case of heavy tarry oils eventually is a long time.
Oil and gas seeps in the gulf may release a million barrels a year (not a small amount). This oil is used by bacteria, which are eaten by large worms and other creatures in so-called dark ecosystems on the seafloor. (‘Dark’ because they are out of the reach of sunlight.) So oil is not new to the gulf.
Booms are used to keep the oil from reaching the beach and people scoop up and bag the oil that does. Hair (human and otherwise) makes an excellent absorbent and afterwards the oil soaked material can be burned. Behind the booms, skimmers remove the oil from the surface of the sea.
Booms and sleeves stuffed with hair are cheap but oil companies don’t want to pay for buying and storing the material against emergencies. (Renting the drilling ship Deepwater Horizon cost about $500,000 a day.) Absorbent booms are probably better than plastic ones but are more expensive.
Any cleanup is a big mess. Nothing really works. Storms and waves cause problems. Marsh vegetation will come back after one oiling but several oilings will kill it, leaving the marshland open to erosion by the sea.
But gulf marshlands have been receding for decades, a matter that is well known. Modern levees keep the muddy waters of the Mississippi from flowing over the marshlands and rebuilding them. Rather, the river water is sent straight out into the gulf, where its muds and fertilizers add to the dead zone, rather than fertilize and maintain the protective marshlands of the delta.
Canals dug by oil companies through the marshes (10,000 miles of them) let the sea in to erode the marshes.
Salt water penetrates inland and as the marshes become more saline, their vegetation changes. They become less desirable to migratory waterfowl. Cypresses and other trees die.
The receding marshlands expose the coast to storms.
The Caribbean, of which the Gulf of Mexico is part, once had tens of millions of sea turtles grazing its seagrass meadows and coral reefs, manatees nibbling seagrasses along its coasts, seals eating its forage fish and many whales. Its spawning fish came from nearby and far away. Like the water birds most of these animals are reduced by 90-95% from their original abundance. Some losses were deliberate (turtles and manatees were hunted for food and oil), some a consequence of human settlement.
The Ixtoc spill of 1979-80 in the Mexican section of the gulf, released 10,000-30,000 barrels a day for ten months until contained. Much of the oil ended up on Texas beaches. The Deepwater Horizon spill is putting out 25,000-60,000 barrels a day. If the relief wells work and end the spill by August, it will only have lasted half as long. (The Ixtoc relief wells did not work at first.)
As of June 5th a temporary containment system seems to be capturing half the oil.
Such oil spills are only a part of our mismanagement of the ecosystems of the gulf. The Louisiana sport and commercial fisheries are worth about 8 billion dollars a year. In general, we have no idea of our place amidst the natural systems of the planet.
And as long as we place no value on nature, we will treat it like shit.
The well drilled by the drilling ship Deepwater Horizon in a mile of water continues to pour oil and gas into the deep sea. Some of the oil floats to the surface, where the lighter fractions evaporate (up to half the oil), the rest floats in rafts on the sea, until driven by winds and currents onto the beaches and marshlands of the gulf coast. Turtles or whales that swim through the oil become disoriented; some die. Birds that land in it die. The film of oil kills the larvae of fish and crustaceans that float in the spring waters of the gulf; including the larvae of such long distance swimmers as the western Atlantic population of the bluefin tuna.
Much of the oil and gas disperses underwater to form deep plumes of tiny droplets under the sea surface, that oxidize, or are oxidized by bacteria, and use up the oxygen in the water. The water in the plumes may become too depleted of oxygen for animals to survive. Such plumes are also toxic to the larvae of gulf animals and to the animals (deepwater corals, fish, crustaceans) themselves.
Some summer anoxia in coastal bays and estuaries (like those of the gulf) is normal. The upper layer of the ocean is ventilated by storms mixing surface water, rich in oxygen, with the waters below. Oxygen also diffuses downward into the water column, but slowly. Currents bring deeper waters to the surface, renewing their nutrients and being renewed with oxygen.
In summer storms are fewer. The sun heats the surface waters, which tend to form a lid over the colder waters below. The water column stratifies. Fresh water from rivers pouring into the sea, less dense than salty ocean water, also sits on the sea’s surface, helping keep the lid in place. So the oxygen content of the deeper waters falls.
If the water’s oxygen content falls too low, fish and benthic organisms (corals, anemones, worms, sponges) suffocate. One July evening in 1987, lobsters started crawling out of Long Island Sound onto shore: insufficient oxygen was left in the water. Bluefish gasped in the shallows. Modern summer anoxias are made more extreme by the nutrients (from sewage effluent, pet poop, burning fuel, fertilizer) we put in the ocean. These materials cause algae to grow. The algae grow and die, sink to the bottom of the sea and decay, using up the available oxygen. (This process also sequesters carbon.)
Fertilizer from farms and lawns running off into the Mississippi River has created a so-called dead zone of anoxic water in the Gulf of Mexico for several decades. The size of the zone increased dramatically after the 1993 floods, which increased the runoff of nitrogen and pesticides into the gulf. It continues to grow.
I would guess its growth is related to the size of the American corn crop. The nitrogen runoff is caused by poor agricultural practice in the Mississippi basin: not rotating corn and sod crops; applying too much fertilizer; putting too much land in crops, period. Fertilizing the tens of millions of acres of suburban lawn grasses in the Mississippi basin also adds nitrogen. Rotating cornland into hays would reduce the size of the corn crop by a third and help heal the river and the gulf. With the price of corn so low, people burn it instead of wood and transform it into a motor fuel; but corn is a food. Even agricultural economists say we have too much corn.
The nutrients and soil running off poorly managed farms also degrade rivers, and their fisheries.
So the anoxia caused by the oil adds to the anoxia caused by foolish agricultural policies in the fertile center of the continent.
The rafts of evaporating oil also drift into the marshes at the mouth of the Mississippi and onto coastal beaches.
On the beaches it is removed. (Some sinks below the surface.) Removing it from marshes is more difficult.
Thousands of people have been organized to remove the oil. They drive vehicles through colonies of nesting birds and over low coastal dunes, flattening them. They walk through pelican nests (whose adults will die anyway).
Some biologists say it would be better to leave the oil alone. Over time most of it (perhaps 70%) will evaporate or biodegrade. In Prince William Sound in Alaska, high pressure washing with warm water of rocks along the shore after the Exxon Valdez spill drove the oil underground, where it remains, mobilized from time to time by digging animals or rock shifting storms. (Once out of reach of oxygen oil breaks down extremely slowly. Adding nutrients like nitrogen may help.) The herring fishery in the sound never recovered and other fisheries remain much reduced many years after the spill. Fish living near a 40 year old spill on Cape Cod show elevated levels of liver enzymes many years later. (Fuel oil there also remains under the surface of the beaches, driven down by gravity and storms.) No one knows the continuing effects on fish eggs and larvae and thus on fish abundance; but our use of oil is a sort of tax on the wild world. Oil on the surface of the ocean or land will eventually be broken down by bacteria and archaea (natural asphalt lakes are full of life) but in the case of heavy tarry oils eventually is a long time.
Oil and gas seeps in the gulf may release a million barrels a year (not a small amount). This oil is used by bacteria, which are eaten by large worms and other creatures in so-called dark ecosystems on the seafloor. (‘Dark’ because they are out of the reach of sunlight.) So oil is not new to the gulf.
Booms are used to keep the oil from reaching the beach and people scoop up and bag the oil that does. Hair (human and otherwise) makes an excellent absorbent and afterwards the oil soaked material can be burned. Behind the booms, skimmers remove the oil from the surface of the sea.
Booms and sleeves stuffed with hair are cheap but oil companies don’t want to pay for buying and storing the material against emergencies. (Renting the drilling ship Deepwater Horizon cost about $500,000 a day.) Absorbent booms are probably better than plastic ones but are more expensive.
Any cleanup is a big mess. Nothing really works. Storms and waves cause problems. Marsh vegetation will come back after one oiling but several oilings will kill it, leaving the marshland open to erosion by the sea.
But gulf marshlands have been receding for decades, a matter that is well known. Modern levees keep the muddy waters of the Mississippi from flowing over the marshlands and rebuilding them. Rather, the river water is sent straight out into the gulf, where its muds and fertilizers add to the dead zone, rather than fertilize and maintain the protective marshlands of the delta.
Canals dug by oil companies through the marshes (10,000 miles of them) let the sea in to erode the marshes.
Salt water penetrates inland and as the marshes become more saline, their vegetation changes. They become less desirable to migratory waterfowl. Cypresses and other trees die.
The receding marshlands expose the coast to storms.
The Caribbean, of which the Gulf of Mexico is part, once had tens of millions of sea turtles grazing its seagrass meadows and coral reefs, manatees nibbling seagrasses along its coasts, seals eating its forage fish and many whales. Its spawning fish came from nearby and far away. Like the water birds most of these animals are reduced by 90-95% from their original abundance. Some losses were deliberate (turtles and manatees were hunted for food and oil), some a consequence of human settlement.
The Ixtoc spill of 1979-80 in the Mexican section of the gulf, released 10,000-30,000 barrels a day for ten months until contained. Much of the oil ended up on Texas beaches. The Deepwater Horizon spill is putting out 25,000-60,000 barrels a day. If the relief wells work and end the spill by August, it will only have lasted half as long. (The Ixtoc relief wells did not work at first.)
As of June 5th a temporary containment system seems to be capturing half the oil.
Such oil spills are only a part of our mismanagement of the ecosystems of the gulf. The Louisiana sport and commercial fisheries are worth about 8 billion dollars a year. In general, we have no idea of our place amidst the natural systems of the planet.
And as long as we place no value on nature, we will treat it like shit.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Biology Comics
Still no illustrators! Well here’s a hard one…
Climate Story
People say weather is what happens day to day while climate is what happens over thousands of days. But climate times also vary in length.
The sun warms the planet. Its radiance has increased by 25% over the last 4 billion years. Despite everything, the average temperature of the planet hovers above the freezing point of water.
Over a timescale of tens of millions to billions of years, volcanoes emit carbon dioxide and silicate rocks absorb it. If volcanism slows down and the earth cools, the chemical reaction governing the absorption of the carbon dioxide by the rocks also slows down (chemical reactions are dependent on temperature). Then carbon dioxide slowly accumulates in the atmosphere and the planet warms.
New carbon absorbing rocks are also created by volcanism, which is influenced by continental drift. Continental drift also uplifts new rocks from the mantle. It operates on a timescale of tens to hundreds of millions of years.
As plants evolved, they also took a hand in storing carbon dioxide. First they oxygenated the atmosphere, driving most organisms, for whom oxygen was a poison, underground. The plants were single cells floating on the surface of the sea. They took carbon into their bodies through photosynthesis, expelling oxygen as a waste. The carbon from the plants fell as dead plant bodies or animal poop to the bottom of the sea (the “poop pump”), where it remained.
Later, rooted land plants evolved. They pumped carbon dioxide into the soil as part of their strategy to obtain nutrients. This increased the rate of weathering in soil. Soils stored more and more carbon dioxide.
The ocean naturally takes up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a simple chemical reaction with water. The deep ocean circulation (the ocean conveyor) stores this carbon dioxide in the deep ocean. One round of the circulation takes 1000-10,000 years.
The placement of continents determines whether the oceans can circulate heat and so even out the temperature of the earth, cooling the tropics (which receive more direct solar radiation) and warming the poles. The narrow basin of the North Atlantic, bounded by continents on each side, lets warm surface water brought by currents from the Pacific and Indian oceans move north, and lets the return flow (at depth) move south toward Antarctica.
There’s more. Over the long term the earth’s temperature is determined by the sunlight falling on it, the position of its land masses, the heat capacity of its oceans and the characteristics of its atmosphere.
The atmosphere lets through the sun’s rays, which strike the earth, while various of its gases absorb the solar energy that is reradiated as heat to space. The gases act like a blanket.
Water vapor is the greatest greenhouse gas. Thus desert days and nights have wide temperature swings (less of a blanket there).
