The Oyster’s Garter

Genetically modified (GM) food has never been something that particularly worries me. They certainly have problems - pesticide use, mingling with wild plants - but industrial agriculture has these problems anyway. The large companies that make them take advantage of farmers in icky ways, like making the crops sterile so farmers have to buy new seeds every year, but that sort of behavior has a legislative fix. If industrial growers, say in California’s Imperial Valley, were using GMOs that saved water and didn’t need pesticides, I’d think it was a great idea (assuming proper environmental testing).

However, I also believe that people have a right to avoid GMOs if they wish. So it was troubling that a recent study in Spain found that GMO agriculture drives out organic agriculture. The study showed that a small amount of genetically modified pollen fertilized nearby organic plants, making them also “genetically modified.” There’s not a lot of mixing - 6% seems to be the high estimate - but that’s enough to put organic consumers off their feed. Since the organic produce was not GMO-free, it was unsellable in Europe. This drove organic farmers out of the organic business, and they started planting GMO crops.

The European Commission’s GMO policy is based on “coexistance” - assuming that GMOs and organic produce can be grown side-by-side. This is clearly not the case, if cross-contamination is an issue for organic consumers. So if genetically modified foods have a place in modern agriculture - and I think they do, particularly because of climate change - that place is far away from organic agriculture.

Via A Blog Around the Clock

Compact flourescent bulbs (CFLs) can save a vast amount of electricity, but they contain mercury, which we really, really don’t want leaching out of our landfills. (Previously on TOG.) In order to properly dispose of broken bulbs, people used to have to go to their city’s hazardous waste drop-off (which nobody was going to do for a couple lightbulbs) or to IKEA (the only store that took them back.)

However, the NYT reports that Home Depot will start accepting CFLs for recycling. Since there’s way more Home Despots than IKEAs, this will hopefully encourage proper disposal. Switching to CFLs is totally worth the small recycling inconvenience - Eric and I save 30% on our electricity. Happy illuminating!

Jocelyn Ford of the the Science Friday blog lives in Beijing, and she has posted an account of the on-the-ground repercussions of China’s plastic bag ban. China banned extremely thin single-use plastic bags, but not the thicker bags more common in the US. Ford admits that the new bag surcharge has made her more careful about bringing her own bags to the food market, but worries that banning thin bags has only led to more widespread use of thick bags:

Take my local hole-in-the wall shop that sells stuffed pancake (yum!) Until last week, the shop did takeaway orders in ultra thin bags less than 0.025 millimeters, or 0.00098 inches thick. It’s now upgraded– the shop not only uses thicker bags, it’s ordered bags with the shop name on them. The shopkeeper proudly told me they were “environmentally friendly.” Looks to me like the new regulation has encouraged him to add to the garbage and pollution problem. The tiny bags are not easy to reuse.

In a classic case of the law of unintended consequences, Ford says that many shops have also started to give away free paper bags, which create more air and water pollution than plastic bags. (It’s true! See this handy chart from the Washington Post.) Ford believes that China should have legislated biodegradable bags - except, as she point out, they are made from corn.

So are biodegradable bags a solution? The corn starch bags Ford mentions are still under development, and they are based off ethanol biofuel byproducts. Since corn ethanol biofuel has proved to be food-price debacle, this is probably not the solution. Most commercially available biodegradable bags are based off a mixture of corn starch and petroleum-based polyesters. While they do biodegrade (which does solve the problem of cute large animals choking and drains clogging), it means that biodegradable bags are both competing with food supplies and polluting the environment with tiny molecular- and cell-sized bits of polyester. Little bits of plastic can be a huge problem at the base of the food chain, due to accidental ingestion by non-charismatic but ecologically critical animals like insects and earthworms

I still think that plastic bag bans are a move in the right direction, but Ford’s anecdotes about the Chinese ban show that a nuanced approach may be necessary. Should all disposable bags, including paper, be taxed? How can the Chinese government encourage people to reuse bags instead of simply switching types of disposable bag? And what approach might the US (when we finally catch up with Ireland, Bangladesh, and South Africa) take to control the plastic problem?

Please, please tell me that this dress comes with nematocysts.

