".... algae consuming about 2.4 times its own body weight in carbon dioxide in order to double in size each day, ..."
Monday, July 12, 2010
Fish Kills 2010
USA
Two local ponds have been plagued by scores of dead fish in recent days -- leaving residents and wildlife officials speculating as to what happened.
The first fish kill was reported Friday in Garfield Park, where fishermen were upset by the stench left by hundreds of fish corpses -- including two huge Asian carp.
The second kill happened in Bloomingdale, near Westlake Park. Local resident Kirk Steinbruecker described what he saw Friday to the Daily Herald.
http://wvgazette.com/ap/ApTopStories/201007120191
July 12, 2010
Cause sought for W.Va. fish kill
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) - State regulators are looking for the cause of a fish kill in a tributary of Dunkard Creek in Monongalia County.
Biologist Frank Jernejcic (Jur-nay-sic) with the Division of Natural Resources says 6,000 to 7,000 fish died on July 1 over 1 mile of the North Fork of the West Virginia Fork of Dunkard Creek
Phillipines
BFAR probes mysterious fish kill in Ifugao
By DEXTER A. SEE
July 12, 2010, 9:10am
LAMUT, Ifugao – The Cordillera office of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) is conducting an investigation on the cause of a fish kill that resulted in over P10 million worth of losses.
An initial report from the Provincial Environment and Natural Resources Office (PENRO) and the Provincial Agriculture Office showed that over 40 hectares of fish ponds in the lowland towns of Lamut, Aguinaldo, Alfonso Lista and Lagawe were affected.
The report showed that the fish kill began last April and affected numerous fish ponds in the different parts of the province.
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/07/biologists_investigate_substan.html
On Mobile Bay's Eastern Shore on Tuesday, marine biologists investigated what was described as a substantial kill of small menhaden in a canal off Weeks Bay's western shore near Bay Haven Drive in the Barnwell Community.
Nicole Shaffer, a marine biologist with Alabama's Marine Resources Division said she collected water at the site where several thousand juvenile menhaden up to an inch long floated. The cause of the kill won't be known until results of tests on those samples are complete.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/07/09/china.green.pioneers.wu.lihong/?fbid=9ClEUmOeDaK
China's third largest freshwater body of water, Lake Tai, is at once placid and majestic, until it reveals its dirty secret. Lake Tai, or Tai Hu in Chinese, was once considered an ecological treasure in the heart of eastern China's land of fish and rice cultivation in Jiangsu province. Today, the lake is lined with green algae, dead fish and industrial waste, unmistakable consequences of more than 20 years of heavy factory production along its perimeter. It is a story of environmental disintegration that Wu Lihong, an environmental activist recently freed from prison, has been trying to tell for decades.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Grand Lake St. Marys 'dying' from toxic algae
Grand Lake St. Marys 'dying' from toxic algae
Programs to induce farmers to create buffer zones around their fields have been hampered by a lack of funds. The USDA’s Wetland Reserve Program offers $3,500 per acre to protect or restore wetlands, but farm values in the watershed are $8,000 to $10,000 per acre. Likewise, the federal Environmental Quality Improvement Program (EQIP) pays farmers about $50 an acre to create buffer zones, but the Ohio Farm Bureau says farmers can make two to three times that much by cultivating the acreage.
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The problem is not the lack of funds but non profitable nature of the programs.
If fish ponds are set up instead of wetlands and buffer zones, the fertilizer and manure run off can be used to grow fish and this would be profitable to the farmers.
Surf Diatoms, Australia
http://www.epa.vic.gov.au/water/coasts/surf_diatoms.asp
Surf diatoms
From time to time, visitors to surf beaches along the coast of Victoria notice patches of brown discolouration along the shore line. Although oil may occasionally be washed up on our beaches, this discolouration may be due to natural accumulations of large numbers of microscopic plants called diatoms.
The diatoms which usually make up these patches are not toxic, although they may cause some irritation to the human body. It is advisable to avoid swimming in dense patches or at least shower after swimming or surfing.
...
