Smooth Pebbles

Pacific Salmon take another hit, where it really hurts

Via the invaluable Knight-Ridder Science Journalism Tracker comes woeful news from the L.A. Times: One of the few remaining success stories, the Alaskan salmon fishery, is under threat by a parasite whose expansion seems related to climate change.

I'm trying to finish an unrelated story myself, so will simply post the Tracker's write-up below the photo, which comes from a first-rate photo essay that accompanies Kenneth Weiss's full story at the LA Times. There's also quite a nice video version at the Times' site. (I can't figure out how to embed it here, but it heads the main story.

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2008-05/39343633.jpg

More Pacific coast salmon woes. In Alaska’s warming rivers the chinook are getting “ick.”

Up on Alaska’s northernmost, tundra-speckled coast the locals already have complained in recent years that global warming has made it harder to keep meat fresh in their cellars - as permafrost thaws, the ground doesn’t provide a natural freezer in every hole. Now, across more of the state, some salmon are going bad while they’re still swimming. The LA Times’s Kenneth R. Weiss on Sunday had a long feature (and isn’t it nice to find a paper, even the LAT with its buyouts, layoffs, and other thrift, still running such?) on it. An increasing number of salmon pulled from the Yukon and other rivers, gleaming and flopping, are promptly thrown in the “dog pot” as inedible and unmarketable for people. The meat, it says here, turns mealy. Smoked and dried it looked more like “strips of greasy rotten mango” than the intended rich red jerky.

The fish have a form of the parasitic disease ich, pronounced ick (familiar to many aquarium-owning fish hobbyists), reports Weiss. His piece lays out the rise of its incidence, suspicion that the warming water has made the fish more susceptible in the last 20 years, and a scientific and regulatory ruckus that pitted factions within the fishing industry and state fish and game officials over the problem’s urgency. The issue, it appears from this piece, has been a hot one for some time there. Weiss gives it a needed, more national stage and presents it as an example of the changing landscape of wildlife diseases.

Included, in this age of converging media, is a photo gallery online and a well-done video version.

It’s a colorful package with many cited sources. The Tracker would have had plenty more questions for the researchers about the disease’s dynamics and the hypothesized link to warmer water. Such as - do young salmon probably catch it on their way out of the rivers, then worsen when they migrate back from the sea to spawn? Do salmon in rivers farther south, from Canada down into California where rivers presumably have been this warm all along, get ich - or might subpopulations there have developed resistance? (LATE ADDITION: Weiss says he asked. No answer yet and room in the news hole for questions that have no answers is rare). But this yarn is convincing as it stands. Something has changed. Temperature is a prime suspect.

Technorati Tags:
salmon, climate_change, commercial_fishing

Salmon Fallout -- and Diver Deaths

I've been remiss in tracking here the farmed salmon issue I wrote about in the April/May Eating Well. Much has transpired; here a few tidbits and updates.

Soon after my feature ran, news broke that the Sacramento king (aka chinook) salmon run -- traditionally fairly robust, and the base of both the California salmon fishing industry and the main supply for many California restaurants -- went completely snuff this year. The California salmon fishery was closed for the first time in 160 years. A stunning blow to the fishing industry and all fans of salmon in general.

This has had some interesting fallout right up the line. The Eater SF blog laments:

The cancellation of salmon season has made the question of farmed/wild salmon a hot topic, and now at least one more local won't be resorting to the Loch Duart alternative: "It will come as no surprise, then, that there is one fish I will not serve at Contigo: farmed salmon. Not even Scotland's eco-friendly Marine Conservation Society-endorsed Loch Duart salmon. My decision isn't based on holier-than-thou food snob bull shit. It comes from my heart. My decision is based on respect for and solidarity with people like Larry Miyamura, hardworking fishermen who depend on the salmon season for the majority of their income. It's a personal choice. It just wouldn't feel right to me to put farmed salmon on my restaurant's menu. Especially not this year."

That quote comes from chef Brett, who blogs at in praise of sardines and is soon to open a new restaurant, Contigo.

And yesterday's news brings report of another problem with the farmed salmon industry, at least in Chile: The death on April 25 of farmed-salmon industry diver Nelson Andrés Bustamente, from the bends, brought to 54 the number of Chilean salmon industry divers who have died since 2005. Crîstån Soto of the local divers union there in Chile told a Patagonia Times reporter that Bustamente died because he had been asked to go deeper than is safe. "Every day we go down further than we're supposed to, Why do we do it? Because if we don't, we'll be out of work." The Patagonia Times story ran no response from industry. The mere count, however -- 54 divers dead in a bit over 3 years -- seems rather damning itself.

