Plants on a Hot Green Roof

Rows of native plants at the Thimann Lab greenhouse, grown for coastal prairie restoration (photo: E. Loury)

by Erin Loury

There’s a room at UC Santa Cruz filled with chocolate and vanilla, cinnamon and green tea, bananas and pineapple.  But far from ready-to-eat desserts, all are leafy and green, basking in the humid light of one of the three UCSC campus greenhouses.

A certain former UCSC student and plant aficionado in my life recently told me about the greenhouse on the roof of the Thimann Lab building.  Anyone can pop up to this greenhouse on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., and I came across some students studying at tables on the plant-covered patio.   The oldest of the campus greenhouses, it’s primarily used for instruction.

Workspace in the Thimann Lab greenhouse (photo: E. Loury)

Plant lab sections can visit a room full of carnivorous plants (I should have asked if they have this one with peculiar diet preferences), and also a tropical plant collection, which boasts the disproportionate number of tasties I mentioned earlier. There’s even an outdoor classroom up here, complete with speakers and a whiteboard.  If only all students were so lucky!

Jim Velzy, UCSC greenhouse director, points out two different species of plants in a hybridization experiment - brought back memories of Punnett squares! (photo: E. Loury)

Jim Velzy, the greenhouses director, was kind enough to give me a tour of all three greenhouses, including the ones used for research atop the Sinsheimer Labs and the Interdisciplinary Sciences Building, which are not open to the public.  All the greenhouses are located within a stone’s throw of each other, which is probably a good thing since it’s just Jim, the greenhouse operation’s manager Denise Polk, and four student employees that care for all the plants.

Some of the plants grown on the Thimann lab building, Jim told me, are for a coastal prairie restoration project near the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at the campus’s Long Marine Lab.  Seeds collected from native plants sprout in dozens of plastic tubes, awaiting transportation to the field.

Two campus divisions, Physical & Biological Sciences and Social Sciences, share the funding of the greenhouses, and researchers have free access to pots, soil and space. They can reserve a greenhouse and tailor it to their specific needs, like one that is currently sealed up and pumped with elevated levels of carbon dioxide.  Jim estimates that about 25 different projects occupy his 10 growth chambers, 10 incubators and 15 greenhouses at any given time.

“This facility is unique in that the instructional facility and the research facility are the same unit,” Jim said. “That’s not the case almost anywhere you go.”

Undergraduate students benefit from access to the state-of-the-art greenhouses, and a direct connection to ongoing research.  Students can work with the greenhouses for a senior thesis or volunteer with research projects.  Researchers benefit from the extra labor counting seeds or planting plants, and the connection to the instructional greenhouse gives them some overflow space for their experiments.

“Our biology faculty generally look at populations, distribution of species, speciation,” Jim said. “Those are all our claims to fame.”

On our tour, he showed me several experiments involving the hybridization of two closely related species.  A student in Dr. Kathleen Kay’s lab is studying how two species of goldfields that are nearly identical, and often grow next each other, maintain their distinct identities.

He also showed me endangered California wallflowers native to sand hills grown by Dr. Ingrid Parker’s Lab, and an experiment investigating how invasive Scotch broom suppresses the growth of Douglas fir seedlings.

A growth chamber maintains constant conditions for a flat of woodland stars. (photo: E. Loury)

We poked our heads inside growth chambers used by Dr. John Thompson’s lab.  Jim called Thompson a “father of coevolution,” the study of how closely connected species, like plants and pollinators, change together over time.  Jim showed me Lithophragma, or woodland stars, that have coevolved with a species of moth that lays its eggs inside the flower, and also pollinates the flower.

Another greenhouse overflowed with spiral ginger plants from Costa Rica, which have coevolved with hummingbirds, as seen in their flowers with a distinctly hummingbird-tailored, sippy-cup-like extension.

Sprial ginger flowers have evolved a perfect fit for their hummingbird pollinators (phto: E. Loury)

Achieving constant, reliable conditions in incubators (which are used to germinate plants), and growth chambers (which maintain constant light and humidity) are key to producing publishable results, Jim said.

“When you publish a paper in Science, Nature, Plant Physiology, whatever you want to publish in, the better publications are going to require that you have your plants under set conditions,” Jim said. “You eliminate all variables except for one.”

