The Oyster’s Garter

The noble oyster is making a comeback in New York. The city is taking advantage of the oysters’ natural ability to filter huge amounts of water to clean the effluent of a wastewater treatment plant in Jamaica Bay, on the non-Manhattan side of Brooklyn. Oysters aren’t picky eaters - they just suck in water, eat the organic bits, and squirt out the clean water. They can pretty much eat continuously to the tune of filtering up to 50 gallons of water per day per oyster. So New York will be using Poop Power to turn its waste into molluscan water-cleaning machines!

New York was fed and its waters kept clean by oysters for more than 200 years, but overharvesting and pollution finally did them in. The last oyster bed closed in 1927. (The “Cod” and “Salt” guy has also written an “Oyster” book, for those interested.) These modern pioneering oysters will not be edible, what with the toxins they will inevitably bioaccumulate, but edibility is almost beside the point. Along with filtering the water, these oysters will provide high-quality habitat to all kinds of other critters. The shells themselves are hard surfaces for tunicates and sponges to grow on, the space between the shells is a nice protected home for tiny bugs, and the whole structure is attractive to fish both for shelter and for eating said tiny bugs.

The big danger will be hypoxia, or low dissolved oxygen in the water. Oysters need to breathe just like all animals, and since they can’t exactly move out of the way, a low-oxygen incident (common in the summer in polluted waters) could easily kill them all in a matter of days. But if this works, it’s a huge step to giving Jamaica Bay back a bit of its former glory.

Still haven’t had enough oysters? The State of Virginia has a lovely oyster-reef popup book (PDF). And an official molluscan mascot - Omar of the Reef. He got to visit Japan!

               

Yesterday, Congress decided that as long as the oil companies are making a gazillion dollars in profits these days, they don’t really need tax payer support. So, legislators said, let’s get rid of the oil subsidies, worth $1.8 billion over ten years, and re-fund tax breaks for solar and wind and other renewable technologies. The House passed the bill 236-182.

Unfortunately, the passage of this bill doesn’t exactly set my heart aflutter, since there’s almost no chance it will survive a filibuster in the Senate, and President Bush has already said he’d veto it. I do wish Democrats hadn’t given away the tax breaks when they negotiated the increase in mileage standards a while back. They should keep trying, though, because the current subsidies for renewables will die at the end of this year (which is a correction to my earlier post, when I thought they ended on 1/1/2008.), a month before a possibly Democratic president would be sworn in.  Republicans, of course, wax wroth on anything that burdens oil companies, but the Washington Post casually lets drop the fact that the money represents a 2% dent in oil company profits, or an extra penny a gallon for a consumers. Excuse me, but I believe I hear the sound of the world’s smallest violin playing Mozart’s renowned Oil Company Lament.

Well, I can’t close on that depressing note. In other news, the National Science Foundation gave $100,000 to the solar tech company Bloo Solar (which is a neat name) to develop its solar film. The product uses millions of tiny nano-bristles to massively increase the amount of solar energy the cell can convert to electricity. The company won’t release actual efficiency figures, but they claim to have broken the world record for light capture. They have records for that sort of thing? I must dig up my Guinness Book.

Justin tagged me with a “things I learned the hard way” meme. I usually am not a big fan of the viral memes (so don’t be sad if you tag me and I don’t respond) but this one called to me. It said, “Miriam, don’t you want to share some of your stupid science-related mistakes with the world?” Yes, world. Yes, I do.

1) Punk jewelry and diving are NOT COMPATIBLE. When I was an undergraduate, I had the amazing opportunity to go on a research trip to the Galapagos. It involved a lot of diving in challenging conditions, but having learned to dive in the Gulf of Maine school of cold-water/low-vis, I felt confident that I could handle the surge and the currents. Until during one dive in an absolutely ripping current, my ever-so-badass circular barbell earring got caught on my BC. So there I was with my head stuck sideways, hanging on to equipment (couldn’t drop anything since there was nothing but 300 meters of water below us), and still trying to count snails. I managed to complete the transect, but having my head stuck to my BC was painful and made me suck air. So my buddy and I had to ascend far from the boat, which caused us to get caught in a surface current going the wrong way, so we inflated our safety sausages and hoped they saw us before we hit Antarctica. We eventually got retrieved, my earlobe survived (though less intact than it had been) and now I wear plain ball closure earrings.

2) If you get seasick, avoid Cheetos. Like an astonishing percentage of marine scientists, I am a world-class upchucker (at least before I discovered the sweet, sweet nectar of prescription seasickness medication). So you’d think that I would be more aware of Foods that Are Bad. Nope. On my very first dive in San Diego, I ate my usual breakfast - coffee, orange juice, and toast. Immediately on anchoring the small boat, I started to notice the big, long-period swell, and tried to ignore it by eating a whole bag of Cheetos. Later, I would learn that acidic substances like coffee make seasickness worse - but what I learned that day is that regurgitated Cheetos make quite a hideous contrast with the kelp.

3) Don’t put your field sites next to a public beach. If your project involves studying the movements of 400 carefully numbered snails for several months, you might want to put them far away from the wandering hands of toddlers and families seeking soup ingredients. Because when you see an entire multi-generational family on your field site, and they are GATHERING UP YOUR SNAILS, then you will freak out and act like a crazy person and even the English-speaking members of the family will not understand why you are running towards them and shrieking. Especially do not do this if you are more visually intimidating than a short white girl, because that is apparently scary enough for said family to think you are a mugger.