The other (known) gases that absorb heat are carbon dioxide (from combustion, logging, land clearance, animal respiration, plant decay), methane (from coal mining, landfills, rice paddies, cattle, termite mounds, bacterial action, swamps), nitrous oxide (from fertilizer, combustion, denitrifying bacteria), low level ozone (from air pollution and sunlight) and the halocarbons (from fires, bacterial action, chemical manufacture: these are the gases that ate the high altitude ozone shield).
These gases have different molecular weights and absorb infrared radiation at different frequencies. Thus their effect is greater than if they absorbed radiation at the same frequency: a symphony in infrared.
The warming gases are all produced naturally but human activity has become their largest source. The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has been measured continuously since the late 1950s from a mountaintop in Hawaii and is now 100 parts per million over the preindustrial level of 280 parts per million. It seems to me that if you know this and accept that carbon dioxide absorbs heat, you must believe in global warming. A hundred parts per million is a large part of 280 parts per million. (In fact, it is the difference between an ice age and an interglacial period.)
The warming gases are not common in the atmosphere and thus human activity can influence their abundance. Their effects are amplified by water vapor, the greatest greenhouse gas. A small warming from carbon dioxide leads to more evaporation from the oceans and more water vapor in the air, therefore a warmer atmosphere, which leads to more evaporation, and a still warmer atmosphere, in an ineluctable positive feedback.
From the steamy Cretaceous Period of 100 million years ago the earth has slowly cooled to our age of continental glaciations. The cooling has several causes: the storage of 8000 billion tons of carbon (10 times that in the modern atmosphere) during the damp, temperate Carboniferous of 300 million years ago; the current position of the continents, which lets massive ice sheets build up on land near both poles; the ongoing storage of methane by bacteria in sea bottom sediments; a moderate degree of volcanism (a volcano is erupting somewhere on earth every day); and an increased biological storage of carbon by higher animals, both in the poop pump of the oceans and on land.
A cooler earth is a dryer one and a drier one lets grasses outcompete trees. Over the last 70 million years grasslands have come to dominate much of the planet. Grassland and grazers accumulate much more carbon in their soils than forests. Grazers help by stimulating new growth and by recycling nutrients: the Great Plains were maintained by buffalo piss. Many of the most productive agricultural soils are former grasslands.
Man with his plow, his axe, his farm animals and his industries releases carbon to the atmosphere.
But back to the story: why the glacial cycles of our relatively low carbon world?
Imposed on the increasing radiance of the sun, the position of the continents, the state of the atmosphere and the biosphere, are the angle of the earth’s axis to incoming solar radiation and the earth’s distance from the sun: the Milankovitch cycles. While these cycles don’t affect the total amount of radiation the earth receives, they affect its seasonality. Glaciers grow when summers are short and cool (so snow doesn’t melt) and winters long and moderate (warmer winters mean more snow, which accumulates to become ice); that is, when there is less summer sun and more winter sun in the northern hemisphere (where there is more land at high latitudes for ice to form).
The timing of the Milankovitch cycles seems to correspond with the changes of climate expressed in cores from the Greenland ice sheet, in cores from the deep sea, from other glaciers and ice sheets, and from tree rings.
During a modern glaciation the surface of the planet goes from 10% to 30% ice. The ice forms mostly in the northern hemisphere, but also in Patagonia and New Zealand and wherever there are high mountains. Antarctica remains always covered with ice.
Glaciers take tens of thousands of years to grow and less than ten thousand to die. They seem to be self-limiting, perhaps because they depress the earth’s surface so much (up to half a mile) so any surface melting rapidly brings them down into warmer regions; and perhaps because they cover so much of the earth, whose plants no longer take up carbon dioxide, which then accumulates in the atmosphere, warming the planet.
As the planet warms it begins sucking up more carbon dioxide in its soils and oceans, both from increased biological activity on that newly uncovered 20% of the earth’s surface and because warmer temperatures speed up chemical reactions. This slowly lowers the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and sets the stage for the next cooling. These changes are reinforced (or not) by the planet’s position in the Milankovitch cycles.
The small changes in solar radiation during a Milankovitch cycle, and the not-so-small changes in carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere from glacial to interglacial period (about 50%) are amplified by the planet’s water cycle.
Our next glaciation is overdue. Glaciers should have begun forming about 8000 years ago, as the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere began to fall. There are some signs of this on the rocky surface of northeast Labrador (the center of the last continental glaciation in North America).
But the ice melted. One theory is that deforestation to clear fields by humans in Eurasia 8000 years ago released enough carbon dioxide to stop the fall in atmospheric carbon dioxide and in fact raised it several parts per million.
The cultivation of paddy rice (which releases methane) and the keeping of cattle, as well as human population increases by 5000 years ago, raised it more.
(I should point out that the last long interglacial period, 30,000 years long rather than the more normal 10,000, was 400,000 years ago, when the orbit of the earth around the sun was nearly round, as now.)
Who knows? The numbers work. What is incontrovertible is that burning coal from the beginning of the industrial revolution in the 1700s began to raise the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from its preindustrial level of 280 parts per million. The rise has accelerated lately, from 1.1% a year in the 1990s to 3% a year in 2000-2004. The current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 389 ppm.
Carbon dioxide shows a peak in the northern hemisphere fall and a trough in the spring. The seasonal variation is explained by the greater amount of land in the North Hemisphere. Plants use up carbon dioxide during the summer, while animals (and many plants) continue to produce it by respiration during the winter.
A warming climate causes many problems. Sea level rises, partly from melting of ice caps and glaciers, partly from thermal expansion of the water. Many continental glaciers, like the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, are grounded on the bottom of the sea. As the sea rises, ever so slightly, the glaciers lose their grip on the sea bottom and surge forward, speeding their collapse (and raising sea levels, in this case, 16-18 feet).
A warmer ocean also melts the glaciers faster where they meet the sea.
A likely estimate for sea level rise is 3-10 feet by 2100. Two feet will drown the Everglades. New Orleans is already a goner. (Because of subsidence, the relative sea level rise at the mouth of the Mississippi is now 4 feet per century.)
A rising sea also raises the heights of inland rivers, which overflow.
Salt water intrudes into coastal aquifers, such as the Magothy under Long Island, making them undrinkable.
Coastal communities build seawalls, move inland or are abandoned.
A warmer climate reduces grain crops in hot climates. Temperatures for growing maize are already marginal in much of the southeastern United States. Farmland moves north, where soils are rocky and poor.
Some regions become drier, some wetter. Reservoirs run out of water or dams must be reinforced. Heavy downpours are increasing in the eastern and middle western United States. A month’s rain comes in a few hours rather than being spread out. This is hard on crops and forests.
Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes store winter snowfall and release it into summer springs and rivers. As they melt, summer flow falls and there is little water for people or crops. Similarly, as the winter snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada melts earlier, summer water becomes more scarce.
Will this happen? Expressing all the known greenhouse gases as carbon dioxide, the current level of carbon dioxide is 430 ppm, a level not reached for a million years. (But carbon dioxide was about 800 ppm in the temperate Carboniferous 300 million years ago.) The last, recent time carbon dioxide was 350 ppm sea level was 80 feet higher.
Feedback processes are in play. Eastern forests are accumulating carbon much more quickly than 20 years ago; that is, their growth has speeded up. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes it easier for the trees to photosynthesize (they lose less water obtaining carbon). A hopeful sign: but the trees will soon run out of nitrogen, an essential nutrient.
Forests throughout the western United States and Alaska are collapsing from a century of poor management, drought and an infestation of bark beetles. Drought and crowding stresses the trees. Winter temperatures no longer fall low enough to kill the beetles’ larvae and warm long summers let the beetles breed continuously for several months. Crowded stressed trees are not able to mobilize their defenses against the beetles. As these forest collapse and burn they release billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Similar problems may affect the boreal forests (which may in any case be cleared for agriculture).
Moving societies north will require a lot of energy, which will put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Warming is most pronounced in polar regions. As the sea ice melts, the ocean absorbs heat from the sun, melting more ice, and the glaciers that touch the sea (as in Alaska and Greenland).
As the tundra warms, and the permafrost below it thaws, the soil releases carbon dioxide and methane. Methane now bubbles up through Siberian lakes all winter keeping them from freezing. As the permafrost around them melts, the lakes expand, then drain away as the land beneath them thaws, leaving the bare ground to warm in the sun, and release methane (perhaps 400 billion tons are stored in the tundra).
Off the northeastern coast of Siberia, methane is bubbling up from the sea from underwater clathrates, lattices of water and ice in which the methane is held by cold and pressure. The amount of methane held in underwater clathrates is enormous. Those under shallow seas will be released by a small increase in temperature of the water (of the order of 1° Centigrade).
A warming climate may shut down the Gulf Stream, part of the deep ocean circulation. Warm tropical water from the Indian and Pacific oceans is pulled north around Africa by the sinking of cold salty water around Iceland and Greenland. The warm water loses evaporated moisture to the Eurasian plains as it moves north, to the Pacific as easterly trades blow it across the Isthmus of Panama. It becomes salty and more dense. When it reaches a sufficient density of coldness and saltiness around the latitude of Iceland, it sinks into the oceanic abyss, helping drive the deep ocean circulation.
As the water moves north out of the tropics it also freshens from fresh water from rivers and melting ice. This lessens its density. If the density of the water is sufficiently reduced, it won’t sink. About every 1500 years over the last 100,000, the sinking has slowed and the earth’s climate has become colder, windier and more dry. A complete halt to the sinking and a disruption of the deep ocean circulation (which keeps the sea oxygenated) would be a disaster.
If we do nothing about the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere we may be in for a wild ride.
Who knows? It may be interesting.
Climate Story
People say weather is what happens day to day while climate is what happens over thousands of days. But climate times also vary in length.
The sun warms the planet. Its radiance has increased by 25% over the last 4 billion years. Despite everything, the average temperature of the planet hovers above the freezing point of water.
Over a timescale of tens of millions to billions of years, volcanoes emit carbon dioxide and silicate rocks absorb it. If volcanism slows down and the earth cools, the chemical reaction governing the absorption of the carbon dioxide by the rocks also slows down (chemical reactions are dependent on temperature). Then carbon dioxide slowly accumulates in the atmosphere and the planet warms.
New carbon absorbing rocks are also created by volcanism, which is influenced by continental drift. Continental drift also uplifts new rocks from the mantle. It operates on a timescale of tens to hundreds of millions of years.
As plants evolved, they also took a hand in storing carbon dioxide. First they oxygenated the atmosphere, driving most organisms, for whom oxygen was a poison, underground. The plants were single cells floating on the surface of the sea. They took carbon into their bodies through photosynthesis, expelling oxygen as a waste. The carbon from the plants fell as dead plant bodies or animal poop to the bottom of the sea (the “poop pump”), where it remained.
Later, rooted land plants evolved. They pumped carbon dioxide into the soil as part of their strategy to obtain nutrients. This increased the rate of weathering in soil. Soils stored more and more carbon dioxide.
The ocean naturally takes up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a simple chemical reaction with water. The deep ocean circulation (the ocean conveyor) stores this carbon dioxide in the deep ocean. One round of the circulation takes 1000-10,000 years.
The placement of continents determines whether the oceans can circulate heat and so even out the temperature of the earth, cooling the tropics (which receive more direct solar radiation) and warming the poles. The narrow basin of the North Atlantic, bounded by continents on each side, lets warm surface water brought by currents from the Pacific and Indian oceans move north, and lets the return flow (at depth) move south toward Antarctica.
There’s more. Over the long term the earth’s temperature is determined by the sunlight falling on it, the position of its land masses, the heat capacity of its oceans and the characteristics of its atmosphere.
The atmosphere lets through the sun’s rays, which strike the earth, while various of its gases absorb the solar energy that is reradiated as heat to space. The gases act like a blanket.
Water vapor is the greatest greenhouse gas. Thus desert days and nights have wide temperature swings (less of a blanket there).