He also revealed a surprising similarity between plant science and high fashion – a little brand name recognition goes a long way.  Thus, the pricey Conviron E15 growth chambers (which cost about $30,000) or Percival incubators are worth every dollar if they help a researcher establish credibility with a publication.

I felt very fortunate to get a behind-the-scenes look into the blooming world of plant science on my own campus, and felt nostalgia for my undergraduate days in an introductory biology plant class at UC Davis.  I remember a TA telling me that once you start learning plants, it gives you whole new way of looking at and appreciating your environment, even if it’s the landscaping around campus.  Now I can say I also have a whole new appreciation for the rooftops on Science Hill!

Thanks, Jim, for a great, informative tour!

Pitcher plants wait to catch a meal at the Thimann Lab greenhouse (photo: E. Loury)

Hacking for science and creating synesthesia

By Marissa Fessenden

This past weekend I willingly deprived myself of sleep in order to participate in Science Hack Day in San Francisco.

What is a Hack Day?

Well, a hack is a quick solution to a problem. Not necessarily pretty, but probably clever.

A Hack Day is usually a 48 hour event where people with ideas get together and make something cool! Wikipedia lists a bunch of hack days around the world. It seems to be a fairly new phenomenon. Science Hack Day was first held in London last year. Since then people have gotten excited and made things with science! (exclamation points are very much part of the culture) in Mexico City, Cincinnati and last weekend in San Francisco for the second time. Upcoming events include Nairobi and Cape Town.

The idea behind science hack day is that there is so much data out there, and so many things to be found, that people can do science or use science in innovative ways through hacking.

Last year’s winningest hack was the particle wind chime. Matt Bellis, a physicist and post-doc at Stanford, led the team. He writes:

The idea was to allow users to take properties of the particles that we observe in our detector (energy, distance from the interaction region, type of detector it is interacting with, etc.) and map that onto sonic characteristics (volume, timbre (instrument), pitch, duration, etc.). In this way, the user can explore the data themselves and find mappings which either make sense to him or her, or are simply more aesthetically pleasing.

I admit that I was not expecting to be of much use at a hack day. I have no experience in software development or coding and very little ability to use tools and build stuff. But the website said “If you’re a coder, designer, scientist, hacker or just an enthusiastic person with good ideas, Science Hack Day is for you.” I wasn’t sure that I had good ideas, but I could do enthusiasm.

Emails from Ariel Waldmen, the founder of Science Hack Day SF, repeatedly emphasized that I didn’t even need to have an idea before coming. And that eavesdropping on other people was completely acceptable. So I went.

I wandered around the morning of the first day, introduced myself to people and tried to think about how I could be useful. Everyone was very friendly, very enthusiastic and full of ideas.

After inspirational talks I found a couple of young women who won me over with their NCBI ROFL shirts. We were going to create a walk-in, interactive model of a cell, but didn’t think of a satisfactory way to accomplish that over lunch. Instead we turned to the group behind us and decided to help with their idea: create a synesthesia machine to override our everyday senses.

Synesthesia is a mixing of the senses. Synesthetes might report seeing green when they read the number 4, feeling a strong impression of a particular shape when they eat ice cream  or tasting raspberries every time they listen to the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Scientists used to believe that this was just a strong memory or that people were making up the sensations. But recent studies show a neurological basis. This study found additional activity in the brain of synesthetes corresponding to their sensations.

The project was based on an idea by this guy:

Liam in the foreground, Fen inspecting code in the background. Photo by Marissa

I asked our fearless leader to tell me about his idea to create a synesthesia machine. He responded via email:

There’s a strong evolutionary pressure to optimize our perception of the world to emphasize information that makes a difference to our survival. This means that we necessarily under-appreciate a large amount of the information in the world, that is, we ignore much of reality. The goal was to short-circuit the pre-processing systems in our visual cortex by sending visual input into an inappropriate sense, the sense of touch. The hope is that the resultant synesthesia would allow us to appreciate a different slice of reality to the quotidian.

Hacking this idea did take us most of the time. I stayed up until 3:30 a.m. and I loved it.

Lil modeling the placement of speakers.