These accumulations are a natural phenomenon, and are not 'blooms' caused by pollution. In fact, diatoms are a major food source for prawns, fish and filter-feeding molluscs.
Surf diatoms
From time to time, visitors to surf beaches along the coast of Victoria notice patches of brown discolouration along the shore line. Although oil may occasionally be washed up on our beaches, this discolouration may be due to natural accumulations of large numbers of microscopic plants called diatoms.
The diatoms which usually make up these patches are not toxic, although they may cause some irritation to the human body. It is advisable to avoid swimming in dense patches or at least shower after swimming or surfing.
...
These accumulations are a natural phenomenon, and are not 'blooms' caused by pollution. In fact, diatoms are a major food source for prawns, fish and filter-feeding molluscs.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Is Using Dispersants on the BP Gulf Oil Spill Fighting Pollution with Pollution?
It remains unclear what impact chemical dispersants will have on sea life--and only the massive, uncontrolled experiment being run in the Gulf of Mexico will tell
By David Biello
Is Using Dispersants on the BP Gulf Oil Spill Fighting Pollution with Pollution?
Roughly five million liters of dispersants have now been used to break up the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, making this the largest use of such chemicals in U.S. history.
..
Nevertheless, just 20 ppm of COREXIT 9500—or one drop in 2.5 liters of water—inhibits growth of Skeletonema costatum, a Gulf of Mexico diatom, according to toxicology test data presented in the 2005 NRC report. It appears to inhibit the phytoplankton's ability to perform photosynthesis, specifically blocking part of the biochemistry that enables the photosystem II complex, Villalobos says. "Skeletonema seems to fall among the most sensitive ones," he says. "Like many aquatic plants, these are organisms that are resilient, that tend to come back even though you wipe them out in some cases chemically."Thursday, July 1, 2010
Oil reserves in Gulf of Mexico's deepwaters
[Oil deposits in the Gulf of Mexico]
"Geologists once doubted oil could be found this far from shore. Twenty years ago, as drilling marched seaward across the shallow continental shelf, the oil-bearing sandstone layer seemed to be petering out. Scientists concluded that the sand deposited tens of millions of years ago by great rivers had not spread all the way out on the shelf. But they were mistaken. The sand—and oil—was there all right.
The sand had spilled off the edge of the shelf and down the steep continental slope to the deep-ocean floor. There it had pooled in apron-like deposits that turned into porous rock—perfect for capturing oil oozing from still deeper rock layers. In the 1990s, as hints of these deposits began showing up in seismic data, the vanguard of oil production stepped off the continental shelf, into waters thousands of feet deep. Now giant new fields, the biggest of them Thunder Horse [BP's Deepwater Horizon is / was located here], beckon at 6,000 feet (1,829 meters) and more. At still greater depths approaching 10,000 feet (3,048 meters), says geophysicist Roger Anderson of Columbia University, "there have been a whole series of finds," although they have yet to be exploited.
All in all, oil experts estimate that the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico will yield more than 25 billion barrels of oil. That's twice as much as in Alaska's giant Prudhoe Bay field, and far more than in any untapped U.S. prospect, including the controversial Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. "There's a major consensus that there's more oil there than you'd ever find in ANWR," says Anderson. With the boost from deepwater wells, offshore oil should increase from a third of U.S. oil production now to more than 40 percent by 2008, before tapering off. But it will still barely ease the American thirst for oil."
Greenhouse Ocean May Downsize Fish, Risking One Of World's Most Productive Fisheries
Greenhouse Ocean May Downsize Fish, Risking One Of World's Most Productive Fisheries
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The Bering Sea is highly productive thanks mainly to diatoms, a large type of phytoplankton. "Because they're large, diatoms are eaten by large zooplankton, which are then eaten by large fish," Hutchins explained.
The scientists found that greenhouse conditions favored smaller types of phytoplankton over diatoms. Such a shift would ripple up the food chain: as diatoms become scarce, animals that eat diatoms would become scarce, and so forth.
"The food chain seems to be changing in a way that is not supporting these top predators, of which, of course, we're the biggest," Hutchins said.
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