The other (known) gases that absorb heat are carbon dioxide (from combustion, logging, land clearance, animal respiration, plant decay), methane (from coal mining, landfills, rice paddies, cattle, termite mounds, bacterial action, swamps), nitrous oxide (from fertilizer, combustion, denitrifying bacteria), low level ozone (from air pollution and sunlight) and the halocarbons (from fires, bacterial action, chemical manufacture: these are the gases that ate the high altitude ozone shield).
These gases have different molecular weights and absorb infrared radiation at different frequencies. Thus their effect is greater than if they absorbed radiation at the same frequency: a symphony in infrared.
The warming gases are all produced naturally but human activity has become their largest source. The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has been measured continuously since the late 1950s from a mountaintop in Hawaii and is now 100 parts per million over the preindustrial level of 280 parts per million. It seems to me that if you know this and accept that carbon dioxide absorbs heat, you must believe in global warming. A hundred parts per million is a large part of 280 parts per million. (In fact, it is the difference between an ice age and an interglacial period.)
The warming gases are not common in the atmosphere and thus human activity can influence their abundance. Their effects are amplified by water vapor, the greatest greenhouse gas. A small warming from carbon dioxide leads to more evaporation from the oceans and more water vapor in the air, therefore a warmer atmosphere, which leads to more evaporation, and a still warmer atmosphere, in an ineluctable positive feedback.
From the steamy Cretaceous Period of 100 million years ago the earth has slowly cooled to our age of continental glaciations. The cooling has several causes: the storage of 8000 billion tons of carbon (10 times that in the modern atmosphere) during the damp, temperate Carboniferous of 300 million years ago; the current position of the continents, which lets massive ice sheets build up on land near both poles; the ongoing storage of methane by bacteria in sea bottom sediments; a moderate degree of volcanism (a volcano is erupting somewhere on earth every day); and an increased biological storage of carbon by higher animals, both in the poop pump of the oceans and on land.
A cooler earth is a dryer one and a drier one lets grasses outcompete trees. Over the last 70 million years grasslands have come to dominate much of the planet. Grassland and grazers accumulate much more carbon in their soils than forests. Grazers help by stimulating new growth and by recycling nutrients: the Great Plains were maintained by buffalo piss. Many of the most productive agricultural soils are former grasslands.
Man with his plow, his axe, his farm animals and his industries releases carbon to the atmosphere.
But back to the story: why the glacial cycles of our relatively low carbon world?
Imposed on the increasing radiance of the sun, the position of the continents, the state of the atmosphere and the biosphere, are the angle of the earth’s axis to incoming solar radiation and the earth’s distance from the sun: the Milankovitch cycles. While these cycles don’t affect the total amount of radiation the earth receives, they affect its seasonality. Glaciers grow when summers are short and cool (so snow doesn’t melt) and winters long and moderate (warmer winters mean more snow, which accumulates to become ice); that is, when there is less summer sun and more winter sun in the northern hemisphere (where there is more land at high latitudes for ice to form).
The timing of the Milankovitch cycles seems to correspond with the changes of climate expressed in cores from the Greenland ice sheet, in cores from the deep sea, from other glaciers and ice sheets, and from tree rings.
During a modern glaciation the surface of the planet goes from 10% to 30% ice. The ice forms mostly in the northern hemisphere, but also in Patagonia and New Zealand and wherever there are high mountains. Antarctica remains always covered with ice.
Glaciers take tens of thousands of years to grow and less than ten thousand to die. They seem to be self-limiting, perhaps because they depress the earth’s surface so much (up to half a mile) so any surface melting rapidly brings them down into warmer regions; and perhaps because they cover so much of the earth, whose plants no longer take up carbon dioxide, which then accumulates in the atmosphere, warming the planet.
As the planet warms it begins sucking up more carbon dioxide in its soils and oceans, both from increased biological activity on that newly uncovered 20% of the earth’s surface and because warmer temperatures speed up chemical reactions. This slowly lowers the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and sets the stage for the next cooling. These changes are reinforced (or not) by the planet’s position in the Milankovitch cycles.
The small changes in solar radiation during a Milankovitch cycle, and the not-so-small changes in carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere from glacial to interglacial period (about 50%) are amplified by the planet’s water cycle.
Our next glaciation is overdue. Glaciers should have begun forming about 8000 years ago, as the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere began to fall. There are some signs of this on the rocky surface of northeast Labrador (the center of the last continental glaciation in North America).
But the ice melted. One theory is that deforestation to clear fields by humans in Eurasia 8000 years ago released enough carbon dioxide to stop the fall in atmospheric carbon dioxide and in fact raised it several parts per million.
The cultivation of paddy rice (which releases methane) and the keeping of cattle, as well as human population increases by 5000 years ago, raised it more.
(I should point out that the last long interglacial period, 30,000 years long rather than the more normal 10,000, was 400,000 years ago, when the orbit of the earth around the sun was nearly round, as now.)
Who knows? The numbers work. What is incontrovertible is that burning coal from the beginning of the industrial revolution in the 1700s began to raise the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from its preindustrial level of 280 parts per million. The rise has accelerated lately, from 1.1% a year in the 1990s to 3% a year in 2000-2004. The current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 389 ppm.
Carbon dioxide shows a peak in the northern hemisphere fall and a trough in the spring. The seasonal variation is explained by the greater amount of land in the North Hemisphere. Plants use up carbon dioxide during the summer, while animals (and many plants) continue to produce it by respiration during the winter.
A warming climate causes many problems. Sea level rises, partly from melting of ice caps and glaciers, partly from thermal expansion of the water. Many continental glaciers, like the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, are grounded on the bottom of the sea. As the sea rises, ever so slightly, the glaciers lose their grip on the sea bottom and surge forward, speeding their collapse (and raising sea levels, in this case, 16-18 feet).
A warmer ocean also melts the glaciers faster where they meet the sea.
A likely estimate for sea level rise is 3-10 feet by 2100. Two feet will drown the Everglades. New Orleans is already a goner. (Because of subsidence, the relative sea level rise at the mouth of the Mississippi is now 4 feet per century.)
A rising sea also raises the heights of inland rivers, which overflow.
Salt water intrudes into coastal aquifers, such as the Magothy under Long Island, making them undrinkable.
Coastal communities build seawalls, move inland or are abandoned.
A warmer climate reduces grain crops in hot climates. Temperatures for growing maize are already marginal in much of the southeastern United States. Farmland moves north, where soils are rocky and poor.
Some regions become drier, some wetter. Reservoirs run out of water or dams must be reinforced. Heavy downpours are increasing in the eastern and middle western United States. A month’s rain comes in a few hours rather than being spread out. This is hard on crops and forests.
Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes store winter snowfall and release it into summer springs and rivers. As they melt, summer flow falls and there is little water for people or crops. Similarly, as the winter snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada melts earlier, summer water becomes more scarce.
Will this happen? Expressing all the known greenhouse gases as carbon dioxide, the current level of carbon dioxide is 430 ppm, a level not reached for a million years. (But carbon dioxide was about 800 ppm in the temperate Carboniferous 300 million years ago.) The last, recent time carbon dioxide was 350 ppm sea level was 80 feet higher.
Feedback processes are in play. Eastern forests are accumulating carbon much more quickly than 20 years ago; that is, their growth has speeded up. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes it easier for the trees to photosynthesize (they lose less water obtaining carbon). A hopeful sign: but the trees will soon run out of nitrogen, an essential nutrient.
Forests throughout the western United States and Alaska are collapsing from a century of poor management, drought and an infestation of bark beetles. Drought and crowding stresses the trees. Winter temperatures no longer fall low enough to kill the beetles’ larvae and warm long summers let the beetles breed continuously for several months. Crowded stressed trees are not able to mobilize their defenses against the beetles. As these forest collapse and burn they release billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Similar problems may affect the boreal forests (which may in any case be cleared for agriculture).
Moving societies north will require a lot of energy, which will put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Warming is most pronounced in polar regions. As the sea ice melts, the ocean absorbs heat from the sun, melting more ice, and the glaciers that touch the sea (as in Alaska and Greenland).
As the tundra warms, and the permafrost below it thaws, the soil releases carbon dioxide and methane. Methane now bubbles up through Siberian lakes all winter keeping them from freezing. As the permafrost around them melts, the lakes expand, then drain away as the land beneath them thaws, leaving the bare ground to warm in the sun, and release methane (perhaps 400 billion tons are stored in the tundra).
Off the northeastern coast of Siberia, methane is bubbling up from the sea from underwater clathrates, lattices of water and ice in which the methane is held by cold and pressure. The amount of methane held in underwater clathrates is enormous. Those under shallow seas will be released by a small increase in temperature of the water (of the order of 1° Centigrade).
A warming climate may shut down the Gulf Stream, part of the deep ocean circulation. Warm tropical water from the Indian and Pacific oceans is pulled north around Africa by the sinking of cold salty water around Iceland and Greenland. The warm water loses evaporated moisture to the Eurasian plains as it moves north, to the Pacific as easterly trades blow it across the Isthmus of Panama. It becomes salty and more dense. When it reaches a sufficient density of coldness and saltiness around the latitude of Iceland, it sinks into the oceanic abyss, helping drive the deep ocean circulation.
As the water moves north out of the tropics it also freshens from fresh water from rivers and melting ice. This lessens its density. If the density of the water is sufficiently reduced, it won’t sink. About every 1500 years over the last 100,000, the sinking has slowed and the earth’s climate has become colder, windier and more dry. A complete halt to the sinking and a disruption of the deep ocean circulation (which keeps the sea oxygenated) would be a disaster.
If we do nothing about the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere we may be in for a wild ride.
Who knows? It may be interesting.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Biology Comics
Lyme Disease
Lyme disease is caused by a spirochete bacterium of the genus Borrelia that lives in some small mammals ((white-footed mice, chipmunks, meadow voles) and some birds (robins, grackles, house wrens) without causing them distress. Such animals are reservoir species for the disease. White tailed deer are not a reservoir species.
However the tick of the genus Ixodes that spreads the spirochete has deer for one of its hosts. So the ticks are called deer ticks.
Eggs laid by mature female ticks hatch into larvae (tiny ticks) in early spring. The larvae feed on a small animal, preferably a white footed mouse, but a chipmunk, a bird, a frog or a human will do. The larvae need a blood meal to mature into the next insect stage, a nymph. Feeding lasts a few days. After its meal, the larvae drops off its host, winters over in the leaf litter and the next spring sheds its cuticle to become a nymph.
Nymphs also need a blood meal to mature and also feed preferentially on white footed mice, but again will feed on any animal with blood. Nymphs, as a result of their first blood meal, are more likely to be infected with the spirochete that causes Lyme disease than larvae. Many climb high enough in the vegetation to bite people. Their activity in southern New England and New York State peaks in early summer.
By fall the nymph sheds its skin to become an adult. Adults are able to climb still higher in the vegetation, from where they attach themselves to any animal that brushes against them. Their preferred (or most common) host is deer. The blood meal from the deer or a human lets them develop sexually and survive until spring, when the female lays her eggs and dies.
Lyme disease was here when the Native Americans inhabited the continent (some Puritans seem to have contracted it) but was uncommon. It also exists (with similar ticks carrying it) in Eurasia. Peter Kalm, a Swedish botanist, remarked on the abundance of ticks in the eighteenth century New Jersey forest. Of course Peter Kalm didn’t wear shorts in the woods.
Deer ticks in the Northeast today prefer young forest and forest edges. They probably became much less common around human habitations as the landscape was cleared and settled. The virtual elimination of white tailed deer in the Northeast by 1900 may also have helped break the transmission of the disease to humans.
As northeastern farms were abandoned in favor of better farmland in California or Ohio and as northeastern industries used up their natural resources or failed during the first half of the twentieth century, the land emptied of people and grew back to young woodland, ideal habitat for ticks and deer. Much of the woods was oakwoods, also ideal, once the trees were large enough to bear acorns, for white-footed mice and chipmunks. As the animals returned, so did the disease causing ticks and spirocetes.
Beginning in the 1960s the second growth woodland started to be subdivided into housing lots. Life under the trees had its charms.