My Eating Well Story on Wild Salmon -- and the Times' Story on Lost Wild Salmon

Suddenly it's salmon everywhere -- or in some cases, nowhere.

My story on "The Wild Salmon Debate: A Fresh Look at Whether Eating Farmed Salmon is ... Well ... OK," was published a couple weeks ago in Eating Well. You can see the Eating Well web version here or download a pdf here. The story describes why I came to swear off eating farmed Atlantic salmon because of their impact on wild salmon fisheries, which have enough troubles as it is.

I’m increasingly convinced that the larger issue of farmed versus wild salmon poses a similar choice. The withering array of injuries that salmon farms inflict on wild salmon forces a sort of long-range consumer decision. This is not like deciding whether you want free-range versus conventional chicken for tonight’s dinner; that’s a decision with limited echo. To decide that you may as well eat farmed Atlantic tonight, however, is to decide, in a very real sense, that you may as well eat farmed salmon, and farmed salmon only, forever. That just doesn’t sit well with me. For now, anyway, I’ve eaten my last farmed salmon.

Accompanying the story are some great recipes Eating Well gathered or put together -- delishy dishes like salmon panzanella, grilled salmon tacos, and something highly photogenic called New World Graviax.

This story was, among other things, an attempt to describe not just the salmon's status but a sort of metric -- the "Is it Okay" Algorithm -- by which to sort though the frequently confusing question of what fish are okay to eat. I can't say I came up with a universal metric, but with luck this offers a bit of guidance. The feedback so far has been quite good.

Quite a few readers have written me asking for guidance to the confusing world of salmon - as in, what kind to eat. As I note in the Eating Well article, the answer to that question depends on a formula whose variables will get weighed differently by different people. But for me it sugars to a decision to eat only wild Pacific salmon from Alaskan fisheries. If you want to keep it simple, that works. More, of course, in the article in the links above.

No sooner was that published than came the news that an important run of Chinook salmon -- the Sacramento River run -- seems to have vanished. The Times has an excellent story on that.

Drugs in Your Drinking Water

This one's getting a lot of play: There are traceable levels of prescription drugs in many public water supplies.

The Times includes the AP story, which is both long and good. I bumped into it first on the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:

Health Blog : Big Pharma is in the Water Big Pharma is in the Water Posted by Sarah Rubenstein

It's not so expensive to get pharmaceuticals after all: Just drink water.

An investigation by the Associated Press found trace amounts of scads of drugs in drinking-water supplies around the country. For a list of what was found in the watersheds of 28 metro areas, click here. Among the water's offerings were antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones. There were traces of sedatives in water serving the city that never sleeps.

The drugs get in the water via our own waste.

Clive Thompson looked at the ability to trace drugs in water supplies -- a "community urinalysis," as he called it -- in a brief item in the NY Times Magazine's "Ideas" issue.

Do these drugs have any effects? The drug content is pretty low, but as one scientist points out in the Times story, these drugs are meant to have effects at low doses. As the Times story notes in signing off:

''We know we are being exposed to other people's drugs through our drinking water, and that can't be good,'' says Dr. David Carpenter, who directs the Institute for Health and the Environment of the State University of New York at Albany.

Fish can count!

The amazing counting mosquitofish. Image courtesy Wikipedia

Eight years ago I published a book about a fight over how to count fish. Now it turns out that fish themselves can count. The account below comes from the BBC's natural history site, loveearth.com -- which is a well worth visiting anyway, full of visual and scientific wonders. The original paper is in Animal Cognition -- unfortunately, behind the usual absurdly expensive firewall ($32 for this article). Luckily there are science writers at the BBC to write this up:

Researchers find fish that can count up to four

Fish can count. We know that fish are able to tell big shoals from small ones, but now researchers have discovered that fish can actually count how many other fish are nearby.

'We have provided the first evidence that fish exhibit rudimentary mathematical abilities,' says experimental psychologist Christian Agrillo of the University of Padova in Italy, who made the discovery while studying a group mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki).

.... [The reseachers found that] the fish ... have a rudimentary ability to count, and that they appear to do so using similar cognitive mechanisms as other, higher vertebrates. 'They show a performance very similar to what is observed in apes, monkeys and dolphins,' Agrillo says.

The article then goes on to describe the clever experiments used to ferret out the counting ability:

[The research] team first conducted a series of experiments to see whether a lone mosquitofish would prefer to join a shoal of between two and four others. Females preferred to join shoals that were larger by just one fish significantly more often; consistently preferring shoals of four fish rather than three fish, and consistently preferring shoals of three fish over those containing just two. This means the fish were clearly able to count up to four and demonstrates that fish have a rudimentary mathematical ability to visually count how many items are present if the number is small.

