The Oyster’s Garter

A 14,300 year old fossilized poop is the earliest evidence of human presence in North America.

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!

               

The American Institute of Physics recognizes that poop is for all scientists, not just biologists. They’ve awarded “Jurassic Poop” the best children’s science writing of the year. “Jurassic Poop” also comes with the optional coprolite case (scroll down), for when you just can’t bear to leave your fossilized feces at home.

Will “Jurassic Poop” replace “Everyone Poops” as the #2 children’s classic? Stay tuned!

Thanks to Sam, who is pretty much keeping TOG going these days.

When Miriam and I moved in 2006, we used over 100 cardboard boxes and some ungodly quantity of packing materials and duck tape (You know - it’s for ducks). In fact, combined with the fuel emissions produced by the truck hauling our belongings cross-country and the jet flight to San Diego, moving may have been the most environmentally harmful thing I’ve ever done.

Well, they can’t reduce the carbon emissions from jet fuel (yet), but the fellows at Earth Friendly Moving can at least save us the boxes problem. They make plastic moving boxes out materials they take out of the landfill, and they rent them out to customers for a buck a week a box, plus delivery fee. They also make a packing material composed mostly out of recycled paper pulp, and they drop off and pick up the boxes in their bio-diesel trucks. They even stack the boxes for delivery on a pallet made of recycled used diapers (They call it the Poopy Pallet. Yay Poop Power!). The founders, Spencer Brown and Brian Anton, claim that for ever 100 boxes they make, 256 pounds of landfill is removed, and it saves three trees.

The price is pretty reasonable, too. The cheapest deal I found with a quick Froogle search lead me to a supplier charging $1.58 per large box. On our last move we used over 100 boxes, but let’s call it 100 for the roundness of the number (nice, round zeros, like donuts, ahhhh…). So, at the high end delivery fee, we’re paying $2 a box, but we can feel good about ourselves. At the low end we’re paying $1.20 a box, so we get to feel good about ourselves AND save money. As good old Hannibal Smith said, I love it when a plan comes together.

(Thanks for the tip, Anna!)

Full props to JeByrnes, who linked to this video in his comment on “Poop Fuel!”. It was too funny not to get its very own post.

No joke - a tiny New Zealand startup called Aquaflow Bionomics has figured out out to harvest the algae that grows naturally in, ahem, “effluent ponds”. After a person poops, all the waste gets piped to a sewage treatment plant (let’s assume dry weather. Storm water overflow is too gross to be thought about to deeply). It then sits in a settling pond to separate solids from liquids. When the liquid is piped off for further treatment, the solid remains, and it becomes a tasty feeding ground for algae. Once you’ve got algae, it’s no great trick to convert it into biofuel, and in fact, there’s far more energy in algae fuel than in ethanol from corn or sugar. You can get 10,000 gallons of ethanol from an acre of algae, compared to 60 gallons from an acre of corn. And growing the algae on human waste - that’s just genius. The company’s website says that Boeing is looking into Aquaflow’s process for possible distillation into jet fuel.

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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.