We used a webcam to capture an image and translate that to a 12 pixel square. Each pixel in the square would register the image as either white or black. That would translate to an “on” or “off” code transmitted to an Arduino –”an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.” The Arduino was wired to small, cheap speakers sewn on the inside of a full head mask. So the visual input was translated to vibration (and sound) on your face!

Initially, we thought we could design a vest lined with the speakers. I was ready to try and modify a thrift-store purchase into a tight fitting garment. That probably would have been beyond my sewing ability. We decided that a mask would be a more visually striking design.

Lil found a pattern online of a bondage mask. Yes, I know … but we needed something that would keep the speakers in contact with your face. I didn’t find a good pattern for spiderman masks, so bondage mask pattern it was.

Other members of the team worked on coding. I have very little idea what goes into software programming, so I don’t know what they did, but they did it well.

We also needed to wire the Arduino to the speakers, something that required soldering and some electronic-building knowledge. I remember building a tiny robot using a kit when I was younger, so I did get to try my hand at soldering. Though I am not an expert, my skills in that area improved under the tutelage of another member of our group (Parker, who was also my old friend from college).

I think was was most remarkable was the way each of us in the group was instrumental in getting to the finished product.

The final product was…amazingly creepy. We call it Syneseizure. It may possibly be the next superhero or supervillain.

Lil, Parker in mask and Bala. Photo by Marissa

Check out our project’s blog for more photos, a link to the code we used, video of the first public test and video of our presentation at the end of the hack day. Our hack won the People’s Choice award!

The other hacks were incredible. From a globe with a laser inside that tracked the movement of the International Space Station, to a drinkable DNA extraction (with Bacardi 151 and strawberries!), there was some seriously cool things going on.

I had a great time. Thanks so much to the organizers who worked to keep us hacking and fed! They did so much. Here is a time lapse video of the 8 hours of set up at the space. And some more photos of the day.

More reading:

An article from Scientific American about synesthesia.

A website about synesthesia for kids, from the University of Washington.

The American Synesthesia Association

Crabs Galore: From Fisherman to Pulsars

By Tanya Lewis

One minute I’m milling around the dock of the Santa Cruz harbor, the next minute I’m hurtling out to sea on a 23-foot motorboat named “Aquaholic,” a chilly Pacific gale plastering hair across my face as I shout out questions about crab fishing and scribbling down the answers in a notepad that threatens to be tossed into the drink any second, shortly followed by myself. The driver cuts the engine and all of a sudden we’re bobbing on a glorified cork six miles out to sea. Using all my willpower to keep from tossing my cookies, I watch as a father and his son lower a wiry one-way deathtrap, laden with half a raw chicken, over a hundred feet down to the murky depths below.

A baited crab pot (Photo by Tanya Lewis)

Let’s back up: for our news writing class we’ve been assigned to write an advance on the Dungeness crab fishing season. We’ve been told to interview a crab fisherman, so I call up my classmate Helen and we head down to the harbor to find one. The commercial crab season doesn’t start until Tuesday, so the only guys actually fishing are the recreational fisherman, or “Sporties.” We get to the harbor around 3pm on a Saturday. We figure we’ll find a couple of fisherman, they’ll give us some great quotes about the joys of hauling crab, and we’ll call it a day. Easy as seafood pie!

A crab boat loaded and ready to go (Photo by Meghan Rosen)

Well, the only guy we can find is a man loading up his motorboat with his two sons. Sheepishly, we ask if he’s a crab fisherman, and he replies, “Yes I am. Wanna come out?” The answer’s out of our mouths before we have time to process whether this is a good idea. “Sure!” The rest is history. All-in-all it was…rather educational.

In case you’re not up-to-snuff on your crab knowledge, here’s a little background on the Dungeness crab:

Its Latin name is Cancer magister (literally, “Master of Cancer”). The name “Dungeness” comes from the port of Dungeness, Washington. The crabs are generally light reddish-brown on the back and white to light orange underneath, with a tinge of purple on the legs. Their pincers (chelipeds) are white-tipped and not just for show. (The fisherman we talked to said he uses tongs to handle the cranky critters.) See the photo below right.

