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.

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.

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.

http://www.livescience.com/39787-super-eruption-seeded-sky-diatoms.html

Super-Eruption Launched Algae Army Into the Sky

Slimy brown algae not only survived a wild ride into the stratosphere via a volcanic ash cloud, they landed on distant islands looking flawless, a new study finds.

"There's a crazy contrast between these delicate, glass-shelled organisms and one of the most powerful eruptions in Earth's history," said lead study author Alexa Van Eaton, a postdoctoral scholar at both the Cascades Volcano Observatory in Washington and Arizona State University.

The diatoms were launched by the Taupo super-eruption on New Zealand's North Island 25,000 years ago. More than 600 million cubic meters (20 billion cubic feet) of diatoms from a lake flew into the air, Van Eaton reported Sept. 6 in the journal Geology. Lumped together, the microscopic cells speckled throughout Taupo's ash layers would make a pile as big as Hawaii's famed Diamond Head volcanic cone.

Some diatoms drifted as far as the Chatham Islands, 525 miles (850 kilometers) east of New Zealand. "They just hitched a ride," Van Eaton said. The pristine shells in the Chatham Island ash suggest diatoms could infect new niches by coasting on atmospheric currents.

"If they made it there alive, this is one way microorganisms can travel and meet each other," Van Eaton told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. "We know that ash from smaller events easily travels around the world." [5 Colossal Cones: Biggest Volcanoes on Earth]

World domination, cell by cell

Diatoms, a golden brown algae, rule Earth's waterways. From Antarctica's glacial lakes to acidic hot springs to unkempt home aquariums, diatoms are everywhere. It's a good thing. The tiny creatures pump out up to 50 percent of the planet's oxygen, said Edward Theriot, a diatom expert and evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study.

The algae look like little petri dishes or footballs,depending on the species, and spend most of their lives drifting on currents. How diatoms manage to colonize new homes remains a mystery: They can't swim.

Yet diatoms get around. When Wyoming's Yellowstone Lake emerged from its mile-thick ice cover 14,000 years ago, diatoms quickly arrived, Theriot said. "They had to be blown in by some mechanism or carried in by water birds," he added.

Diatoms particularly love volcanic lakes, because they are the only creatures that build shells of glass. (Glass sponges, for instance, produce a skeleton of glass spicules — tiny spike-like structures — but not a hard shell.) Silica-rich magma often causes the volcanic explosions that leave behind lake-filled craters, and silica is the key ingredient in diatom shells. Yellowstone Lake, which sits in a caldera created by a super-eruption, contains so many diatoms that the lake sediments are mostly shells (85 percent by weight), Theriot said.

Now scientists know what happens to diatoms when a massive volcanolike Yellowstone blasts through a big lake.

Immaculate preservation

The Taupo Volcano super-eruption slammed through a deep lake that filled a rift valley, similar to the elongated lakes in East Africa. The combination of water and ash created a hellish dirty thunderstorm, with towering clouds and roaring winds. The detonation flung ash and algae upward at more than 250 mph (400 km/h), Van Eaton said. Volcanic hail (called accretionary lapilli) pelted the landscape for miles.

Van Eaton discovered the diatoms while examining the volcanic hail with a scanning electron microscope.

"The first time I ever saw them I was looking at these volcanic ashaggregates and, bam, these gorgeous little symmetrical shells were there," she said. "Their shells are immaculately preserved."

Van Eaton soon determined that one of the three diatom species entombed in the ash only lives on the North Island of New Zealand. This meant she could track the 25,000-year-old ash layers around the South Pacific with a unique biologic marker. The unique North Island diatoms turned up in a few inches of ash on the Chatham Islands. The diatoms' trip to the Chatham Islands took longer than it looks on a map. The prevailing winds blew west at the time, so the shells circled the Southern Hemisphere before landing on the islands, Van Eaton and her colleagues think.

Some of the diatoms even kept their color, both in ash close to the volcano and at the Chatham Islands. The color suggests they weren't cooked to extreme temperatures in the volcanic eruption, Van Eaton said.

Spores infect the sky

But even though the Taupo diatom shells are pristine, Theriot is doubtful any diatoms lived through the eruptions. Instead, he suspects diatom resting spores could travel the atmospheric currents, dropping out and colonizing new ecosystems. Diatoms fashion spores to ride out inhospitable changes in their environment. Two years ago, Danish researchers revived 100-year-old resting spores from muck in a local fjord. Resting spores have been found in clouds. The eruption could have launched spores from the lake bottom into the atmosphere, Theriot said.

"I and many others have joked about Yellowstone blowing up again and dispersing the diatomite that is being created at the bottom of Yellowstone Lake," Theriot said. "This is the most thoroughly studied and best documented example of this phenomenon, and so it really says maybe we can add volcanoes to the list of possibilities [of how diatoms spread]. And volcanoes would be particularly effective." [Infographic: The Geology of Yellowstone]

Van Eaton hopes the discovery will prompt other scientists to search for microscopic life in "wet eruptions," where magma hit water.

"This is potentially another tool to pinpoint where ash deposits come from," Van Eaton said. "If the work is done to characterize the kinds of microbes that are unique to an area, then it could give you a biogenic fingerprint for your eruption deposits. This has likely been going on in modern eruptions, but no one has taken the time to look for them."

