The Oyster’s Garter

San Diego County has 12 water reservoirs, and they are all now officially infiltrated by the quagga mussel. A tiny fresh-water mussel, the quagga is a close relative of the infamous zebra mussel, which has caused millions of dollars of property damage in the Great Lakes. The city is working on eradication, but don’t count on it - this little dudes are nearly impossible to remove once they’re established.

These tiny mussels wreak havoc in two ways - filtering the water and clogging pipes and walls. By removing tiny plants and animals from the water, the mussels take away food from native critters, fertilize the bottom with their excretions, and allow more light to reach deeper in the lake. This creates perfect conditions for invasive and/or noxious plants to take over the bottom of the reservoir. And mussels love high water flow, since it brings more food their way - which means that their favorite places to live are in intake pipes.

Unfortunately, they are going to be very hard to eradicate. Mussels are broadcast spawners, which means that each individual can spooge out millions and millions of sperm or eggs into the water. As long as there’s one male and one female and they are close enough together to fertilize, millions and millions of baby mussels can be pumped into the lake. And the larvae are hardy - a mussel larvae floats about for about four weeks before settling to the bottom and becoming an adult mussel, plenty of time to be sucked into a boat’s ballast water and transported to another lake.

Because of this decandent molluscan lifestyle, the city’s proposed solutions are a bit laughable. Lowering the level of the reservoir, pulling adults of lines and floats,. dredging the lake - none of these will address the problem of a month’s worth of microscopic larvae just waiting to turn into brand new adults. Unless there is a way to simultaneously remove all adults, then do it again in a month when the larvae settle, then do it again to clean up any stragglers - but such a way would likely kill everything in the lake. It seems likely that the quagga mussel is here to stay - too bad they probably don’t taste good with coconut-basil sauce.

Further info: Here’s a comprehensive FAQ from USGS

There were mammoths in San Diego! And not just any old mammoths - Columbian mammoths, 12 feet high at the shoulder, one of the biggest elephant-creatures ever to live! (In comparison, average shoulder height for an African elephant is 10 feet in males.)

As reported by Kelly Davis in Last Blog on Earth, excavations for a downtown homeless shelter found a 8-foot-long Columbian Mammoth tusk. The U-T says that it’s between 100,000 and 500,000 years old, and proof that mammoths did indeed roam these here parts.

I really, really love the Pleistocene megafauna - the giant mammals and birds that roamed North America until becoming extinct only 12,000 years ago. (In contrast, the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago.) There were American lions and camels and giant armadillos and sabre-tooth tigers.

But my favorite creature of all time is the giant ground sloth, 20 feet high with foot-long claws, which ambled slowly about munching plants. There’s a theory that giant ground sloths are what brought us the avocado - they were the only herbivore big enough to pass an avocado pit. The La Brea tar pits has an especially fine assortment of sloth fossils as well as very silly fibreglass sloth statues in the adjacent park.

If you don’t want to go all the way up to LA, the San Diego Natural History Museum has a great local fossil exhibit, with sloths, sabre-tooth cats, dire wolves, giant sea cows, and more. Hopefully the new mammoth tusk will be on display soon.

There’s no such things as a free lun- er, reduction in harmful greenhouse gases. Those cute little polar bear cubs plastered all over are gonna make us PAY, one way or another. And the latest way in which saving energy has unexpected consequences is in energy-saving compact flourescent lights. Those bulbs, which SDG&E subsidizes at Costco and Al Gore plugged in his movie, are chock-filled with mercury.

We REALLY don’t want mercury in our landfills. It is a nasty poison - that’s why hatters went mad. (Babies and children are especially susceptible to brain damage). It also builds up in the environment and can accumulate at very high levels in top predators - like the extremely tasty yellowtail I saw swimming by La Jolla today.

For these reasons flourescent bulbs count as hazardous waste, and it is illegal to just throw them in the trash - you’re supposed to recycle them. Unfortunately, the only way to do so in San Diego is to make an appointment with the nice folks at the city environmental services, then bring your bulbs in at the appointed time. No walk ins, no drop offs. How many people are going to do that? Only the most frothing enthusiasts - and there are a lot of flourescent bulbs out there these days.