Dungeness crab. (Photo from National Archives and Records Administration)

It’s the most abundant crab in California, which is probably why it’s so popular to fish (then again, rats are also pretty abundant and we don’t eat them). The Dungeness lives in eelgrass beds and on the ocean bottom, as far north as Alaska and as far south as Baja California (but aren’t often seen south of Santa Barbara). The males grow to be about 9 inches across, whereas the females rarely get larger than about 6.25 inches.

As a crab grows, its hard shell must be cast off in a process known as “molting.” The shell slits open at the junction of the carapace (front segment) and abdomen (i.e. tail flap) and the crab literally backs out of it, like wriggling out of a sweater. Underneath, a new shell has started growing, but is uncalcified and still soft. The “soft” crab grows rapidly until the new shell hardens. During molting, the crab can actually re-grow missing legs, though it takes a few molts for them to reach normal size again. They molt about once a year.

That’s about all I have to say about these crabs. But there is another kind of crab I want to talk about: the Crab Pulsar!

Recently, a bunch of astrophysicists detected some uber-high energy gamma rays from the Crab pulsar, and the theoretical models have no explanation for it.

A pulsar, by the way, is a highly magnetized rotating neutron star that beams out electromagnetic radiation. A neutron star is formed by the gravitational collapse of a very massive star during a supernova. So basically you have a magnetic ball of neutrons twice the size of the sun spinning around and whipping out pulses of radiation. Pretty insane in itself, if you ask me, but this is old hat to astrophysicists. What isn’t is the high energy of the radiation: gamma-ray pulses with energies greater than 100 billion-electron-volts.

The pulses were detected by the VERITAS (nice acronym, eh?) telescope array at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona. An international group of scientists published a paper about it in the October 7 issue of Science. Nepomuk Otte, a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz, was a corresponding author, and it was his cockamamie idea to look for pulsar emissions in this energy range. Otte’s response?

“To me it’s a real triumph of the experimental approach, not going along with the flow and making assumptions, but just observing to see what there is. And lo and behold, we see something different than what everybody expected.” (as quoted in a UC Santa Cruz press release)

The Crab pulsar was formed by a magnificent supernova in the year 1054, which left behind the Crab Nebula with the pulsar in its center.

The Crab Nebula. (Photo from NASA)

It’s one of the most-studied objects in the sky, spinning about 30 times per second and casting a beam of radiation from its magnetic field. The beam moves around like the beacon of a lighthouse, and Earth detects is as rapid pulses of radiation.

Scientists agree on the broad cause of pulsar emissions: electromagnetic forces created by the collapsed star’s rotating magnetic field accelerate charges particles to close to the speed of light, which emit a wide spectrum of radiation. But the devil’s in the details, which are still pretty mysterious.

After studying the Crab for years, scientists predicted that emissions above 10 Giga eV would die off exponentially. So they were flabbergasted when they found emissions above 100 Giga eV. (The prefix Giga = 10^9, or 1 billion)

~Warning! The next paragraph will make you 20 IQ points smarter. Read on at your own risk~

The conventional wisdom of how the emission works is curvature radiation: a dense electron-positron plasma is created near the polar cap of the pulsar, and the charged particles move relativistically with Lorentz factors   10²10³ along dipolar magnetic field lines, emitting radiation at frequencies that depend on the radius of curvature of the field lines. Phew!

But the results from VERITAS showed something else was going on. It turns out curvature radiation can only explain lower-energy emissions, not the high-energy stuff they observed.

“We really don’t know what causes the very high-energy emission,” said Otte.

(It takes a good scientist to admit they can’t explain something. But it takes a great scientist to come up with a new explanation.)

The scientists think one explanation could be (are you ready for it?): inverse Compton scattering. I won’t go into depth (or I’d be in over my head, to belabor the metaphor), but it involves energy transfer from charged particles to photons. Otte said they still don’t know the details though. They also don’t know if one mechanism explains the radiation at all energy levels, or whether different mechanisms operate at different higher and lower energies.

The next step is to characterize the gamma-ray emission in much greater detail.

So now you know all about crabs and astrophysics. What more is there to life?

Bigger Birds in Central California?

