The Oyster’s Garter

From San Diego Oceans Foundation:

Trash Bash Art Exhibit
Friday, December 21 | 6:00-8:00 pm
Wyland Gallery (1025 Prospect St, La Jolla)

One month ago at the San Diego Oceans Foundation’s first annual Trash Bash beach and bay clean up, volunteers created works of art from the trash they collected. This Friday, December 21st, Trash Bash art will be exhibited at the Wyland Gallery in La Jolla among his gorgeous paintings and sculptures of marine habitats. Artist Scott Wyland was deemed a “Marine Michelangelo” by USA Today and is very active in ocean conservation.

This special exhibit will also shed light on the effect pollution and trash have on our marine environment. Did you know that Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every HOUR? Do you know what a nurdle is and why it is so detrimental to marine life? Learn all this and more while enjoying scrumptous appetizers, beverages and ocean views from the second floor of the gallery.

How to win at Rock Paper Scissors, according to “research”

1) Realize that rock is the most popular first choice
2) Assume your opponent will thus choose paper
3) Choose scissors
4) If you work for Christie’s, win $25 million!

Of course, this will not avail you if you are playing Rock-Paper-Scissors-Spock-Lizard.

Via Chaos Theory

I have naught but curse words for the Democrats running Congress. In an age when every grassroots gear is turning towards finding ways to produce energy cheaply, without pollution, and without dependence on nations whose governments embrace abhorrent ideals, Congress has decided not to renew crucial solar and wind energy subsidies in the energy bill passed the other day. Apparently it was part of the deal that raised car mileage standards so that by 2020 the average mpg of the American fleet will be 35 mpg. This is predicted to reduce carbon emissions by all of 9%.

Hey Nancy, Harry - check it out: The price of oil is driving people to buy more fuel efficient cars, anyway. And government subsidies in Germany and Japan are driving those countries to develop this renewable energy sources so fast that Germany is on the verge of *reducing* those subsidies - because they’re market competitive. How about standing up for some principles for once?

But, ever the optimist and believer in technology, I also discovered that a company backed by Google, called Nanosolar, made a breakthrough in production that lowers the cost of panels dramatically. Even without subsidies, the panels will allow a solar power facility to be built that produces electricity at the same $2-per-watt that a coal plant would cost. The company has already begun production at its plant in San Jose. So there’s still hope.

I love diving. But even the thought of cave-diving scares the crap out of me. Cave divers don’t have a very long life expectancy - even experienced cave divers frequently go to the giant cave in the sky. That said, what Jarrod Jablonski and Casey McKinlay just did is cool. During the longest ever dive between two cave mouths, they proved that two of Florida’s famed springs are connected.

It took Jablonsky & McKinlay 20 hours, though only 6 were spent traveling. The other 14 hours were spent gradually decompressing before they could surface. I really can’t imagine taking 14 hours to surface - I hope they had a book. (Commercial divers who frequently do this really do take books. Apparently the books don’t fall apart as long as you keep them immersed.)

Wakulla Springs, where the divers surfaced, is one of the biggest and most famous of Florida’s springs. It has mastodon bones at the bottom and used to be famed for its crystal-clear water. It’s really been trashed by nutrient pollution - the visibility is toast, there’s a nasty invasive plant problem, and the signature bird that lived there has fled. But maybe Creature from the Black Lagoon (which was filmed in Wakulla) still lurks…

Of course, you might prefer Weeki Wachee Springs. It has mermaids.

As proponents of ocean fertilization know, the ocean is a huge carbon sink. Some of this carbon is directly absorbed into the water, and some of it is captured in organic material, like phytoplankton and fish and, of course, poop. Poop is a critical component of the ocean’s ability to store carbon, but not all carbon-storage poop is create equal.

The ability of a given poop to store carbon depends on its sinking rate. The ocean is an average of 2 1/2 miles (or 4,000 meters) deep, and a poop has got to make it all the way down if its carbon is going to get stored. If the poop sinks slowly, there’s lots of time for it to get eaten or degraded by bacteria, which means that the carbon is released back into the water. If the poop is sinks quickly, more of that carbon will make it to the deep sea, where it has the potential to be stored for millennia.

The critter with the fastest poop in the sea is the noble salp. Salps are filter-feeders that float about in the open sea, feeding off whatever gets sucked into their siphons. (Incidentally, they are our closest invertebrate relative. They have a primitive spinal cord as a wee tadpole, but lose it on adulthood. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.) And salps have seriously dense poop. Their poop can sink up to 1,000 meters a day, making it to the sea floor in a matter of a few days rather than weeks or months.