Flourescent bulbs are great - they save huge amounts of electricity - but as always, there is a cost. In order to avoid some big unpleasant problems later, we need to advocate for an easy and effective recycling program. Or maybe just drop your bulbs by the office of your friendly city councilperson…

Previously discussed on Last Blog on Earth

Somebody out there must remember, as I do, the days when you could call a number on the phone and have it tell you the exact time. Well, alas, those days are numbered, at least here in California, where AT&T will be ending the service on September 17, 2007. The fact is, no one needs it anymore, but I hereby give it a moment of nostalgic goodbye.

I strongly believe in a healthy skepticism, but sometimes skepticism for its own sake can turn into into something darker and more harmful. In a recent article in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, prominent science blogger and professor of epidemiology Tara C. Smith and neurologist Steven Novella deal with HIV denialism. Their essay, entitled “HIV Denial in the Internet Era”, discusses the growing popular trend of denying that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus. This idea was made most famous by Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, but apparently there is also a large American faction.

Though the link between HIV and AIDS is extraordinarily well established (here is a painfully detailed summary from the NIH), HIV denialists use the mistrust many people have of doctors and modern medicine to spread an extremely harmful myth. Unlike denying evolution, which harm only people’s intellect, discouraging people from seeking treatment for HIV leads to tragic consequences. Here’s the paragraph from Smith & Novella I found most depressing:

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NASA is launching Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber on the next space shuttle mission. This is not strictly related to San Diego, but it’s cool anyway. The lightsaber will depart Oakland airport, where there will be an official hand off ceremony in which Chewbacca will hand it to officials from Space Center in Houston. Then it will be greeted in Houston by a bunch of stormtroopers and R2D2. They’ll put the light saber in R2’s secret compartment until just before the shuttle takes off in October. At T -20, the astronauts will nod to R2, and he’ll shoot the saber into the open door of the cockpit at the last moment. OK, that last part isn’t true, but everything else is.

USA Today busted out with a summary of the solar industry that shines the light of optimism for us all. Some choice quotes that make me hopeful:

The outlook for solar, though, is getting much brighter. A few dozen companies say advances in technology will let them halve the price of solar-panel installations in as little as three years. By 2014, solar-system prices will be competitive with conventional electricity when energy savings are figured in, Deutsche Bank says. And that’s without government incentives.

and

Wal-Mart recently said it’s putting solar panels on more than 20 of its stores in California and Hawaii. Google is blanketing its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters with 9,212 solar panels, enough to light 1,000 homes.

Solar power is one of my favorite solutions to global warming and the eventual oil supply peak. It’s totally clean and the raw material - sunlight - comes free of charge. Plus, no power lines, no reactors, no coal plants. Even as R & D departments solve the price problem by finding ways to generate more electricity from less sunlight, there is still one major flaw: batteries. At midday solar panels can produce more electricity then a given home requires, but at night, nothing. And then what about stormy days? You’re screwed. So we need good batteries. Still, the more solar panels, the better, I say.

America’s Finest City also has America’s second-most-polluted bay. Yay us.

These days, most of the nasty flowing into San Diego Bay (and other parts of the coastline) is a cocktail of urban runoff, with a fine bouquet of oil, pesticides, and heavy metals.

So, when the City of San Diego went to update its storm water discharge permit, the Regional Water Quality Control Board laid the smack and is requiring the city to take some measures to reduce polluted runoff.

Most of the proposed measures target development projects 50 acres or greater, and are aimed at reducing the amount of runoff and slowing down the remaining runoff. This means less impermeable surfaces like concrete and more catchment basins and slow-down devices.I did not have the fortitude to wade through the permit itself, but you can get handy FAQ sheets and links to more info at Think Blue, the City’s storm water reduction website. (Didn’t know they had one of those? Me either.)

There’s also a public meeting tomorrow, August 28th, 5:30-7:30 PM, should you desire to share your runoff-related thoughts with the city and perhaps with a posse of angry developers.

So a journalist and a biologist walked into a bar. The journalist was cheery and had faith in the power of human innovation, while the biologist was cynical and expected (ok, expects) the world to end unpleasantly any day now. Some time, two cats, and several hundred books later, they got married and moved to San Diego.

But the nerdiness was too much for just one apartment. It could not be contained. It needed to be shared with the world. So we, Miriam and Eric, have started this blog to track science & technology developments, especially here in San Diego.

The name comes from a series of 1920s slang we heard on the NPR show A Way With Words - the cat’s pajamas, the bee’s knees, the snake’s hips…and apparently the oyster’s garter. No bivalves have yet been harmed in the creation of this blog, but we’re not making any promises.