By Stephen Tung

Ever since I wrote that mongabay article about the invasion of monster King Crabs that will apparently wreak havoc on life on the Antarctic shelf, I’m a little apprehensive of any climate related changes that cause different, potentially disastrous, animal behavior or morphology.

Big Birds may eventually take over? (Courtesy of wikimedia commons)

So I was a little worried when I read that birds are apparently getting bigger in the central Californian area.

A team led by Rae Goodman from San Francisco State University studied data of bird populations of 40 years at one site and 27 years at another and found that, slowly but surely, bird wing length increased. Body mass didn’t always change, but when it did it went up at about the same rate as wing length.

Don’t panic yet—the rates seem to be fairly small: wing span increases 0.024 – 0.084 percent per year, while body mass seems to increase at most 0.040-0.112 percent per year, which means at that rate, they’ll only grow as much as 11.8 percent in a century. But what is more noteworthy is that it seems to go against an established idea that bird size decreases as temperature increases.

The strange thing is that it doesn’t seem to be happening across the United States. A paper published in 2010 studied passerines populations in Pennsylvania spanning 40 years and found that wing size actually decreased.

According to the paper published online on Oct. 12 in Global Change Biology, there are competing interpretations of how climate change affects what is known as Bergmann’s rule. The 1847 rule states that for animal populations of the same genus, body mass is higher the farther away from the equator. Some researchers have taken that to mean that larger birds can conserve heat better and do better in cooler climates, and so body size of observed populations will decrease as it warms as birds migrate to cooler weather.

A Maryland passerine in Great Falls National Park (Photo by Stephen Tung)

Some have interpreted that to mean that larger birds do better in more severe weather because they can fast and stay sheltered longer. If climate varies more often, then birds need to be able to store more food in case of extreme events.

On top of that, other researchers have interpreted it to mean that food availability is the primary cause of Bergmann’s rule. Under this interpretation, it depends on the region of whether body size would increase or decrease due to climate change.

To get to the bottom of it, researchers studied data of bird populations from two sites: 14,735 birds from Palomarin Field Station, and 18,052 from the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory. Data spanned 40 years for Palomarin site (from 1971-2010) and 27 years for the Bay site (from 1983-2009).

They studied a variety of species of passerines (perching birds that make up 60 percent of all species of birds, and 40 percent of all families), finding that wing size increased over time. Body mass increased in some cases over time, but not significantly for some groups. The researchers suspected body mass varied more than wing size, even after compensating for fat levels and time of day.

According to the researchers, temperatures steadily increased at both of the sites. They reason if changes body size responded only to temperature then they would have expected the results to be the same as those in Pennsylvania. They concluded that it couldn’t just be temperature that determines species size and that it’s likely that the other two explanations play a part, which would be caused by climate change.

Who You Gonna Call?

Natural Bridges, photo by Meghan D. Rosen

By Meghan D. Rosen

On Halloween, an adventure-seeking Santa Cruz surfer braved wintery water temperatures and paddled a half-mile out past Seabright Beach wearing only a bikini.  But she wasn’t trying to catch a wave.  The scantily clad surfer was trawling for an intimate look at the humpback whales that had been feeding off the coast. And she was in for a treat — or maybe it was a trick: two titanic whales burst through the water’s surface mere feet from her surfboard, scattering silvery anchovies into the air.

A nearby kayaker caught the close encounter on tape, and the video surged through local media circuits.  But “surfer-swallowing whales” aren’t just big news in Santa Cruz.  On Nov. 3, Anderson Cooper aired the clip on CNN, and three days later the YouTube video had nearly 2.3 million views.

The past week has been a special thrill for whale watchers: a pod of humpbacks settled unusually close to Santa Cruz’s seashores to hunt for food.  But curious crowds weren’t flocking to the docks just to spot a fleeting fluke: they were jamming into boats and kayaks and hopping onto surfboards to move in for a closer look. Though humpbacks don’t eat people, invading the whales’ space can still be dangerous. The marine mammals are powerful and massive: they range from the size of a school bus to the size of a semi-truck.

Humpback Whale (Megatera novaeanglieae) wrapped in kelp, Monterey Bay, Pacific Ocean. Photo by (c) Peggy Stap / Marine Life Studies NMFS Permit 1094-1836-02

Peggy Stap, director of Marine Life Studies, wants people to remember to maintain a safe distance.  “It’s exciting to see the whales so close to shore,” Stap said.  “But when they are feeding they are sometimes oblivious to their surroundings— a kayaker or boater could be hurt as the whales lunge feed at the surface.”