And there can be a LOT of salps. When conditions are right, they can form massive blooms that eat up to 75% of all the plankton they encounter. And that’s the problem - a salp bloom doesn’t leave much food for anyone else, particularly the tiny crustaceans favored by fish and whales. This is of particular concern in the Antarctic, where salps have increased while krill (what whales eat) has decreased.

So where does this leave climate change? The ocean fertilization people want to deliberately breed salps for their carbon storage capabilities. It is likely that a massive injection of salp poop would store a lot of carbon - but at what cost? Then again, all those little crustaceans may not be able to form their shells anyway in a couple years, so maybe salps are the future. I hear people eat salps in Korea - factory-farmed salp, anyone?

Thus with a whimper and a splash ends Poop Day. May your muffins be fibrous, your intestinal flora vigorous, and your bowels cheerful.

Martini-Corona sent along a link to today’s Dinosaur Comics, which features a poop-related dinosaur conversation. Coincidence? I THINK NOT.

Want to see some real dinosaur poop? Here’s a basic article with photos.  National Geographic has more detail (but fewer photos). Buy your very own fossilized dino poo on Ebay! How about DinoPoo(tm) jewelry?

Really, one day is not enough to explore the wonderful world of turds. I think today is ALSO Poop Day. To keep in touch with the *ahem* movement, please note the brand new Poop Power tag.

Mark Powell of blogfish pointed me towards the cutest anthropomorphized poop of all time - Mr. Floatie of Victora, BC. Mr. Floatie is the spokespoop for POOP (People Opposed to Outfall Pollution). Apparently the sewage of lovely Victoria only goes through a 6 mm screen before being dumped directly into the ocean, and Mr. Floatie is tired of his comrades being so cruelly drowned before their time. He wants loving, snuggly, warm treatment for all his poop brethren.

Perhaps Mr. Floatie should visit San Diego. We are the only city in California to treat our sewage to the primary level. This means that the chunks are removed, the fats (like cooking grease) are skimmed off, and the solid bits (like coffee grounds) are allowed to settle out, but there is no treatment of the biological content of the sewage. So all the bacteria and organic matter get dumped directly into the ocean via the Point Loma outfall, which is three miles and 350 feet of water out to sea.

Several SIO scientists have found no widespread ecological ramifications of this outfall, in either the plankton or the kelp forest. Southern California is fortunate enough to have a naturally very high-nutrient environment, so we don’t have the eutrophication problems of the East Coast. (Eutrophication is when nutrients cause massive algae blooms, which die, sink to the bottom, and rot. The respiration of the bacteria doing the rotting sucks all the oxygen out of the water, killing everything that can’t swim away.)

I don’t think it’s necessary that San Diego institute a billion dollar upgrade right away, but they really ought to have a plan to upgrade. This is just embarrassing. And that 21st century sewage plan MUST include water reclamation. We import our freshwater from thousands of miles away, use it, then throw it into the ocean. That is ridiculous, especially considering that the water we get has already been pooped in (and treated) by every upstream city, and we don’t mind that. Why should we mind one more round of treatment?

San Diego’s population is estimated to increase 30% by 2020 - what are these people going to drink? Are we going to drain the Colorado and line the coast with desalination plants? And how much more people’s poo (and detergent, and personal care products) can the ocean absorb? Clearly, this is a job that calls for Mr. Floatie. Maybe he has some kind of Batman-style beacon that we can beam from Point Loma.

Between fecal transplant therapy and San Diego’s ill-conceived sewage treatment outreach, I declare today Poop Day on the Oyster’s Garter. As a bonus, please enjoy Sam’s list of poop-related children’s books.

Personally, I want to write a heartwarming tale of all the different animals who eat poop. It’s a legitimate life history choice, kids! Bunnies do it, filter-feeders like mussels do it, the entire deep sea depends on it! Let’s do it, let’s eat some poop!

Perhaps this would not be the best outreach method of all time.

Has anyone taken a gander at the city of San Diego’s Metropolitan Wastewater Department website? You simply must. The headline for this post is the headline for the sites children’s section, only it doesn’t read quite that smoothly. An alternative reading might be “Wastewater…Sewage, in your face!” Either way, gross.

Someone at MWD has decided that the city’s school children need a thorough understanding of how sewage gets moved and treated, and they’ve decided to abandon all dignity. On the site, you can send your friends “some cool pictures of sewage,” hear sewage related music, play wastewater games, or make food items that look like waste. Yup, food that looks like poop: Sewage Soda and Fake Sludge Cakes. Sludge, in sewage terms, is the dense clot of solid waste that they filter out of the wastewater. Can we all agree that that’s just gross? Can we also agree that Miriam or I will have to make some of these concoctions and report back? Stay tuned.

A fecal transplant via nasogastric tube is possibly the most disgusting medical procedure I’ve ever contemplated. Bonus points for the phrase “donor stool.”

Via Aetiology