Via Chaos Theory

In the future, your plastic drink bottles and plastic computer cases could be made out of smokestack emissions. At least, that’s what Science Daily says about news from the American Chemical Society meeting. Chemists are very excited about using carbon dioxide emissions as a raw material for making polycarbonate plastic. One of the authors of the report, Thomas Muller, said, “Using CO₂ to create polycarbonates might not solve the total carbon dioxide problem, but it could be a significant contribution.”

It’s tempting to snort “Oh, great, MORE cheap plastic crap.” In fact, as I was writing this, there was significant cynical snortage. But a solution that a) makes it economically desirable to reduce the amount of emissions going into the atmosphere; and b) turns something harmful into something useful is a good solution in my book. It’s not the Magical Fix-Everything Plan that puts a unicorn in every pot - obviously, as the state of the North Pacific Gyre demonstrates, we’ve got to get a lot better about reusing and recycling the plastic that we’ve already got. But wouldn’t it be neat to have a DVD made out of smoke?

Any teachers out there? Apply for a grant for snazzy science toys! Bug Girl says:

Toshiba America Foundation gives grants to teachers in grades K-12. Elementary school teachers (K-6) are eligible for up to $1,000 to support their ideas for project-based learning in science and mathematics.

Funded projects in grades 7-12 provide students with the opportunity to practice science in new ways that promise to increase their engagement with the subject matter and improve their learning. There is no funding limit for grade 7-12 applications, but most grants are for $10,000 or less.

This year’s application deadline for both programs is August 1.

The Great Invertebrate War seems to be trickling to an indeterminate end. Tunicate-lovers might enjoy JE Byrnes’ mighty salvo. Craig attempted to slander deuterostomes (echinoderm, tunicates, & all things with backbones) by labeling these magnificant creatures as the Invertebrate Axis of Evil (Or, in my interpretation, protostomes = Buffy, deuterostomes = Faith.). And the Circus of the Spineless, up on From Archaea to Zeaxanthol,  offered a snazzy echinoderm-centric roundup, including my rallying cry for tunicates, which is especially cool considering that I never entered it.

I’m pretty happy to be an advocate for the Evil Deuterostome Overlords, as long as I get the secret volcanic lair, the minions, and the attack-tunicates armed with laser beams. Besides, since I’ve read the Evil Overlord List, my plan for world domination will avoid the common pitfalls. There will be no elaborate torture mechanisms for encroaching protostomes (Rules #4 and 7) - they will simply be steamed and eaten in drawn butter.

Besides, Craig is right. A certain bipedal simian deterostome certainly seems to have achieved world domination. At least until the mighty protostome-deuterostome hybrid overlord Cthulhu (shown here in cake form) rises from R’lyeh and makes food or fish-servants of us all. Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!

When I somewhat belatedly caught up on the Great Invertebrate Wars, I was torn. Which was best, molluscs or echinoderms? On the one hand (as Jason pointed out), we are extremely fond of tasty bivalves here at the Oyster’s Garter. On the other hand, echinoderms frequently eat poop and barf up their guts, which is a giant plus in my book.

But I do not need to fit myself into this narrow phyla dichotomy! I am a maverick, a unique and special snowflake, and I walk boldly alone to proclaim from the very electronic rooftops that UROCHORDATA IS THE BEST PHYLA IN ALL THE OCEAN.

Why? Because they are my study organism and I plan to spend the summer doing unspeakable things to them in tiny torture chambers. But if that isn’t enough, here is a conveniently numbered list that will make the Deep Sea News lads throw their puny molluscs across the room in jealousy and perhaps gently weep into their extremely expensive deep-sea cores (but I hope that CR McClain will not weep too much because he gave me a kick-ass tour of MBARI and bought me tasty squid for lunch and is awesome).

But first, Meet the Urochordata.

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Don’t have huge wads of cash to donate but wish you did? Tell philanthropy-minded rich folks how to spend their environmental dollars. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (of NPR advertising fame) funded the Keystone Center for Science & Public Policy to create a “listening survey” designed to answer this question:

What are the major challenges to biodiversity conservation over the next 5 to 10 years and beyond and what might be the most significant opportunities for philanthropic impact?

The results will inform the Doris Duke Foundation’s giving. In other words, this survey could have a real impact in how environmental dollars are spent. So click here to tell them what you think!

The survey took me about 15 minutes to complete. There aren’t many questions, but many of them are open-ended. And you get a cookie at the end! (ok, it’s only a nerd-cookie, but you do get to see the results of the survey so far. including write-in comments.)

Via Bug Girl

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!