Humpback Whale's tangled fluke, Monterey Bay, Pacific Ocean. (c) Peggy Stap / Marine Life Studies MMHSRP Permit #932-1489

Stap’s not just worried about overeager onlookers, though. She’s worried about the whales. Her Monterey-based nonprofit organization works to protect marine mammals, and educate people about whales and dolphin conservation. In 2006, they organized California’s Whale Entanglement Team (W.E.T.), a group dedicated to helping free whales from the insidious underwater webs of fishing gear and lines.  According to Stap, 50% of whales have entanglement scars.

Before the team was established, Stap said, “If there was an entangled whale in California, there was no one to call to help.”  Now, if someone sees a trapped whale, they can contact W.E.T. at 877 SOS WHALE (877-767-9425).

Stap’s team advises snared-whale spotters to stay with the animal, but she tells people to avoid getting in the water with it. The W.E.T. team is trained to assess whether a whale actually needs help (some will ‘throw the gear’ and extricate themselves on their own) and has specialized whale-extracting tools if it does. Marine Life Studies recently received a grant to expand their W.E.T tool cache. Soon, they’ll be able to transport a trailer full of tools —Stap calls “W.E.T on Wheels” her dream— wherever there is a whale in need.

Marine Life Studies' Ocean User's Guide

Though Stap’s dream project has come true, her organization is constantly looking for ways to educate the public about marine life protection. Their most recent project, a waterproof ‘ocean users’ guide’ — Marine Mammals of Northern California — outlines little-known rules of thumb for interactions between humans and marine mammals, and is illustrated with 25 different types of whales and dolphins, along with sea lions, sea otters, and seals. The rules are based on NOAA’s regulations to protect marine mammals.

Stap hopes the guide will help people remember to keep a safe distance from marine wildlife. So far, they’ve distributed the guides to boaters, kayak guides, dive instructors, docents, and teachers.

“The law says you need to be 100 yards away from whales,” Stap said. “People need to realize that humpbacks are an endangered species.”

Nemo’s troublesome cousin

Amy West

by Amy E. West

Would you like lemon on your transgenic fish?

In the interest of subduing the emotional reaction many have to genetically modified salmon when calling it ‘frankenfish’, I’ll refer to it by its technical title. But what is an appropriate name for a modified fish operating under the guise of two different fish genes— a deepwater eelpout and Chinook (king) salmon—but marketed as ‘farmed’ Atlantic salmon (Salmo salmar)? Transgenic (not to be confused with transsexual) is a perfect description to a scientist. Frankenfish, however, conjures images of a fish stitched together; some monster experiment gone horribly wrong. And if this franken-animal story does go awry, an aquatic ecosystem could be at stake.

Standing next to one of Alaska's Chinook Salmon- 2007, photo by and of Amy West

This situation is not about modifying food items like corn and tomatoes. They have no native or endemic counterparts that could be potentially decimated by interbreeding. This is about manipulating a living, breathing organism from the animal kingdom, which if approved by the FDA, will represent the first genetically modified animal for consumption. The chief difference here is that these salmon do have native relatives. With even just a slim chance of a transgenic fish reproducing, the potential exists to adversely affect a wild salmon population and its connected economy.

This is just one of several issues AquaBounty Technologies, the manufacturers of hybrid aquaculture fish, must address. Their goal is to produce a faster growing salmon in less time than typical farmed salmon, and bring a less expensive fish to the market. However, their sparse website misses a few key explanations.

1.) They state a Chinook gene (for faster growth) is incorporated, but make no mention of the other ingredient to the recipe; an eel pout gene (keeps the chinook gene turned on). Maybe the name alone isn’t appetizing, but the final engineered product is identified on the FDA’s website as:

Triploid hemizygous, all-female Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) bearing a single copy of the α-form of the opAFP-GHc2 rDNA construct at the α-locus in the EO-1α lineage.

Huh?