In 1975 Lyme disease was recognized as a disease from a cluster of cases in Lyme, Connecticut, a center of upscale suburbia.
A few years later the spirochete was isolated from the gut of a tick. If the disease is recognized, it is easily treated with antibiotics. A bullseye rash is often diagnostic.
Not everyone gets the rash. Other symptoms of the disease include headache, fever, fatigue and depression. If the disease is not recognized early, it becomes, like syphilis, another disease caused by a spirochete, difficult to treat and can result in joint pain and arthritis (especially in the knees), heart trouble and neurological symptoms such as difficulty concentrating and short term memory loss.
What to do? Reducing the number of deer (to fewer than 8-20 per square mile) helps.
Letting in light and air helps. Dehydration is the enemy of insects. Ticks and small mammals like damp leafy woodland edges, unmortared stone walls, brushy areas. Letting forests mature and cutting brush along forest edges probably helps. A few old trees in a sunny mowed lawn is ideal. Such treatments will also make the landscape much less desirable for many birds, small mammals and butterflies.
Cardboard tubes filled with cotton impregnated with pyrethrum helps reduce the number of ticks on mice, if the mice use the cotton to build their nests.
Baited station where mice are treated with insecticide also work; such stations have also been used for deer. Squirrels also enjoy bait stations for mice. A laborious solution is to capture and vaccinate the mice against the spirochete, every year.
Bait stations probably spread chronic wasting disease in deer. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a disease related to mad cow disease that was once endemic but uncommon among elk in the Rockies but is rapidly spreading eastward, probably through the use of feeding stations for deer. At the feeding stations deer come in contact with each other’s saliva, thus spreading the disease.
Lyme disease is a problem of landscape design. The best defense against it is a more diverse ecosystem, in which ticks feed on more animals that are not reservoirs of the disease. Then the incidence of disease in the ticks will be lower. (The chance of getting Lyme disease from a tick bite is currently 1-15%.)
In California, habitats with good fence lizard habitat have fewer infected ticks (ticks feed on lizards and lizards are resistant to the disease).
In the Northeast, small areas of woodland (less than five acres, a huge area in the suburbs) have many more white footed mice, as well as many more ticks, and many many more infected ticks, per square meter. This is probably because most of the woodland is edge, with invasive shrub layers and thick invasive groundcovers, ideal habitat for mice, chipmunks, ticks and deer.
One needs a connected landscape so populations of foxes, coyotes, weasels, owls and hawks can catch mice, and populations of raccoons, opossums, skunks, amphibians, different small birds and foxes can be bitten by ticks. The more young ticks bite animals that don’t carry the spirochete, the less likely humans will get the disease.
The ideal suburban landscape has vegetated bridges over roads connecting small woodlands and amphibian friendly culverts under roads to accommodate migrating frogs and toads (also tick bait).
It has habitat for short tailed weasels and snakes. Mice flee an area at the smell of a snake. Cats that eat snakes are kept indoors.
It has coyotes to help control deer. Coyotes will also control feral or adventurous bird and snake eating cats.
And humans with bows hunting deer. A useful addition to the tool kit would be a curare tipped arrow. Then (as long as the poison enters its bloodstream) the slightest scratch will kill a deer. There are many ways to deliver the poison. Perhaps a groove along the point of a hard plastic disposable arrowhead contains curare, covered with wax (so the hunter doesn’t accidentally kill himself). Or a springloaded pellet propels itself upon impact into the animal’s flesh.
Curare kills by paralyzing the muscles. Respiration stops and the animal dies of asphyxiation. But the curare molecules are too large to pass through the gut wall (curare is harmless if taken orally) so the animal’s meat remains edible.
Since the point is population control as well as sport, does as well as bucks are hunted. Young does taste better anyway.
Lyme disease is caused by a spirochete bacterium of the genus Borrelia that lives in some small mammals ((white-footed mice, chipmunks, meadow voles) and some birds (robins, grackles, house wrens) without causing them distress. Such animals are reservoir species for the disease. White tailed deer are not a reservoir species.
However the tick of the genus Ixodes that spreads the spirochete has deer for one of its hosts. So the ticks are called deer ticks.
Eggs laid by mature female ticks hatch into larvae (tiny ticks) in early spring. The larvae feed on a small animal, preferably a white footed mouse, but a chipmunk, a bird, a frog or a human will do. The larvae need a blood meal to mature into the next insect stage, a nymph. Feeding lasts a few days. After its meal, the larvae drops off its host, winters over in the leaf litter and the next spring sheds its cuticle to become a nymph.
Nymphs also need a blood meal to mature and also feed preferentially on white footed mice, but again will feed on any animal with blood. Nymphs, as a result of their first blood meal, are more likely to be infected with the spirochete that causes Lyme disease than larvae. Many climb high enough in the vegetation to bite people. Their activity in southern New England and New York State peaks in early summer.
By fall the nymph sheds its skin to become an adult. Adults are able to climb still higher in the vegetation, from where they attach themselves to any animal that brushes against them. Their preferred (or most common) host is deer. The blood meal from the deer or a human lets them develop sexually and survive until spring, when the female lays her eggs and dies.
Lyme disease was here when the Native Americans inhabited the continent (some Puritans seem to have contracted it) but was uncommon. It also exists (with similar ticks carrying it) in Eurasia. Peter Kalm, a Swedish botanist, remarked on the abundance of ticks in the eighteenth century New Jersey forest. Of course Peter Kalm didn’t wear shorts in the woods.
Deer ticks in the Northeast today prefer young forest and forest edges. They probably became much less common around human habitations as the landscape was cleared and settled. The virtual elimination of white tailed deer in the Northeast by 1900 may also have helped break the transmission of the disease to humans.
As northeastern farms were abandoned in favor of better farmland in California or Ohio and as northeastern industries used up their natural resources or failed during the first half of the twentieth century, the land emptied of people and grew back to young woodland, ideal habitat for ticks and deer. Much of the woods was oakwoods, also ideal, once the trees were large enough to bear acorns, for white-footed mice and chipmunks. As the animals returned, so did the disease causing ticks and spirocetes.
Beginning in the 1960s the second growth woodland started to be subdivided into housing lots. Life under the trees had its charms.
In 1975 Lyme disease was recognized as a disease from a cluster of cases in Lyme, Connecticut, a center of upscale suburbia.
A few years later the spirochete was isolated from the gut of a tick. If the disease is recognized, it is easily treated with antibiotics. A bullseye rash is often diagnostic.
Not everyone gets the rash. Other symptoms of the disease include headache, fever, fatigue and depression. If the disease is not recognized early, it becomes, like syphilis, another disease caused by a spirochete, difficult to treat and can result in joint pain and arthritis (especially in the knees), heart trouble and neurological symptoms such as difficulty concentrating and short term memory loss.
What to do? Reducing the number of deer (to fewer than 8-20 per square mile) helps.
Letting in light and air helps. Dehydration is the enemy of insects. Ticks and small mammals like damp leafy woodland edges, unmortared stone walls, brushy areas. Letting forests mature and cutting brush along forest edges probably helps. A few old trees in a sunny mowed lawn is ideal. Such treatments will also make the landscape much less desirable for many birds, small mammals and butterflies.
Cardboard tubes filled with cotton impregnated with pyrethrum helps reduce the number of ticks on mice, if the mice use the cotton to build their nests.
Baited station where mice are treated with insecticide also work; such stations have also been used for deer. Squirrels also enjoy bait stations for mice. A laborious solution is to capture and vaccinate the mice against the spirochete, every year.
Bait stations probably spread chronic wasting disease in deer. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a disease related to mad cow disease that was once endemic but uncommon among elk in the Rockies but is rapidly spreading eastward, probably through the use of feeding stations for deer. At the feeding stations deer come in contact with each other’s saliva, thus spreading the disease.
Lyme disease is a problem of landscape design. The best defense against it is a more diverse ecosystem, in which ticks feed on more animals that are not reservoirs of the disease. Then the incidence of disease in the ticks will be lower. (The chance of getting Lyme disease from a tick bite is currently 1-15%.)
In California, habitats with good fence lizard habitat have fewer infected ticks (ticks feed on lizards and lizards are resistant to the disease).
In the Northeast, small areas of woodland (less than five acres, a huge area in the suburbs) have many more white footed mice, as well as many more ticks, and many many more infected ticks, per square meter. This is probably because most of the woodland is edge, with invasive shrub layers and thick invasive groundcovers, ideal habitat for mice, chipmunks, ticks and deer.
One needs a connected landscape so populations of foxes, coyotes, weasels, owls and hawks can catch mice, and populations of raccoons, opossums, skunks, amphibians, different small birds and foxes can be bitten by ticks. The more young ticks bite animals that don’t carry the spirochete, the less likely humans will get the disease.
The ideal suburban landscape has vegetated bridges over roads connecting small woodlands and amphibian friendly culverts under roads to accommodate migrating frogs and toads (also tick bait).
It has habitat for short tailed weasels and snakes. Mice flee an area at the smell of a snake. Cats that eat snakes are kept indoors.
It has coyotes to help control deer. Coyotes will also control feral or adventurous bird and snake eating cats.
And humans with bows hunting deer. A useful addition to the tool kit would be a curare tipped arrow. Then (as long as the poison enters its bloodstream) the slightest scratch will kill a deer. There are many ways to deliver the poison. Perhaps a groove along the point of a hard plastic disposable arrowhead contains curare, covered with wax (so the hunter doesn’t accidentally kill himself). Or a springloaded pellet propels itself upon impact into the animal’s flesh.
Curare kills by paralyzing the muscles. Respiration stops and the animal dies of asphyxiation. But the curare molecules are too large to pass through the gut wall (curare is harmless if taken orally) so the animal’s meat remains edible.
Since the point is population control as well as sport, does as well as bucks are hunted. Young does taste better anyway.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Tales of the North Pacific
No one wants to illustrate Biology Comics!
Imagine the drawings…
Tales of the North Pacific
The other name for orcas is ‘killer whale.’ Orcas are the most fearsome predator in the sea.
When attacked by orcas, a pod of great whales formed a daisy pattern, head toward the center, tails out. Great whales are several times the size of orcas. The idea was probably to whack the attacking killer whales with their tails; or to limit their access to whale bodies.
Orcas are intelligent, powerful and not easily discouraged. Their dentition resembles that of Tyrannosaurus rex. Wounded great whales would be nudged back into formation by their companions, trailing their intestines or missing great flaps of skin. The whole pod might be killed.
Dead whales sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they become the base of a novel ecosystem including polychaete worms that live on the fat in whalebone. Before industrial whaling, 850,000 whale carcasses may have littered the seafloor at any one time. Besides supporting their own ecosystem, the carcasses contributed nutrients to the deep sea.
Orcas are opportunistic hunters and also eat seals, sea lions and fish, including herring and salmon. They have a high metabolic demand and need a lot of food. Stellar sea lions, which weigh up to a ton, provide a good meal.
During World War II, fishing in the ocean almost stopped. After the war, life returned to normal. The whale hunt in the North Pacific resumed. About 500,000 great whales were killed there.
During the 20 years of the hunt, orcas learned to respond to the sound of exploding harpoons and whale distress calls. Like gulls, they followed cruising ships. Many harpooned whales escape. These were fat years for the killer whales.
When the hunt ended, whales were few. The biomass of fin and sperm whales in the North Pacific had been reduced by 90% or more.
As the hunt wound down in the 1970s, harbor seals began to decline, followed by Stellar sea lions and fur seals. The declines were rapid and surprising. Stellar sea lions are now considered endangered.
Fur seals had been hunted almost to extinction by American and Russian sealers toward the opening of the twentieth century. Their populations had recovered under a treaty that let the Aleut natives of the Pribolov Islands, their breeding grounds, manage them.
The reason for the decline of these marine mammals was unknown. It was first blamed on overfishing, specifically for pollock, which had begun to replace herring (a more oily fish) in the warming Bering Sea. The white flesh of the pollock is used by chains like McDonald’s in its fish sandwiches.
