The Oyster’s Garter

Four severed sneaker-clad right feet have washed up in British Columbia just this year, and Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer is on the case. He’s an expert in marine debris, most famous for his work with the wandering rubber duckies. But Dr. Ebbesmeyer also knows how bodies come apart! Is the mild mannered scientist really just a cover for the crime fighter within?

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer based in Seattle, Wash., said when a human body submerged in the ocean, the main parts like arms, legs, hands, feet and the head are usually what come off the body.

But he’s still baffled by how the exact same part — a right foot — could wash up repeatedly.

“It’s not unusual for body parts to wash up along the United States or Canada,” he said. “There’s so many accidents, like boating. That’s not unusual. It is unusual to find four bodies over the course of the year and just right feet.”

He said his theory is that the feet came along as a result of an accident that might have happened up along the Fraser River, that washed down and spread out along the Straight of Georgia.

Ebbesmeyer said he would urge the police to trace the shoes back to the store they were purchased.

“There’s a lot you can do with the serial number of a shoe and I’m assuming the RCMP are doing that,” he said.

Planktos, the science-deficient private company that wanted to fertilize the oceans with iron, has gone out of business. Plankos was notable for the inanity of its arguments and the belligerence of its CEO. In fact, they couldn’t resist one parting shot, blaming their bankruptcy on ” a highly effective disinformation campaign waged by anti-offset crusaders.” How very shocking!

Thanks to Rick for the heads-up and the high-five! Now let’s keep our beady little crusader eyeballs on Australia’s Ocean Nourishment Company, which is apparently still in the urea-dumping business.

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.

Rebecca Horridge asked a really good question over on the “Contact Us” page, and I wanted to give it the in-depth explanation it deserved:

My Dad is a professor of physiology and a marine scientist. He reckons that if everyone ate oysters this would help global warming through shell sequestration. Do you know of anyone who works on this idea? ie could we use oysters, corals or possibly (excuse me if this is blasphemy) genetically engineered organisms to make calcium carbonate which we could then bury in the soil.? I am having trouble finding info about this.

I hereby dub this proposal “Oyster World,” and I sure do wish it were feasible. I LOVE to eat oysters (not to mention mussels, clams, and shelled critters of all kind. I am a bad, bad Jew.) However, Oyster World would not work, for the reasons I’ve listed below in order of least to most scary.

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Deep Sea News reports that the Ocean Nourishment Corporation of Australia is going to dump several hundred tons of urea in the Sulu Sea. Urea is nitrogen, and the lovely clear waters in which coral grows is nitrogen limited. That’s how slow-growing corals can outcompete fast-growing seaweeds - corals are low-nutrient specialists. Pollution by any other name, even called “carbon sequestration,” still smells bad, as the Sulu Sea will after the urea causes a giant icky algae bloom.

Isn’t it nice that for-profit corporations can dump industrial byproducts in the ocean - and claim that they’re helping the environment? For the Oyster’s Garter’s extensive criticism and thorough mocking of ocean fertilization, check out our brand-new Ocean Fertilization tag.

Deep Sea News reports that Planktos is ready to begin dumping iron in international waters. They’ve invested $2 million in their second-rate science. Though a single iron fertilization will probably only have local effects, their idiotic claims of restoration make me see red.

“We’ve done exhaustive research into the data that are available that address all of those questions,” said Coleman. “If we bring back plankton communities to levels they once enjoyed, then how can there be negative effects from that? We are bringing plankton communities back to a baseline.”

When pressed, however, Coleman acknowledged that the “baseline” guiding the company was “unclear.”

In this article, they claim that satellite data shows that plankton is down 10% since the 1970s. On their website, they claim (citing a broken link) that plankton is down 50%. If they’re going to “restore” plankton levels, I hope they know which is correct. But I’m not holding my breath.

For my exhaustive review of Planktos’ claims, go here.

The ocean acts as a huge carbon sponge. Organic matter sinks into the deep and gets stashed away from the atmosphere for a long time. The process is called the “biological pump” and it’s one reason why climate change isn’t already worse. (Iron fertilization attempts to artificially enhance the biological pump.)

Unfortunately, we seem to be breaking the biological pump. Scientific American reports that the ocean (along with terrestrial plants) absorbed significantly less carbon in 2006 than in 2000. Scientists have known of this positive feedback loop for a long time - the main culprit is likely to be increased stratification. It goes like this:

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Usually a good rant leaves me feeling pleasingly released of my usual load of cynicism and anger. But I found myself unsatisfied by my last post on iron fertilization. It occured to me that I had not read Planktos’ ever-so-lofty and dismissive “Response to Current Controversies.”, closely enough, especially now that they’re getting national media attention.

So I did. It was HORRIFYING. I’m appalled Planktos has even gotten off the ground with such poor, nonsensical science. So here’s their claims one-by-one with my rebuttal. Full citations are available upon request. Thanks again to Rick MacPherson for pointing me in the right direction. (more…)

So remember the scientists who wanted to put giant one-way tubes in the ocean in order to grow phytoplankton to suck up CO2? Apparently there are not one, but two private companies looking to do pretty much the same thing, only with iron filings instead of tubes. Vast areas of the ocean (see above - the places with not-blue color) have plenty of nitrogen and phospheros but are limited in plant growth because of lack of iron.

As I wrote previously, the benefits of iron fertilization are far from clear. There is evidence than iron fertilization could encourage the growth of undesirable (often poisonous) plankton, make the global warming worse, totally alter the local food chain - and oh yeah, it could do all this without actually making a dent in atmospheric carbon.

As first posted by Rick MacPherson, the private companies have responded to these concerns in different ways. The first, Climos, has proposed an ethics code for ocean carbon experiments. Well, that’s a good start, but still doesn’t convince me that this will work without serious deleterious effects. The second, Planktos, has a very snippy “Response to Current Controversies.” Planktos dismisses concerns over iron fertilization in a peremptory fashion, without providing citations. I’m not an expert in this field by any means, but I can certainly cite many papers that call Planktos’ claims of safety & efficacy into doubt.

I certainly hope that there will be a lot more small- to medium-scale experimentation before somebody goes and dumps a tanker of iron filings into the Southern Ocean. And I’m not exactly rushing to buy stock in these companies, either. But hey, if they’re right - I’ll be the first to celebrate.

Tubes: they’re not just for the internet anymore. A series of giant ocean tubes has been proposed as a solution to global warming. The tubes are supposed to pump up nutrient-rich water from the depths, which will foster phytoplankton growth, which will soak up carbon dioxide, which will then sink back into the deep as the phytoplankton die.

Now, I am just a baby biological oceanographer, but I think this is unlikely to work. It’s a very similar idea to that of iron fertilization - vast areas of the ocean have plenty of nitrogen and phospheros but are limited in plant growth because of lack of iron. The whole iron-fertilization thing came to a head when oceanographer John Martin famously said, “Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.” Sadly, no woolly-mammoth-rampaging was forthcoming, due to these problems:

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