Crossing salmon lines, Image: © Amy West

Creating female fish with three sets of x chromosomes (triploid) rather than two, ensures fish cannot produce gametes and, therefore, breed. Or does it? The molecular geneticist, Dr. Joe Cummins of the University of Western Ontario, has written about the need to extensively test the “leakiness of sterile triploids” to guarantee no gametes are ever produced. Molecular ecologist, Dr. Steve Palumbi of Stanford, also referred to the small percentage of triploid females that occasionally produce gametes.  If Aquabounty cited studies to prove that raising triploid fish always resulted in 100% sterility- then we could put the idea of crossbreeding to bed.

2.) Secondly, AquaBounty explains there is no threat posed by crossbreeding because the transgenic fish would be raised in closed systems that are operated inland. The company also advertizes their operations have reduced “environmental impact associated with air and ocean freight” that are normally linked to coastal enterprises.

This is confounding since these fish are to be bred in Canada, and their eggs flown to Panama to grow fish to market size. In addition, energy required to power these closed systems, process and ship the feed and market-size fish, leaves an awfully big carbon footprint. Aside from how much fish it takes to raise this new breed of salmon, where is their fish-feed coming from and what is it?

Tilapia in the US are raised in similar closed systems. But the environmental havoc suffered from escapees, in areas like Florida, has resulted in similar consequence worldwide. Would the Panama aquaculture systems be weather-tight?  What about earthquakes, fires, or tsunamis? The warm Panamanian waters aren’t conducive to salmon growth, but what are the chances of viable eggs slipping through the cracks in Canada?

“What level is the system so well-controlled and known that you can feel safe that nothing unusual will ever happen?” said Dr. Palumbi. “What are the consequences of escapes, and who is going to take responsibility?”

Though none of the fish will be raised within the US borders, other countries still face environmental risks. Dr. Jeffrey McCrary, an American fish biologist captured the aquaculture scenario best in a 2011 New York times article, “We are exporting the environmental damage caused by our appetites.”

The costs of introducing a foreign species unintentionally or intentionally has given humans plenty of environmental lessons to choose from: destructive algae let loose in the Mediterranean, zebra mussels attached to the Great Lakes, or bullfrogs taking over Australia.

Bulk salmon for sale at Costco, photo by Amoreeena Anker

FDA has been reviewing AquaBounty’s application for 15 years. Though legislators are currently voicing opposition based on potential risks, AquaBounty has yet to gain approval from Panama and Canada. Even if AquaBounty’s investors wait this out, their transgenic fish probably won’t be a menu option this year. More significant is the precedent set if the FDA approves GM salmon, which could grease the hinges to doors for other genetically engineered animals, like the Enviropig.

In the meantime, I have settled upon a new name for this genetically modified organism (GMO): Geemo.

Though I am sure Nemo, our beloved animated ocean fish, would steer clear of his man-made cousin.

*******************************************************************************************************

Review the FDA materials on AquAdvantage salmon.

FDA accepts general correspondence from the public at any time. If you have comments on this topic, you are welcome to send them to the agency for its consideration at AskCVM@fda.hh.gov.

'Geemo?' Image © Amy West

Part of the Problem

Sarah Jane Keller

by Sarah Jane Keller

It took me a long time to learn that I have a touch of road rage. The first time my husband watched me come slightly unhinged in gridlock, he only had one thing to say: “If you’re complaining, you’re part of the problem.”

Now that I’m spending a year as a California road warrior, it’s a mantra that slaps me with perspective whenever traffic slows to a crawl.

It’s also something that I’ve been thinking about since I fell for the United Nations’ marketing ploy surrounding today’s demographic holiday.

World population is somewhere around 7 billion: “If you’re complaining, you’re part of the problem.”

When I’m the sole person in a five-passenger car, I’m definitely part of the problem. It doesn’t take long for me to redirect my road rage inward.

My Halloween costume is the 4,796,799,300th billion person on Earth. Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515 to get an estimate of your number. (Credit: BBC)

The rectangle of environmental damage

Last week, I interviewed biologist Paul Ehrlich as part of my intern duties at the Stanford News Service. Ehrlich, the author of the controversial 1968 book, The Population Bomb, described a simple way to think about the entangled issues of population growth and consumption:

How do you respond to the statement that we should focus on overconsumption, not population growth?