The decline was also thought to be related to the replacement of the (oily) herring by the (less oily) pollock. Oily fish provide more calories, which sea mammals living in cold water need to maintain their layer of insulating fat; and maintain their metabolisms.
Declaring the Stellar’s sea lion endangered brought boatloads of federal funding. When scientists investigated the pollock fishery, it seemed, for the time being, sustainable. There were enough fish for everybody.
Animals known to have been taken by orcas include blue whales (the largest whale), dogs, great white sharks, sea turtles, moose and sea otters. Orcas capture seal pups resting at the edge of the beach, sliding in on a wave to grab them. Great white sharks flee at the sound of orcas.
In the 1990s sea otters started to disappear. By 1998, 90% of the sea otters were gone from a 1000 kilometer stretch of the central Aleutians. Several tens of thousands of otters were gone.
Sea otters are another predatory animal whose munching on herbivores is thought to keep the world green. They live, or once lived, in the kelp forest of the Pacific coast from northern Japan to Baja California.
Sea otters eat animals that live in the kelp. They are fond of abalone and will hunt them until only those hiding in clefts in the rock are left. They pound the abalone off the bottom with stones. This behavior irritates human fishers (sea otters do the same with beds of mussels) but makes room in the ocean for other invertebrates.
Another favorite food is sea urchins. Sea urchins are covered with spines. Sea otters bite into the soft bottom of the large ones and lick out the insides. The fold up the spines of small ones and pop them in their mouths. The favorite food of sea urchins is kelp.
Sea otters have no layer of fat to keep them warm. Their thick coats do that. To maintain their body temperatures in the cold water in which they live they must eat a quarter to a third of their body weight of 30-100 pounds daily. A lot of sea urchins.
When the shipwrecked German naturalist Stellar wintered on Bering Island in 1741 sea otters were abundant and tame. Like the arctic foxes, whose constant scavenging drove the men crazy, they could be killed with clubs.
Since the otters lack blubber, their insulating fur is the densest of any animal and extremely valuable. The men with Stellar sailed away with 1000 skins, abandoning some of his laboriously prepared specimens on the island. The small boat they cobbled together had only so much room.
Undeterred by the remoteness of the Pacific Northwest, Russian hunters were soon slaughtering sea otters for their skins. They enslaved the native Aleuts to help them. In no time, the Russians were joined by the Americans, who hunted further south.
By 1900 otters were gone from most of their former haunts. The Alaskan otters were hunted out by 1800, but recovered by the 1860s, when they were hunted down again. Sea otters were finally protected by the same treaty that protected the fur seals.
Some otters survived and in the 1970s their influence on the health of kelp forests began to be recognized. Alaska is the center of the sea otter population. Where there were sea otters in the Aleutians in the 1970s, there were dense kelp forests and small sea urchins, where there were no otters, the kelp was grazed down to the bottom by herds of enormous urchins.
In the waving strands of kelp live many fish and invertebrates. Following the abundant fish come harbor seals, sea birds and bald eagles, in numbers greater than where the kelp is missing.
Some sea otter reintroduction programs were successful in reestablishing colonies along the Pacific coast south of Alaska. A colony in Big Sur that had escaped the hunters expanded.
Otters didn’t do as well as formerly. Their habitat was degraded by fishing and runoff. They are susceptible to a disease carried by house cats, whose agents are washed with cat feces down storm drains into the sea.
When in the 1990s, the otters along the Aleutians began to disappear, orcas were not one of the usual suspects. Lacking blubber, otters are not a desirable food for orcas. Three or four hungry orcas could have eaten the tens of thousands of vanished otters over 10 years but more likely several pods of orcas were indulging in otters as a side dish to fur seals, Stellar sea lions, fish and the occasional great whale.
The sea otter tale is one of a predator controlling a grazer, even in the simplified invertebrate fauna of the modern kelp forest (simplified by human fishers).
The orcas demonstrate what happens when a main prey animal is removed: the predatory cascade goes awry. The remaining animals in the ocean can’t satisfy the great hunters’ appetites. They will eat everything available and then starve.
Predatory control of grazers is not always perfect. Sea otters reduce populations of some shellfish to where they are not commercially exploitable (but far from extinct). Wolves will reduce failing populations of moose to zero. Insect populations escape from the control of their bird and rodent predators and eat themselves out of house and home, until controlled by the collapse of the vegetation or by microbes (the ultimate predators). The fear of mountain lions keeps remnant populations of bighorn sheep on their Sierra cliffs during the winter (where they fall on icy rocks) rather than face the hungry lions in the lowlands.
But in most of these cases, the ecosystem has been originally messed up by us.
Imagine the drawings…
Tales of the North Pacific
The other name for orcas is ‘killer whale.’ Orcas are the most fearsome predator in the sea.
When attacked by orcas, a pod of great whales formed a daisy pattern, head toward the center, tails out. Great whales are several times the size of orcas. The idea was probably to whack the attacking killer whales with their tails; or to limit their access to whale bodies.
Orcas are intelligent, powerful and not easily discouraged. Their dentition resembles that of Tyrannosaurus rex. Wounded great whales would be nudged back into formation by their companions, trailing their intestines or missing great flaps of skin. The whole pod might be killed.
Dead whales sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they become the base of a novel ecosystem including polychaete worms that live on the fat in whalebone. Before industrial whaling, 850,000 whale carcasses may have littered the seafloor at any one time. Besides supporting their own ecosystem, the carcasses contributed nutrients to the deep sea.
Orcas are opportunistic hunters and also eat seals, sea lions and fish, including herring and salmon. They have a high metabolic demand and need a lot of food. Stellar sea lions, which weigh up to a ton, provide a good meal.
During World War II, fishing in the ocean almost stopped. After the war, life returned to normal. The whale hunt in the North Pacific resumed. About 500,000 great whales were killed there.
During the 20 years of the hunt, orcas learned to respond to the sound of exploding harpoons and whale distress calls. Like gulls, they followed cruising ships. Many harpooned whales escape. These were fat years for the killer whales.
When the hunt ended, whales were few. The biomass of fin and sperm whales in the North Pacific had been reduced by 90% or more.
As the hunt wound down in the 1970s, harbor seals began to decline, followed by Stellar sea lions and fur seals. The declines were rapid and surprising. Stellar sea lions are now considered endangered.
Fur seals had been hunted almost to extinction by American and Russian sealers toward the opening of the twentieth century. Their populations had recovered under a treaty that let the Aleut natives of the Pribolov Islands, their breeding grounds, manage them.
The reason for the decline of these marine mammals was unknown. It was first blamed on overfishing, specifically for pollock, which had begun to replace herring (a more oily fish) in the warming Bering Sea. The white flesh of the pollock is used by chains like McDonald’s in its fish sandwiches.
The decline was also thought to be related to the replacement of the (oily) herring by the (less oily) pollock. Oily fish provide more calories, which sea mammals living in cold water need to maintain their layer of insulating fat; and maintain their metabolisms.
Declaring the Stellar’s sea lion endangered brought boatloads of federal funding. When scientists investigated the pollock fishery, it seemed, for the time being, sustainable. There were enough fish for everybody.
Animals known to have been taken by orcas include blue whales (the largest whale), dogs, great white sharks, sea turtles, moose and sea otters. Orcas capture seal pups resting at the edge of the beach, sliding in on a wave to grab them. Great white sharks flee at the sound of orcas.
In the 1990s sea otters started to disappear. By 1998, 90% of the sea otters were gone from a 1000 kilometer stretch of the central Aleutians. Several tens of thousands of otters were gone.
Sea otters are another predatory animal whose munching on herbivores is thought to keep the world green. They live, or once lived, in the kelp forest of the Pacific coast from northern Japan to Baja California.
Sea otters eat animals that live in the kelp. They are fond of abalone and will hunt them until only those hiding in clefts in the rock are left. They pound the abalone off the bottom with stones. This behavior irritates human fishers (sea otters do the same with beds of mussels) but makes room in the ocean for other invertebrates.
Another favorite food is sea urchins. Sea urchins are covered with spines. Sea otters bite into the soft bottom of the large ones and lick out the insides. The fold up the spines of small ones and pop them in their mouths. The favorite food of sea urchins is kelp.
Sea otters have no layer of fat to keep them warm. Their thick coats do that. To maintain their body temperatures in the cold water in which they live they must eat a quarter to a third of their body weight of 30-100 pounds daily. A lot of sea urchins.
When the shipwrecked German naturalist Stellar wintered on Bering Island in 1741 sea otters were abundant and tame. Like the arctic foxes, whose constant scavenging drove the men crazy, they could be killed with clubs.
Since the otters lack blubber, their insulating fur is the densest of any animal and extremely valuable. The men with Stellar sailed away with 1000 skins, abandoning some of his laboriously prepared specimens on the island. The small boat they cobbled together had only so much room.
Undeterred by the remoteness of the Pacific Northwest, Russian hunters were soon slaughtering sea otters for their skins. They enslaved the native Aleuts to help them. In no time, the Russians were joined by the Americans, who hunted further south.
By 1900 otters were gone from most of their former haunts. The Alaskan otters were hunted out by 1800, but recovered by the 1860s, when they were hunted down again. Sea otters were finally protected by the same treaty that protected the fur seals.
Some otters survived and in the 1970s their influence on the health of kelp forests began to be recognized. Alaska is the center of the sea otter population. Where there were sea otters in the Aleutians in the 1970s, there were dense kelp forests and small sea urchins, where there were no otters, the kelp was grazed down to the bottom by herds of enormous urchins.
In the waving strands of kelp live many fish and invertebrates. Following the abundant fish come harbor seals, sea birds and bald eagles, in numbers greater than where the kelp is missing.
Some sea otter reintroduction programs were successful in reestablishing colonies along the Pacific coast south of Alaska. A colony in Big Sur that had escaped the hunters expanded.
Otters didn’t do as well as formerly. Their habitat was degraded by fishing and runoff. They are susceptible to a disease carried by house cats, whose agents are washed with cat feces down storm drains into the sea.
When in the 1990s, the otters along the Aleutians began to disappear, orcas were not one of the usual suspects. Lacking blubber, otters are not a desirable food for orcas. Three or four hungry orcas could have eaten the tens of thousands of vanished otters over 10 years but more likely several pods of orcas were indulging in otters as a side dish to fur seals, Stellar sea lions, fish and the occasional great whale.
The sea otter tale is one of a predator controlling a grazer, even in the simplified invertebrate fauna of the modern kelp forest (simplified by human fishers).
The orcas demonstrate what happens when a main prey animal is removed: the predatory cascade goes awry. The remaining animals in the ocean can’t satisfy the great hunters’ appetites. They will eat everything available and then starve.
Predatory control of grazers is not always perfect. Sea otters reduce populations of some shellfish to where they are not commercially exploitable (but far from extinct). Wolves will reduce failing populations of moose to zero. Insect populations escape from the control of their bird and rodent predators and eat themselves out of house and home, until controlled by the collapse of the vegetation or by microbes (the ultimate predators). The fear of mountain lions keeps remnant populations of bighorn sheep on their Sierra cliffs during the winter (where they fall on icy rocks) rather than face the hungry lions in the lowlands.
But in most of these cases, the ecosystem has been originally messed up by us.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Biology Comicks
Wolf Cascade
The last wolf in Yellowstone National Park was killed in 1926. Two young wolves stepped simultaneously into nearby traps. Wolves were killed to protect elk.
The elk enjoyed the wolves being gone. They soon increased in number.
Coyotes also increased and ate lots of mice, voles and rabbits. They also killed many foxes and skunks and learned to kill newborn antelope. Fewer foxes and skunks meant more ground nesting birds.
Elk eat grass but they also browse twigs of aspen and willow, especially in winter. With wolves gone they spent more time browsing near streams. Soon no tender young trees were left.
Beaver had dams along the streams. Fat trout ate tadpoles in their ponds. Green-winged teal dabbled for insect larvae and small plants. Birds sang from the trees.
