Sunday, October 27, 2013

A crash course in septic systems and how they’re damaging the environment


http://alldownstream.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/a-crash-course-in-septic-systems-and-how-they%E2%80%99re-damaging-the-environment/#comment-83

A crash course in septic systems and how they’re damaging the environment


Conclusions

Even if you have a septic system in your backyard, your waste ends up in the same place as everybody else’s.  The key difference is that waste flowing to a wastewater treatment plant is more likely to be treated using biological nutrient removal (BNR) technology that dramatically reduces the amount of nitrogen before discharging into a receiving waterbody (source).  Your local wastewater treatment plant is also more likely to be routinely inspected and maintained than your neighbor’s septic system because there are laws that require it.
As for Governor O’Malley’s proposed ban on septic systems in new large housing developments, he’s facing some stern opposition from rural counties and building associations.  Prospectors who have been holding on to agricultural land in the hope of one day selling it to a developer for big bucks are waking up to find their ship may have already sailed.  New residential developments in the middle of nowhere aren’t possible without septic systems.  New growth may actually be focused in existing service districts, otherwise known as Maryland’s Smart Growth areas.  I thought it was funny today when a woman on WYPR (local NPR affiliate) referred to Smart Growth as something the state tried 15 years ago.  Actually, we’ve been trying it every year since; it’s just experienced very marginal success.  A septic system ban would be a huge step in the right direction.

Nearly 40,000 oysters to grow in Baltimore's Inner Harbor


http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2013/10/14/40000-oysters-grow-in-baltimore-harbor.html?page=all

Nearly 40,000 oysters to grow in Baltimore's Inner Harbor

The Inner Harbor waters will soon be home to 37,500 new residents — baby oysters.
The Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore is teaming up with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to plant five oyster gardens around the Inner Harbor on Tuesday. It’s another step in the Healthy Harbor initiative, the Waterfront Partnership’s mission to make Baltimore’s harbor swimmable and fishable by 2020.
“If we had a clean Chesapeake Bay we wouldn’t have to do any of this stuff,” saidAdam Lindquist, the Healthy Harbor coordinator for the Waterfront Partnership.
The gardens will be located at five points around the Inner Harbor: near the Rusty Scupper restaurant; near the Lightship “Chesapeake,” between Piers III and IV; between Piers IV and V; and in Fells Point.
The 75 oyster cages in the gardens will each hold 500 baby oysters, which will help clean the water as they mature over the next nine months. After they reach adulthood in June 2014, the oysters will be transported to the Fort Carroll Oyster Sanctuary.
The project costs about $15,000 per year for the materials and use of the Snow Goose, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s boat used to transport the oysters. The cost doesn’t include volunteer hours to maintain the gardens, Lindquist said. A grant from the Abell Foundation will help fund the initiative.
About 12 volunteers each from Brown Advisory, Legg Mason, BGE/Constellation Energy and T. Rowe Price, as well as students from Digital Harbor High School and the Green School of Baltimore, will be responsible for maintaining the oyster cages. That requires pulling them to the surface once a month to scrub off any barnacles, mussels or microorganisms.
If the program is successful, Lindquist said he hopes to repeat it next year with new oysters.
Oysters are filter feeders, meaning they clean the water as they feed on the algae that suffocates aquatic life. The Chesapeake Bay once had enough oysters to filter the entire volume of the bay in three days; today’s oyster population is only 1 percent of historical levels.
But oysters alone can’t clean the Inner Harbor. Stormwater runoff polluted with excess nutrients is the root cause of the harbor’s algae blooms, so Lindquist said the Waterfront Partnership will continue to focus on other measures outside the oyster program to get the harbor to a swimmable, fishable state.
“Oysters are not the only solution,” Lindquist said. “It’s just one more thing we can do to help restore the ecosystem, but really the harbor is just a reflection of the health of our neighborhoods.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

A mystery at the bottom of the Great Lakes food web



http://michiganradio.org/post/mystery-bottom-great-lakes-food-web

A mystery at the bottom of the Great Lakes food web

There’s a mystery at the very bottom of the Great Lakes food web.
Phytoplankton – the algae that are food for plankton which in turn feed fish – are behaving strangely. They’re surrounded by a nutrient they need to grow. But for some reason, they’re not using it.
The puzzle has big implications for how scientists think about the Great Lakes’ future in a warming world.
Tiny creatures
It’s a crisp sunny morning on the St. Lawrence River. All of the Great Lakes’ water flows through here on its way to the ocean.
Michael Twiss is leaning over the edge of his research boat, his face just a couple inches from the water’s surface. He swishes the water like he’s sniffing fine wine.
“Yup, there’s a fall bloom going on, because we’re at the end of the summer.”
DAVID: “That’s those little sparkly crystals in the water?”
“Yes, that’s what you’re seeing right there. Those are algae.”
Twiss is a limnologist at Clarkson University. He studies algae like this – the bottom of the food web that sustains the Great Lakes’ fishery.
The algae – also called phytoplankton – like to eat nitrate – nitrogen plus oxygen. In all of Great Lakes, there’s loads of nitrate. But get this. Twiss says they’re not eating it.
"The mystery is akin to being at a free smorgasbord and ordering out for pizza. You're going to have to wait longer to get your food, and you're going to have to pay for it."
“The mystery is akin to being at a free smorgasbord and ordering out for pizza. You’re going to have to wait longer to get your food, and you’re going to have to pay for it. So why aren’t they using this nutrient that’s available to them?”
Why should we care what the critters eat?
There are two reasons why this matters. First, if they ate more nitrate, they’d grow and become more food for fish.
Second, the algae would also eat more carbon from the atmosphere, just like trees do through photosynthesis.
“These lakes, which hold 20% of the world’s fresh water, play an important role in sequestering carbon and taking it out of the atmosphere and into the bottom of the lakes. That’s a natural process.”
In fact, the Great Lakes do a better job proportionally at sucking up carbon than the ocean does.
So, if only we could get those phytoplankton to eat more nitrate, we’d have more fish and we’d alleviate climate change at the same time, right?
Not so fast. Climate change cuts both ways.
Andy Bramburger is a researcher at the St. Lawrence River Institute in Cornwall, Ontario. He says the warmer climate is changing the kind of algae in the Lakes – from the kind that’s good for fish to the kind that causes toxic algal blooms and kills fish.
“With climate change and with these fluctuations in temperatures, and the rapid warming we’ve been seeing in the early parts of the spring and summer in recent years, we are tipping the balance in favor of algae that are not favorable to our use of waterways,” he says.
The detective cracks the case... a little
Michael Twiss recently made a tiny breakthrough in the phytoplankton mystery. Phytoplankton also need trace metals to eat the nitrate. So when he sprinkled the trace metal molybdenum into water samples – poof – the algae feasted like it was a smorgasbord.
Twiss’ hypothesis is that invasive species like zebra mussels have sucked too many metals and other nutrients out of the water. Twiss says it may be a new paradigm.
“A shift in the way the ecosystem is operating, and it’s up to us to understand how it operates so we can predict what will happen in the future, and so we can manage for change, particularly climate change.”
To protect our clean waters, our fishery, and our relationship with the Great Lakes in the face of climate change, scientists will have to puzzle out the mysteries at the bottom of the food web."
-------------------------------
We have understood the food web and invented a Nano Silica based micro nutrient product to grow Diatom Algae in large lakes.