Ehrlich: Most of humanity’s environmental problems trace to too much total consumption, but that consumption is a product of population size and per-capita consumption. Population and consumption are no more separable in producing environmental damage than the length and width of a rectangle can be separated in producing its area – both are equally important.

The next time I find myself trapped in an argument about which one matters more, I’m going to invoke geometry.

Both population and per-capita consumption are equally important, but our contribution to population is decided for us when we’re born, and we all need food, water and shelter. But I also seem to think that I need an iPhone, a Subaru, coffee and a hot shower. Need, maybe not, but that’s what I’m choosing.

Thank you, California

In addition to all of my consumption, I just became one more body in the most populous U.S. state. Thank you California, for your fresh agricultural products and tap water, I’m enjoying your resources.

In The Population Bomb Ehrlich warned of threats to food security, the availability of and access to enough food to live a productive life free from hunger or starvation. Many of his most dire and specific predictions have not come to pass, but we’ve been innovating ways to increase food production since the book was published; yet people generally agree that the current level of hunger in the world is still unacceptable.

The Dos Amigos Pump Plant, part of the California State Water Project, 10 miles south of Los Banos on I-5. Water is pumped up 114 feet so it can flow downhill to the next station. (Photo by Sarah Jane Keller)

California is an example of how we’ve engineered more food out of the land during the past century. It also supplies the U.S. with half of its fruits, vegetables, and nuts, making it an important part of the food system in our neck of the globe.

I recently stopped along I-5 to take in some of California’s extensive plumbing that makes it all possible. The roadside attraction was the Dos Amigos Pumping Plant, part of the California State Water Project (SWP). The pump lifts water in the California Aqueduct 114 feet, so it can flow by gravity 164 miles to the next pumping plant.

The SWP delivers water to two-thirds of the state’s population, with 70 percent going to urban users and 30 percent going to agriculture, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. Coincidentally, many initial phases of the project were completed in the years surrounding publication of The Population Bomb.

Having read Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner’s 1986 opus on Western U.S. water development and sustainability (or lack thereof), seeing the California Aqueduct was like spotting a celebrity. Nothing drives home how we bend natural resources to our will like watching water flow languidly through a concrete conduit, on a journey hundreds of miles through an arid landscape.

I imagined how the water in the California Aqueduct started in the Sierra Nevada, much of it as snow, and how some of it would eventually reach Southern California. To make the journey, it is pumped nearly 2000 feet over the Tehachapi Mountains that divide the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert.

California’s water system has been described as a Rube Goldberg apparatus, which is not a cliché in this case. Before he became a cartoonist, Goldberg was a sewer engineer in San Francisco.

Water in the California Aqueduct flowing south. According to Aquafornia, "70 percent of California’s runoff occurs north of Sacramento, 75 percent of California’s urban and agricultural demands are to the south." (Photo by Sarah Jane Keller)

A paper, “Reclaiming freshwater sustainability in the Cadillac Desert”, published last year, found that “Reisner’s incisive journalism led him to the same conclusions as those rendered by copious data, modern scientific tools, and the application of a more genuine scientific method.”

Sustainability, according to the authors is defined as allocation of streamflow “to people farms and ecosystems.” They discuss issues that I have not mentioned here such as salination and impacts on biodiversity and fisheries. They mention, but do not analyze, climate change pressures on freshwater.

What would Reisner say about water in a world with 7 billion people? Sadly, we’ll never know because he was lost to cancer over a decade ago, at age 51. But an interview with Reisner, from 2000, in the now defunct magazine, California Wild, will let me give him the last word:

CW: The state’s population is projected to grow another 30 percent by 2020. If there’s enough water to fill California with people from border to border, is population growth a big problem for California?

MR: For California and the world. People ask me “What is the greatest environmental problem?” Some people think it’s water, and I say, “No. It’s population growth, by far.” It eclipses the next five most significant environmental problems combined, and in California it’s not much different.

This ending doesn’t make thinking about our roles on a planet of 7 billion any easier, but I’ll be considering how I contribute to the area of our resource sustainability rectangle, globally and in California.

If you are wondering about the source of your California tap water check out:  http://www.water-ed.org/watersources/default.asp