As fewer and fewer young trees grew and only big old trees were left, beaver had less and less to eat. Slowly, they starved to death or left. Their dams washed out.
The elk missed the young trees too and looked for them. They found every one. Elk numbers had increased until they were eating all the available food. In hard winters, many elk died.
The females were in poor condition in spring when they bore their fawns. During a hard winter the females absorbed the embryonic fawns into their bodies. But when the weather relented elk numbers would increase once again.
Without beaver ponds and young trees to hold their banks, the streams straightened out and cut deeper into their beds. Water tables near the streams fell.
Fewer birds returned to the old aspens on the streamside. Trout were smaller and fewer mink and otters came to hunt them.
In 1960, after 34 years of no wolves, some scientists had the bright idea that fierce predatory animals, by keeping animals like elk from eating up all the grass and trees, kept the world green. This may have not been a new idea but as a general principle it was revolutionary. Ecosystem control was from the top down, through predators, rather than from the bottom up, through photosynthesizers. (Actually both processes are key.)
By the 1990s the idea had taken hold and the National Park Service decided to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone. Wolves were trapped in northern Alberta in the winter of 1994-95 and kept in cages in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley for a few months to acclimatize them to their surroundings.
When the wolves were released it didn’t take them long to figure out what to do with the elk. (These wolves were used to eating moose.) The elk had forgotten about wolves over the last 70 years (many many elk generations).
Soon things were back to normal. When pursued, healthy elk, generally slightly faster than wolves, would tell the wolves to get lost.
Unhealthy or old slow elk did less well. Wolves ate unhealthy, sick and old elk.
Wolves also ate young elk. By eating elk calves, wolves kept numbers of elk somewhat below the carrying capacity of their range, though overall, weather still had the greatest influence on the elk population. Fewer elk starved to death in bad winters and the animals were in better condition.
Wolves also made elk cautious. Elk realized certain places were dangerous because of ambush by wolves. Many of these places were near streams.
As elk spent less time near streams, the streamside forest started to recover. As it got thicker, it provided more cover for the wolves and became more dangerous.
Soon willows and aspen, shrubs and wildflowers were again growing along the streams.
As the trees recovered, beaver started to move back in. Wolves patrolled the valleys too, hoping to surprise a beaver on land. Beaver is a common food of wolves. Soon only very hungry elk would venture near the tasty willows and aspen of the streambanks.
As the beaver dams grew in number, water tables near the streams rose, benefiting the trees and the grasses that grew under them. Downcutting ceased and stream bottoms filled in. Trout grew more plentiful and plump. Mink hunted the trout and the frogs that lived in the ponds.
The wolves killed half the coyotes in the Lamar valley, their competition (as foxes and skunks were for the coyotes), which meant more foxes and skunks, and a recovering population of pronghorn antelope, whose numbers had been decimated by the coyotes. Ground nesting birds probably didn’t enjoy greater numbers of foxes and skunks but neither did they enjoy coyotes.
The wolves left behind a windfall of carrion for foxes, crows, grizzly bears, magpies, golden eagles and early returning mountain bluebirds, who ate the flies hatching out of the carcasses.
Along the streams, the birds returned and sang from the trees.
The last wolf in Yellowstone National Park was killed in 1926. Two young wolves stepped simultaneously into nearby traps. Wolves were killed to protect elk.
The elk enjoyed the wolves being gone. They soon increased in number.
Coyotes also increased and ate lots of mice, voles and rabbits. They also killed many foxes and skunks and learned to kill newborn antelope. Fewer foxes and skunks meant more ground nesting birds.
Elk eat grass but they also browse twigs of aspen and willow, especially in winter. With wolves gone they spent more time browsing near streams. Soon no tender young trees were left.
Beaver had dams along the streams. Fat trout ate tadpoles in their ponds. Green-winged teal dabbled for insect larvae and small plants. Birds sang from the trees.
As fewer and fewer young trees grew and only big old trees were left, beaver had less and less to eat. Slowly, they starved to death or left. Their dams washed out.
The elk missed the young trees too and looked for them. They found every one. Elk numbers had increased until they were eating all the available food. In hard winters, many elk died.
The females were in poor condition in spring when they bore their fawns. During a hard winter the females absorbed the embryonic fawns into their bodies. But when the weather relented elk numbers would increase once again.
Without beaver ponds and young trees to hold their banks, the streams straightened out and cut deeper into their beds. Water tables near the streams fell.
Fewer birds returned to the old aspens on the streamside. Trout were smaller and fewer mink and otters came to hunt them.
In 1960, after 34 years of no wolves, some scientists had the bright idea that fierce predatory animals, by keeping animals like elk from eating up all the grass and trees, kept the world green. This may have not been a new idea but as a general principle it was revolutionary. Ecosystem control was from the top down, through predators, rather than from the bottom up, through photosynthesizers. (Actually both processes are key.)
By the 1990s the idea had taken hold and the National Park Service decided to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone. Wolves were trapped in northern Alberta in the winter of 1994-95 and kept in cages in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley for a few months to acclimatize them to their surroundings.
When the wolves were released it didn’t take them long to figure out what to do with the elk. (These wolves were used to eating moose.) The elk had forgotten about wolves over the last 70 years (many many elk generations).
Soon things were back to normal. When pursued, healthy elk, generally slightly faster than wolves, would tell the wolves to get lost.
Unhealthy or old slow elk did less well. Wolves ate unhealthy, sick and old elk.
Wolves also ate young elk. By eating elk calves, wolves kept numbers of elk somewhat below the carrying capacity of their range, though overall, weather still had the greatest influence on the elk population. Fewer elk starved to death in bad winters and the animals were in better condition.
Wolves also made elk cautious. Elk realized certain places were dangerous because of ambush by wolves. Many of these places were near streams.
As elk spent less time near streams, the streamside forest started to recover. As it got thicker, it provided more cover for the wolves and became more dangerous.
Soon willows and aspen, shrubs and wildflowers were again growing along the streams.
As the trees recovered, beaver started to move back in. Wolves patrolled the valleys too, hoping to surprise a beaver on land. Beaver is a common food of wolves. Soon only very hungry elk would venture near the tasty willows and aspen of the streambanks.
As the beaver dams grew in number, water tables near the streams rose, benefiting the trees and the grasses that grew under them. Downcutting ceased and stream bottoms filled in. Trout grew more plentiful and plump. Mink hunted the trout and the frogs that lived in the ponds.
The wolves killed half the coyotes in the Lamar valley, their competition (as foxes and skunks were for the coyotes), which meant more foxes and skunks, and a recovering population of pronghorn antelope, whose numbers had been decimated by the coyotes. Ground nesting birds probably didn’t enjoy greater numbers of foxes and skunks but neither did they enjoy coyotes.
The wolves left behind a windfall of carrion for foxes, crows, grizzly bears, magpies, golden eagles and early returning mountain bluebirds, who ate the flies hatching out of the carcasses.
Along the streams, the birds returned and sang from the trees.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Biology Comix
Anyone want to illustrate "Biology Comix"? Line drawings or watercolors give one more scope but photoshopped photos would do.
Cloud Story
The sea surface is full of micro-organisms—single celled bacteria, fungi, animals, plants, viruses. One dives through them into the sea. The photosynthesizing plankton, the algae and cyanobacteria, are the grasses of the sea.
The turning earth generates winds.
The winds blow up waves and generate currents.
The photosynthesizing micro-organisms of the planckton, the basis of the ocean’s food chain, are fed by nutrients coming from below, pushed up by storms, transported by currents.
Bubbles slide up the surface of the waves, concentrating the plankton and a chemical they secrete, dimethyl sulfide (DMS).
As the waves break, the bubbles burst and the plankton and DMS escape the water’s grip and are swept up into the atmosphere.
The wind carries them further and further aloft.
High in the atmosphere, water starts to condense about the molecules of DMS.
Clouds form.
The airborne plankton live in the clouds, on organic acids and alcohols and on sulfur and nitrogen compounds. Some of this material comes from the smokestacks of power plants and the tailpipes of cars, and some from passing ships, but much of it is natural.
Micro-organisms are abundant in clouds. They divide and reproduce and live happily there.
The clouds float over the earth, reflecting the sun during the day (and cooling the earth), keeping the warmth in at night (making the earth warmer). No one knows the overall effect of clouds but it is thought they cool the earth. Without clouds, temperatures would be more extreme.
When the micro-organisms are tired of living in the clouds, they secrete proteins that make ice form around them.
Then they fall from the clouds as pellets of ice, perhaps melting as they pass through a warmer layer of air, and falling to earth as rain; or refreezing to fall as snow, on the sea, a lake, or the land below.
Then they begin life in their new environment. Thus these micro-organisms constantly recolonize the earth.
Cloud Story
The sea surface is full of micro-organisms—single celled bacteria, fungi, animals, plants, viruses. One dives through them into the sea. The photosynthesizing plankton, the algae and cyanobacteria, are the grasses of the sea.
The turning earth generates winds.
The winds blow up waves and generate currents.
The photosynthesizing micro-organisms of the planckton, the basis of the ocean’s food chain, are fed by nutrients coming from below, pushed up by storms, transported by currents.
Bubbles slide up the surface of the waves, concentrating the plankton and a chemical they secrete, dimethyl sulfide (DMS).
As the waves break, the bubbles burst and the plankton and DMS escape the water’s grip and are swept up into the atmosphere.
The wind carries them further and further aloft.
High in the atmosphere, water starts to condense about the molecules of DMS.
Clouds form.
The airborne plankton live in the clouds, on organic acids and alcohols and on sulfur and nitrogen compounds. Some of this material comes from the smokestacks of power plants and the tailpipes of cars, and some from passing ships, but much of it is natural.
Micro-organisms are abundant in clouds. They divide and reproduce and live happily there.
The clouds float over the earth, reflecting the sun during the day (and cooling the earth), keeping the warmth in at night (making the earth warmer). No one knows the overall effect of clouds but it is thought they cool the earth. Without clouds, temperatures would be more extreme.
When the micro-organisms are tired of living in the clouds, they secrete proteins that make ice form around them.
Then they fall from the clouds as pellets of ice, perhaps melting as they pass through a warmer layer of air, and falling to earth as rain; or refreezing to fall as snow, on the sea, a lake, or the land below.
Then they begin life in their new environment. Thus these micro-organisms constantly recolonize the earth.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
3/13/10: Leaving Berkeley
3/13/10: Leaving Berkeley
Forty years ago Seymour Melman pointed out again and again in The New York Times that the cost of the Vietnam War was approaching the value of the built American landscape. From the 1960s through 2000 the United States lost the opportunity to create a new world: a more egalitarian society, living comfortably within its natural limits. But this was a time without limits, when the United States dominated the world, much of which was developing at an unprecedented pace. In 1960, carbon dioxide levels were rising but not unreasonable; human populations low enough that much natural landscape, with its fierce large animals, was left (fierce wild animals, through their predatory behavior, are thought through a trophic cascade of effects on herbivores and smaller predators to keep the world green; in 1960 in developed countries like the United States the land was now largely empty of such animals, which were replaced by human hunters); songbird populations collapsing but still relatively high; chemical use low (DDT new and popular), if growing; medical care largely affordable; the country relatively rich. Berkeley was creeping out into San Francisco Bay; the Mississippi being hemmed in by dikes, the Everglades drained off to the sea. The sea still had fish, the sky hawks. During full moon at nighttime high tide, millions of silvery grunion spawned on the beaches of southern California.