Ash travels hundreds of miles, but once it's far from its source, linking a few inches of glass back to a single volcano becomes difficult, particularly in regions like the South Pacific, where volcanoes pop off all the time.

But Theriot is skeptical that diatoms will prove to be a useful tool for tracking volcanic ash. Diatoms are so global that endemic species — known only to one place — are hard to find, he said. "If you found diatoms in ash deposits in a bog in Ohio, you would have no idea if it was from Yellowstone or from that bog," Theriot said. "It would take a really extraordinary set of circumstances, like this New Zealand [diatom] that is clearly out of place, to be convincing that the diatoms had blown in with the ash."

http://www.dailytownsman.com/breaking_news/222971371.html

Koocanusa algae bloom kills thousands of salmon

Two weeks ago there was a mass die-off of Kokanee Salmon in Lake Koocanusa. Thousands of fish floated on the surface near the Canada-US border.

Area B Director Heath Slee brought up the subject at the Regional District of East Kootenay meeting Friday, Sept. 6.

"Some of the local people complained that they saw all these carcasses of kokanee salmon floating upside down on the lake and in the reservoir," Slee said. That was the first thing he's heard about it happening two weeks ago.

He found that Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks biologists attributed the die-off to a blue-green algae bloom.

The kokanee, 8-10 inches in size, came to the surface because of the long stretch of hot, dry weather this summer on Koocanusa.

"The two-year-old salmon came up to feed on this algae, which they typically do, and once they ingest this algae, it affects their bladder and so they are not able to dive down into the cooler waters again,"

he said, adding that unless they can reach those cooler depths, they cannot thrive.

"So consequently there was a huge die-off. It hasn't affected the over-species, from what I've been told, it's not harmful, it's not going to affect the wildlife," Slee said, adding that if you're out there fishing and catching salmon there's also no concern about eating the salmon.

Slee said it has happened before and biologists believe it is the algae that caused it.

The salmon would be becoming mature and spawning in the fall of 2014, so it may have an effect on future stock.

"Unfortunately a lot of those salmon have died," Slee said. "I don't know what the end result will be or how it will affect the salmon fishery next summer, but it has been a major die-off at this stage and it has hurt in the past."

According to an article in the Tobacco Valley News, Montana biologist Mike Hensley estimated that 10,000 juvenile kokanee were dead as a result of the algae bloom.

Slee said he hadn't heard of any local biologists looking into the situation, but said they were probably aware of the die-off.

The kokanee were introduced into Koocanusa a number of years ago and this year's salmon will begin spawning in the creeks and rivers in the next few weeks.

Fertilizer grows crops and kills fish ???

http://www.allatsea.net/the-gulf-of-mexicos-zombie-dead-zone/

The Gulf of Mexico’s Zombie Dead Zone

"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) hypothesizes the annual agricultural and treated sewage discharge into the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River exceeds 1,700,000 tons or 3,400,000,000 pounds of potassium and nitrogen. To put that into perspective, it’s the equivalent of dumping 168 million 20 pound bags of fertilizer directly into the Gulf."

Conundrum. Sadly, the Dead Zone is created by essential agriculturally-based, nutrient rich (i.e., phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium) fertilizers. These elements find their way into the warm waters of the Gulf via the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Scientists point to the recent spree of heavy rains and floods in the Midwest and subsequent agricultural crop run-offs for the heavy influx of nutrients. Interestingly, the most negatively affected species are shellfish, as they have limited mobility and are typically unable to escape the devastating effects of the Dead Zone."

Agriculture and Plants killing animals / fish ?

Lake Ontario algal bloom is big enough to be seen from space

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/geekquinox/lake-ontario-algal-bloom-big-enough-seen-space-145539313.html

Astronauts on board the International Space Station spotted something unusual as they flew over North America on August 24th — the normally blue waters of Lake Ontario had changed to a vibrant green hue!

The reason for this was a population explosion blue-green algae in the lake water. These 'algal blooms' are seen quite often in the Great Lakes during the summer months, but ones of this extent are usually seen in Lake Erie (you can even see that the western part of Lake Erie has a smaller bloom going on at the same time). According to NASA's Earth Observatory, the Aqua satellite captured a view of this at the same time (you can see it here).

Algal blooms happen when there's a combination of warm water and lots of nutrients, from sources like sewage and fertilizers making their way into the lakes. The algae feast on the nutrients, spurred on by the warmth, and multiply rapidly.

Algal blooms can cause health problems for anyone drinking the water or swimming in it, as the algae, called cyanobacteria, can produce toxins as they eat. Even without the toxins, the blooms also threaten life in the lake, as the algae consume all the oxygen in the water, causing the fish to suffocate.

[ Related: Experimental Lakes Area saved with funding from Ontario, Manitoba ]

Although these blooms still happen due to other sources, it was scientists working at theExperimental Lakes Area, in northwestern Ontario, that discovered the link between these blooms and phosphates in our cleaning products. The future of the ELA was in jeopardy until recently, but the scientists there will now be continuing their world-renowned work, thanks to new commitmentsby the Ontario government and the International Institute for Sustainable Development in Manitoba.