I’m not going to tag anyone, but sharing your stupid science stories is good for the soul!

Eric sent me this comic. We thought, oh! What a great analogy for valuing the silly things in life.

Analogy? Analogy my patootie! These excellent people don’t need no stinkin’ analogy.

I have a teeny tiny obsession with giant ground sloths, which has been made ever so much worse by moving to California, which is sloth ground zero. The sloths haven’t been extinct for long - 10,000 years is pocket change in evolutionary terms - so many of the plant species that knew the sloths still exist. The Joshua tree, for example, is unable to travel without sloths to poop out intact seeds. There is also the theory that avocados  evolved for sloth poopage, since nothing else is big enough to pass the giant pits.

Joshua trees aren’t alone. NPR recently had a story on the thorns of honey locust trees, which live in Manhattan (among other places.) A paleoecologist is theorizing that the big thorns were evolved to protect against a big grazer - the mastodon. The story totally captures the pain of a tree that is all gussied up with no predator to pierce:

[Said in a mournful tone] There hasn’t been a mastodon in New York for at least 13,000 years, but the thorns are still there, waiting for the mastodons that will never come.

Fortunately for the honey locust, researchers proposed a solution back in 2005. Bring the Pleistocene megafauna back to America! The Pleistocene wasn’t just about sloths & mastodons - there were also lions and cheetahs and camels and dire wolves, and those have living modern analogues. So the idea is to let African lions and elephants and such loose on the Great Plains. Wouldn’t you like to go on a safari in Oklahoma?

Of course this idea is completely mad (especially since we can’t seem to deal with the wolves that are already here) but it’s the kind of madness I love. Maybe one day we can clone the sloths, too. If you want more info, the official rewilding page is here.

Also, now I really want this book on ecological ghosts by the author of the honey locust NPR piece.

In so much as biofuels are a good idea, they’re a really good idea for jets. Jet engines produce vast amounts of carbon (A gallon of jet fuel gives off 21 lbs of Co2) but there’s no alternative when you want to visit your dear old grammy who lives on the opposite coast. So the headlines about Virgin Atlantic running an actual test flight powered by coconut- and palm oil-based fuel had me gleefully reaching for the “O frabjous day!” category for this post. Alas. The 747 Virgin used to fly from London to Amsterdam has four tanks, three of which were nothing but regular jet fuel, and the fourth of which was 80% jet fuel and 20% coconut biofuel. So really the flight was 5% biofuel, which means that proportionally it flew 11 miles on coconuts, roughly from London to, err …London.

Even Virgin Atlantic owner Richard Branson himself admits that coconut-based biofuels won’t power the future air fleet. The world couldn’t possibly produce enough coconuts to fly the Monty Python troop to Camelot, let alone the entire world fleet, and the movers and shakers are starting to realize it’s probably not a great idea to use food for fuel anyway. Branson wants to extract energy from the thorny jatropha plant, which grows on non-arable land in South America., and I found a goofy company that thinks they can filter oxygen out of the air, while flying, and burn it as fuel immediately. But we all know the better answer: Poop fuel!

This time-lapse video of a Venus fly trap is WAY better than watching the grass grow. It probably has something to do with the teeth.

Via Boing Boing

The Beagle Project reports that a French wine exporter will begin to transport goods by tall ship - a three-masted barque, to be exact. The Belem, was originally launched in 1896, and was the last French merchant sailing vessel to be built. (Here’s the ship’s official webpage- beware silly music.) Now the Belem has a new life transporting French wine to Ireland, at a carbon savings of 4.9 oz per bottle, or 18,375 lb per 60,000 bottle cargo. To make the operation even more sustainable, ships will return with a cargo of crushed glass for recycling into new wine bottles.

Tall ships are so beautiful that it warms my crusty cynical heart to see them making a comeback, no matter how small. Tacking a sail onto a container ship, though useful, just isn’t the same. Maybe this is the beginning of a reversal of the Last Shanty?

Parasite fans (and I know you’re out there) NEED to check out Deep Sea News’ excellent rhizocephalan pics. You might remember rhizocephalans from this post (they’re the crab-bot zombie barnacles), but never before have you seen them this up close and personal. Maybe I Can Haz Cheezburger needs some of that LOLRhizocephalan?

British scientists have produced a black coating that is 25 times blacker than conventional black paint. The scientists plan to use it to improve the vision of telescopes, but artists and goths are already drooling over the blacker-than-black substance. Even the description of how the new coating works sounds goth* - according to the BBC, it’s “an alloy of nickel and phospherous pitted with tiny curved craters [pictured here] which absorb light.” Just like the tiny curved craters can absorb my exquisite pain!

Sadly, the black black costs almost $980 for a 5 cm-square panel, which probably restricts its use to actual industrial applications for the time being. To sooth your inevitable angst, I gift you with the best piece of black-related poetry of all time. Originally from a friend’s high school literary magazine, it has been passed down lovingly throughout the years. Though now, perhaps the young and pained will compare their soul to cratered nickel and phospherous alloy rather than to a Metallica t-shirt.

Black
Author (thankfully) unknown

Black.
Black as my soul
Black as the Metallica T-shirt he wore
He didn’t invite me to the prom
He didn’t invite me to the prom
Dance.
I shall dance on his grave
And I shall wear
Black

The title of this post is stolen from this list of “I’m So Goth That…” sayings, which Adam K. sent me long ago.

*I mock because I love. (and because though I now wear colors, I still confuse everyone in my lab when I play Siouxsie or Switchblade Symphony.)