From its founding amidst the unfolding of capitalist economies in the West, the United States has been ruled by its economic interests; most often, the economic interests of wealthy individuals and corporations (which largely replaced wealthy individuals; the 1930s were an apparent exception). So from the sixties on, corporations like ExxonMobil, General Motors and United States Sugar, with their financial connections to politicians (who needed money for reelection, to put their children through college, to entertain their mistresses, impress their colleagues, or for a comfortable retirement) determined the country’s priorities. The result is that our prosperity, in a much less egalitarian society than in 1960, depends on our producing chemicals that cause developmental anomalies in children (ambiguous sexuality, autism, low IQ) and cancer in adults (perhaps partly as a result of depressed immune systems, with similar effects in fish, marine mammals, birds and the other creatures with which we share the planet); on our eating cheap industrial foods that produce life-shortening diseases (obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis); on world trade that haphazardly introduces strange plants and animals to new places; on processes that produce carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that are changing the climate. While all this is known, little changes: a recent plan by the State of Florida to buy land to add to the Everglades turns out to be a plan to prop up United States Sugar, a company which survives through the use of cheap Haitian labor, through import duties on sugar (which raises its price to us and harms poor farmers worldwide), which is a major polluter of the Everglades with its releases of phosphorus, and which was only able to farm at all because of public works projects that drained its land. The Everglades will not survive anyway: a two foot rise in sea level will turn the fresh water marsh with its alligators and shorebirds (already reduced 90% from the 1930s) into a salt water one with crocodiles and manatees. Sea level is predicted to rise three feet by 2100 (though ten feet is more likely). A changing climate will make all plans to save habitats, plants and animals moot, as the creatures move and their habitats change and disappear. The forests of the western cordilleras of North America from Arizona to Alaska are collapsing from insects and fire, partly as a result of drought, partly from 100 years of human mismanagement. Boreal forests across the northern hemisphere may soon join them. Tropical forests continue to be logged and cleared for agriculture. Methane bubbles up from the warming Arctic Sea (or perhaps it always has). Blister rust, a fungus disease of pines (it inspired a program of hand eradication of native gooseberries, an alternate host in the eastern United States in the 1920s-1930s) has reached the white bark pines of high altitudes in the Rocky Mountains, whose seeds, robbed from rodent nests, are a major autumn food of grizzly bears. The bears survive because they live high up in the backcountry. If they descend to lower altitudes to feed they will be shot. Eastern forests change as the climate warms, heavy cutting continues, cloud ceilings (the boundary between deciduous and evergreen forests) rise, and as several of its species (green and white ash, eastern hemlock, beech) join chestnut, red spruce and the elms in decline from imported insects, air pollution and diseases. Coyotes however, have moved into habitats abandoned a century ago by gray wolves and, growing ever larger as they adopt white tailed deer, along with rabbits and mice, as a prey animal, are doing well. What a changing climate will do to people (a species as opportunistic as coyotes) is uncertain. Rich populations may survive without too much difficulty. But if I were to buy land, I would do it at least 200 feet above sea level, out of river flood plains, and north, perhaps in walking distance of water with fish. Much may depend on how much the chemical soup in which we live, and the industrial food we eat, costs us (and of course in the case of the United States, the costs of our pointless foreign wars): modern life may not be cost-effective or survivable.
What all this implies for conserving the landscape is uncertain. Habitat for individual animals (grizzly bears, tigers, shorebirds) may not be worth saving: habitats are changing too fast. Land in large quantities is worth saving, especially lands near large rivers and coasts (and inland of coasts) and any extensive, connected pieces of open land. Lands in continental interiors are probably going to get drier (deserts will expand, land for photo-voltaic panels become a dime a dozen) and northern lands warmer. Northern lands may remain well watered and so desirable for agriculture, despite their relatively poor soils. Coastal regions (the lands east of the Appalachians, the coast of California) may become too stormy to be easily habitable by people. An orderly retreat from the effects of a changing climate, demolishing or moving buildings as we go, leaving much open land for nature, would be the best strategy; but we won’t do it. The cities of older civilizations slid under the sea and were adopted by sponges and fish but our more toxic buildings may be less friendly to wildlife and us. In 10,000 years bacteria will have broken down or sequestered the toxins, the sea diluted the radioactivity in the storage ponds of nuclear power plants, buried the asbestos insulation, oxidized the iron, the action of the waves turned the concrete to sand.
* * *
The day we left Berkeley dawned clear and cool, the air washed clean by the previous day’s rain. There was an invisible skim of frost on the car’s windshield, momentarily confusing the locals. The sun was going to be hot, the air cool, with a slightly sour smell of damp and redwoods. The plane banked over the bay, revealing pale green hills, with darker oaks and firs in the hollows, the blue sky, a pale blue or muddy green sea. Large areas of the southern parts of the bay are still used for the evaporation of salt, diked rippled flats red with salt tolerant micro organisms, and more areas of natural wetland are left, if with no natural flow from the San Joaquin River, all of whose water is allocated to people and agriculture. I missed California already. Who would want to leave on such a day, such a beautiful and ruined landscape?
We were returning to our black and white late winter world. When we landed in Albany, parked on the side of the airport tarmac were several huge planes, diverted from New York City airports because of tremendous winds earlier that day. Global warming gives us a more energetic atmosphere, of which this may or may not be an example. But perhaps more difficult and unreliable air travel will be another part of our warming world.
Forty years ago Seymour Melman pointed out again and again in The New York Times that the cost of the Vietnam War was approaching the value of the built American landscape. From the 1960s through 2000 the United States lost the opportunity to create a new world: a more egalitarian society, living comfortably within its natural limits. But this was a time without limits, when the United States dominated the world, much of which was developing at an unprecedented pace. In 1960, carbon dioxide levels were rising but not unreasonable; human populations low enough that much natural landscape, with its fierce large animals, was left (fierce wild animals, through their predatory behavior, are thought through a trophic cascade of effects on herbivores and smaller predators to keep the world green; in 1960 in developed countries like the United States the land was now largely empty of such animals, which were replaced by human hunters); songbird populations collapsing but still relatively high; chemical use low (DDT new and popular), if growing; medical care largely affordable; the country relatively rich. Berkeley was creeping out into San Francisco Bay; the Mississippi being hemmed in by dikes, the Everglades drained off to the sea. The sea still had fish, the sky hawks. During full moon at nighttime high tide, millions of silvery grunion spawned on the beaches of southern California.
From its founding amidst the unfolding of capitalist economies in the West, the United States has been ruled by its economic interests; most often, the economic interests of wealthy individuals and corporations (which largely replaced wealthy individuals; the 1930s were an apparent exception). So from the sixties on, corporations like ExxonMobil, General Motors and United States Sugar, with their financial connections to politicians (who needed money for reelection, to put their children through college, to entertain their mistresses, impress their colleagues, or for a comfortable retirement) determined the country’s priorities. The result is that our prosperity, in a much less egalitarian society than in 1960, depends on our producing chemicals that cause developmental anomalies in children (ambiguous sexuality, autism, low IQ) and cancer in adults (perhaps partly as a result of depressed immune systems, with similar effects in fish, marine mammals, birds and the other creatures with which we share the planet); on our eating cheap industrial foods that produce life-shortening diseases (obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis); on world trade that haphazardly introduces strange plants and animals to new places; on processes that produce carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that are changing the climate. While all this is known, little changes: a recent plan by the State of Florida to buy land to add to the Everglades turns out to be a plan to prop up United States Sugar, a company which survives through the use of cheap Haitian labor, through import duties on sugar (which raises its price to us and harms poor farmers worldwide), which is a major polluter of the Everglades with its releases of phosphorus, and which was only able to farm at all because of public works projects that drained its land. The Everglades will not survive anyway: a two foot rise in sea level will turn the fresh water marsh with its alligators and shorebirds (already reduced 90% from the 1930s) into a salt water one with crocodiles and manatees. Sea level is predicted to rise three feet by 2100 (though ten feet is more likely). A changing climate will make all plans to save habitats, plants and animals moot, as the creatures move and their habitats change and disappear. The forests of the western cordilleras of North America from Arizona to Alaska are collapsing from insects and fire, partly as a result of drought, partly from 100 years of human mismanagement. Boreal forests across the northern hemisphere may soon join them. Tropical forests continue to be logged and cleared for agriculture. Methane bubbles up from the warming Arctic Sea (or perhaps it always has). Blister rust, a fungus disease of pines (it inspired a program of hand eradication of native gooseberries, an alternate host in the eastern United States in the 1920s-1930s) has reached the white bark pines of high altitudes in the Rocky Mountains, whose seeds, robbed from rodent nests, are a major autumn food of grizzly bears. The bears survive because they live high up in the backcountry. If they descend to lower altitudes to feed they will be shot. Eastern forests change as the climate warms, heavy cutting continues, cloud ceilings (the boundary between deciduous and evergreen forests) rise, and as several of its species (green and white ash, eastern hemlock, beech) join chestnut, red spruce and the elms in decline from imported insects, air pollution and diseases. Coyotes however, have moved into habitats abandoned a century ago by gray wolves and, growing ever larger as they adopt white tailed deer, along with rabbits and mice, as a prey animal, are doing well. What a changing climate will do to people (a species as opportunistic as coyotes) is uncertain. Rich populations may survive without too much difficulty. But if I were to buy land, I would do it at least 200 feet above sea level, out of river flood plains, and north, perhaps in walking distance of water with fish. Much may depend on how much the chemical soup in which we live, and the industrial food we eat, costs us (and of course in the case of the United States, the costs of our pointless foreign wars): modern life may not be cost-effective or survivable.
What all this implies for conserving the landscape is uncertain. Habitat for individual animals (grizzly bears, tigers, shorebirds) may not be worth saving: habitats are changing too fast. Land in large quantities is worth saving, especially lands near large rivers and coasts (and inland of coasts) and any extensive, connected pieces of open land. Lands in continental interiors are probably going to get drier (deserts will expand, land for photo-voltaic panels become a dime a dozen) and northern lands warmer. Northern lands may remain well watered and so desirable for agriculture, despite their relatively poor soils. Coastal regions (the lands east of the Appalachians, the coast of California) may become too stormy to be easily habitable by people. An orderly retreat from the effects of a changing climate, demolishing or moving buildings as we go, leaving much open land for nature, would be the best strategy; but we won’t do it. The cities of older civilizations slid under the sea and were adopted by sponges and fish but our more toxic buildings may be less friendly to wildlife and us. In 10,000 years bacteria will have broken down or sequestered the toxins, the sea diluted the radioactivity in the storage ponds of nuclear power plants, buried the asbestos insulation, oxidized the iron, the action of the waves turned the concrete to sand.
* * *
The day we left Berkeley dawned clear and cool, the air washed clean by the previous day’s rain. There was an invisible skim of frost on the car’s windshield, momentarily confusing the locals. The sun was going to be hot, the air cool, with a slightly sour smell of damp and redwoods. The plane banked over the bay, revealing pale green hills, with darker oaks and firs in the hollows, the blue sky, a pale blue or muddy green sea. Large areas of the southern parts of the bay are still used for the evaporation of salt, diked rippled flats red with salt tolerant micro organisms, and more areas of natural wetland are left, if with no natural flow from the San Joaquin River, all of whose water is allocated to people and agriculture. I missed California already. Who would want to leave on such a day, such a beautiful and ruined landscape?
We were returning to our black and white late winter world. When we landed in Albany, parked on the side of the airport tarmac were several huge planes, diverted from New York City airports because of tremendous winds earlier that day. Global warming gives us a more energetic atmosphere, of which this may or may not be an example. But perhaps more difficult and unreliable air travel will be another part of our warming world.
Monday, March 1, 2010
3/1/10 Berkeley
We went down this morning to visit Daui's grandnephew at Santa Clara University. Santa Clara is at the foot of the Bay, near San Jose. The Santa Clara River once flowed freely and contributed major amounts of sand to the beaches of southern California. The land around the lower Bay is flat and completely developed, perhaps once sea bottom, or high marsh: strip malls, warehouses, several story apartment buildings and hotels, single family houses. I suppose the flats were originally wooded with Douglas fir and redwood, with some pine, cypress and coastal scrub near the water, some oak and bay along the brooks, serpentine meadows. The campus consisted of tall yellow stucco buildings, on wide lawns decorated with dying redwoods. Against the mission church was a walled rose garden. A black phoebe flitted from shrub to shrub in an alley. We took the kid to lunch at a "pedestrian mall" set down with its own parking garage off a major road, a totally fake urban scene: America as Disneyland.
We drove there from Berkeley, also totally built up, with its tiny yards, scattered redwoods amd palms, unkempt old gardens, a totally mixed and wild vegetation, redwoods growing up against house walls, wild orange bushes, palms two feet thick and sixty feet tall growing out of three square feet of soil, with stone steps laid around the fibrous trunk to a front door; Berkeley with its parks, organic amaranth, sustainably fished salmon, fresh greens, mushrooms smelling of the woods, round topped trees pruned by the wind, happy eggs, bottles of fresh squeezed blood orange juice, affordable apartments set among million dollar houses, round soft green hills fading away to the east from Inspiration Point, the swirl of plastic bottles amidst swimming ducks where Strawberry Creek enters the Bay. A few days later, in early morning we drove Daui's niece and her husband to the airport, through flat gray light, eight lanes of traffic, rain washed buildings visible above the elevated highway, water from the streets running into the Bay. Real life in our capitalist world was along the walled interstates leading down to San Jose.
We drove there from Berkeley, also totally built up, with its tiny yards, scattered redwoods amd palms, unkempt old gardens, a totally mixed and wild vegetation, redwoods growing up against house walls, wild orange bushes, palms two feet thick and sixty feet tall growing out of three square feet of soil, with stone steps laid around the fibrous trunk to a front door; Berkeley with its parks, organic amaranth, sustainably fished salmon, fresh greens, mushrooms smelling of the woods, round topped trees pruned by the wind, happy eggs, bottles of fresh squeezed blood orange juice, affordable apartments set among million dollar houses, round soft green hills fading away to the east from Inspiration Point, the swirl of plastic bottles amidst swimming ducks where Strawberry Creek enters the Bay. A few days later, in early morning we drove Daui's niece and her husband to the airport, through flat gray light, eight lanes of traffic, rain washed buildings visible above the elevated highway, water from the streets running into the Bay. Real life in our capitalist world was along the walled interstates leading down to San Jose.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
1/30/10
1/30/10
For the past month I’ve been cutting up a load of logs for firewood. They came from Schroon Lake, maybe thirty miles away. Most of them are sugar maple, tall slim trees, each yielding three or four sixteen foot logs, knotty, with a small core of rot. The bark on some of them flows like a river around the lopped off branches, covered with frilly pale green lichens and bright clumps of moss. Logs from the deep woods. For good measure the logger threw in a couple of hemlock logs – maybe he thought I wouldn’t know the difference. Hemlock and sugar maple often grow together. Crushed against one log was a long strand of princes pine, a club moss of the forest floor, kept bright by the cold. If it isn’t too cold, I can smell the sweetness of the blocks as I split them. The wood inside the logs is slightly pink. I feel slightly guilty at using these offerings from the forest – at least I should pay attention to them. One tree is a species I don’t recognize – perhaps red elm.
* * *
Now everyone is moaning about the deficit. Okay! How about paying for our current wars? (Bush and the Republicans never thought this necessary.) I think a universal draft is the best way to keep American foreign policy honest, and the U.S. a republic rather than an empire, but if we must have wars, we should pay for them. Everyone’s wars – everyone should pay. Perhaps a 1% surcharge on income taxes to start, the percent rising as incomes rise, to a maximum of - what? 100% on incomes over $2 million? 200%? Those poor bankers will need even larger bonuses….
For the past month I’ve been cutting up a load of logs for firewood. They came from Schroon Lake, maybe thirty miles away. Most of them are sugar maple, tall slim trees, each yielding three or four sixteen foot logs, knotty, with a small core of rot. The bark on some of them flows like a river around the lopped off branches, covered with frilly pale green lichens and bright clumps of moss. Logs from the deep woods. For good measure the logger threw in a couple of hemlock logs – maybe he thought I wouldn’t know the difference. Hemlock and sugar maple often grow together. Crushed against one log was a long strand of princes pine, a club moss of the forest floor, kept bright by the cold. If it isn’t too cold, I can smell the sweetness of the blocks as I split them. The wood inside the logs is slightly pink. I feel slightly guilty at using these offerings from the forest – at least I should pay attention to them. One tree is a species I don’t recognize – perhaps red elm.
* * *
Now everyone is moaning about the deficit. Okay! How about paying for our current wars? (Bush and the Republicans never thought this necessary.) I think a universal draft is the best way to keep American foreign policy honest, and the U.S. a republic rather than an empire, but if we must have wars, we should pay for them. Everyone’s wars – everyone should pay. Perhaps a 1% surcharge on income taxes to start, the percent rising as incomes rise, to a maximum of - what? 100% on incomes over $2 million? 200%? Those poor bankers will need even larger bonuses….
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
1/27/10
1/27/10
The Democrats are losing their nerve again. Goodbye health care! Goodbye cap-and-trade! Hello Afghanistan!
It’s too bad no one can figure out that a carbon tax can also be a jobs program. Half the money collected goes back to those who can least afford the increased cost of goods and fuel (say those families earning less than $80,000 a year), half goes to reducing our dependence on carbon – wind and solar power, new transmission lines, electric cars, better electric motors, more home insulation.
If we don’t steer capitalism in a new direction, it will continue with its frontier mentality, swallowing up resources, as though the whole world were still out there, unspoiled.
The Democrats are losing their nerve again. Goodbye health care! Goodbye cap-and-trade! Hello Afghanistan!
It’s too bad no one can figure out that a carbon tax can also be a jobs program. Half the money collected goes back to those who can least afford the increased cost of goods and fuel (say those families earning less than $80,000 a year), half goes to reducing our dependence on carbon – wind and solar power, new transmission lines, electric cars, better electric motors, more home insulation.
If we don’t steer capitalism in a new direction, it will continue with its frontier mentality, swallowing up resources, as though the whole world were still out there, unspoiled.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
1/19/10
10/19/10
We don’t do anything about carbon emissions because we have no real motivation to do so. What’s wrong with Jim Hansen’s plan of a carbon tax whose money goes back to the people? We could also put it toward universal medical care. (It amounts to the same thing.)
Say, $100 a ton, from oil and coal companies directly into our pockets.
Climate change isn’t going to be an apocalyptic event out of a film but a slow moving catastrophe.
But we may regret every wrong move we make from now on.
We don’t do anything about carbon emissions because we have no real motivation to do so. What’s wrong with Jim Hansen’s plan of a carbon tax whose money goes back to the people? We could also put it toward universal medical care. (It amounts to the same thing.)
Say, $100 a ton, from oil and coal companies directly into our pockets.
Climate change isn’t going to be an apocalyptic event out of a film but a slow moving catastrophe.
But we may regret every wrong move we make from now on.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
1/4/10
1/4/10
The NY Times a few days ago had a photo of a river of electro-shocked carp leaping into the air. These asian carp (bighead and silver carp) were introduced by southern catfish farmers to control algae in their fishponds. They escaped during floods to the Mississippi, an entirely predictable event. These carp also leap into the air when boats pass—the pressure wave must indicate a predator to them—so boaters going by at 5-10 mph may get whacked in the face with a 20-50 pound fish. The carp breed prolifically and have been moving up the Mississippi drainage for years. They are now poised to enter Lake Michigan, via a canal from the Illinois River. The other Great Lakes’ states are in an uproar since the carp are likely to dominate the ecosystems of the lakes. (And while carp have a good reputation in Europe and Asia, they don’t have one here.) The other states insist the canal be closed. Building the canal, partly for transportation, partly to send Chicago’s sewage and stockyard waste away from Lake Michigan, was never a good idea. But why wait til now to do something? I think fish from the Mississippi are edible. Couldn’t McDonalds sell carp fillets in a bun instead of Alaskan pollock? Eco-fish? Can’t we make use of these “invasive species?” Florida panthers prefer to dine on invasive European feral hogs.
During the Reagan years I watched the progression of a pandemic of raccoon rabies up the East Coast. It had started with the release of Florida raccoons by coon hunters in West Virginia. One animal was rabid. I guess there aren’t enough raccoons in West Virginia. Wild animals in general die horrifying deaths but hunting coons with dogs seems an unnecessary addition to the scene. At any rate, no one did anything and the epidemic, now also affecting foxes and skunks, eventually reached us in upper New York State. There were stories of foxes walking up to people or being shot in barns. People were bitten and had to be vaccinated. One died. Rabies is a public health problem but the Reaganites seemed to think people should take care of themselves. Now New York State and Vermont try to prevent the spread of new outbreaks by spreading bait spiked with a vaccine around the area with the disease.
This fall we were visited nightly by three raccoons. They pulled down the bird feeder if I left it up. They also visited my neighbor who doesn’t put up with this sort of thing. He trapped one for a friend who was training his hounds. Let’s not think about what happened to that animal. The others, one as big as a small bear (50-60 pounds), disappeared in a few days. I suppose he shot them. The big one was too big to trap, he was too big to climb up the side of the house to reach the bird feeder. I would have preferred the coyotes to get them. Coyotes are one positive sign in our natural environment—our evolving small wolf, tolerant of humanity and smart enough to live among us. And perhaps also the moose, who, during much debate by state game departments on their reintroduction, began reintroducing themselves.
* * *
As for that article in the Sunday NY Times for January 3rd, What’s a Failed Bailed out Banker Worth? — what a red herring! It’s hard to put morality into capitalism. The banker’s worth what he can get. Any income over $1 million? $2 million? $2.5 million? should be taxed at 90%.
The NY Times a few days ago had a photo of a river of electro-shocked carp leaping into the air. These asian carp (bighead and silver carp) were introduced by southern catfish farmers to control algae in their fishponds. They escaped during floods to the Mississippi, an entirely predictable event. These carp also leap into the air when boats pass—the pressure wave must indicate a predator to them—so boaters going by at 5-10 mph may get whacked in the face with a 20-50 pound fish. The carp breed prolifically and have been moving up the Mississippi drainage for years. They are now poised to enter Lake Michigan, via a canal from the Illinois River. The other Great Lakes’ states are in an uproar since the carp are likely to dominate the ecosystems of the lakes. (And while carp have a good reputation in Europe and Asia, they don’t have one here.) The other states insist the canal be closed. Building the canal, partly for transportation, partly to send Chicago’s sewage and stockyard waste away from Lake Michigan, was never a good idea. But why wait til now to do something? I think fish from the Mississippi are edible. Couldn’t McDonalds sell carp fillets in a bun instead of Alaskan pollock? Eco-fish? Can’t we make use of these “invasive species?” Florida panthers prefer to dine on invasive European feral hogs.
During the Reagan years I watched the progression of a pandemic of raccoon rabies up the East Coast. It had started with the release of Florida raccoons by coon hunters in West Virginia. One animal was rabid. I guess there aren’t enough raccoons in West Virginia. Wild animals in general die horrifying deaths but hunting coons with dogs seems an unnecessary addition to the scene. At any rate, no one did anything and the epidemic, now also affecting foxes and skunks, eventually reached us in upper New York State. There were stories of foxes walking up to people or being shot in barns. People were bitten and had to be vaccinated. One died. Rabies is a public health problem but the Reaganites seemed to think people should take care of themselves. Now New York State and Vermont try to prevent the spread of new outbreaks by spreading bait spiked with a vaccine around the area with the disease.
This fall we were visited nightly by three raccoons. They pulled down the bird feeder if I left it up. They also visited my neighbor who doesn’t put up with this sort of thing. He trapped one for a friend who was training his hounds. Let’s not think about what happened to that animal. The others, one as big as a small bear (50-60 pounds), disappeared in a few days. I suppose he shot them. The big one was too big to trap, he was too big to climb up the side of the house to reach the bird feeder. I would have preferred the coyotes to get them. Coyotes are one positive sign in our natural environment—our evolving small wolf, tolerant of humanity and smart enough to live among us. And perhaps also the moose, who, during much debate by state game departments on their reintroduction, began reintroducing themselves.
* * *
As for that article in the Sunday NY Times for January 3rd, What’s a Failed Bailed out Banker Worth? — what a red herring! It’s hard to put morality into capitalism. The banker’s worth what he can get. Any income over $1 million? $2 million? $2.5 million? should be taxed at 90%.
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