A second series of experiments revealed the fish’s ability to process larger numbers. The fish were not able to directly count over four, but they were able to distinguish between larger numbers if they differed by a ratio of 2:1. For example, the fish could distinguish between a shoal of 16, compared to a shoal of eight others. But they could not tell the difference between a shoal of 12 compared to a shoal of eight, a ratio of 3:2. This demonstrates that fish are able to visually estimate larger numbers - but not very accurately.

I am fascinated to read of this testing for 2:1 ratios, for it is very similar to experiments that Harvard cognitive psychologist Liz Spelke and others have used to explore the numerical awareness, or "numerosity," as Spelke calls it, of human infants. I described Spelke's work in a profile for Scientific American Mind a while back. I'd love to know if the fish researchers took this method from Spelke and similar work.

Cod, climate, and Nature's new Climate Change journal

A new journal from the Nature Publishing Group (publishers of Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and other favorites of mine) has just started a journal about climate change, and to my delight they feature a story about climate change and Atlantic cod, an old love of mine from my time on the Gulf of Maine.

Atlantic cod, Gadus callarius Linneaus, by Goode, from the magnificent Bigelow and Schroeder, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, 1953, the best field guide I've ever read, now online.

Cod aren't doing terribly well, because of overfishing and decimation of inshore spawning stocks, though some pockets still produce nice numbers of this lovely fish. The Nature Climate Change story gives a heads-up to a study about how cod fared in previous climate change cycles. This is a hot topic, as many fishermen and scientists wonder whether warming seas have already contributed to the cod's decline so far or might inhibit its recovery. The new study finds that previous large swings in climate have cut cod populations back by as much as a fifth, knocking it down but not out. But the authors don't seem optimistic on how well they'll fare in this one.

Having read a few of these papers, I gather that the jury is still out on how much climate change will complicate the cod's future.

The Natural Environment Research Center actually writes it up more cleanly than the Nature Climate Change story does:

The new findings, published online today (14 November 2007) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, show that natural climate change has previously reduced the range of cod to around a fifth of present-day values. Despite this, cod continued to populate both sides of the North Atlantic.

The researchers used a computer model and DNA techniques to estimate where cod could be found in the ice age, when colder temperatures and lower sea-levels caused the extinction of some populations and the isolation of others. ....

Professor Bigg [the lead researcher] said "This research shows that cod populations have been able to survive in periods of extreme climatic change, demonstrating a considerable resilience. However this does not necessarily mean that cod will show the same resilience to the effects of future climatic changes due to global warming."

Yet another story, this one from the Telegraph and titled "Climate change joins fishing as cod threat," notes that cod don't do so well in their northernmost ranges:

[The] study by Prof Bigg and colleagues shows that cod "are good at surviving habitat reduction, except in the northern half of their range. With regard to future climate change, it is clear that the acceptable habitat will retreat poleward significantly as temperatures warm," [Bigg] says.

"It is not unlikely that acceptable conditions for spawning will disappear from much of the North Atlantic to become restricted to the Arctic."

Cod is currently not found there, apart from the Barents Sea, and so there is the question of whether the currently depleted species is able to colonise new areas faster than its old habitat is lost, says Prof Bigg.

Yet another paper, meanwhile, by Mieszkowska, Sim, and Hawkins [pdf download], concluded that climate change might already be adding pressure to North Sea cod. The jury will doubtless be out on this one a while. But it raises more worries both about what climate change may do to cod -- and about the difficulty of predicting how different species will fare as things warm up.

Left-Hand-Turn Elimination - New York Times

There were a mess of interesting items in the New York Times Magazine annual "Ideas" issue last December 9, but I keep thinking of this one every time a) I wait to make a left-hand turn or b) see a UPS truck. Short v: Avoid left turns and save ...

Here's the whole thing:

Left-Hand-Turn Elimination

By JOEL LOVELL

Published: December 9, 2007

It seems that sitting in the left lane, engine idling, waiting for oncoming traffic to clear so you can make a left-hand turn, is minutely wasteful — of time and peace of mind, for sure, but also of gas and therefore money. Not a ton of gas and money if we’re talking about just you and your Windstar, say, but immensely wasteful if we’re talking about more than 95,000 big square brown trucks delivering packages every day. And this realization — that when you operate a gigantic fleet of vehicles, tiny improvements in the efficiency of each one will translate to huge savings overall — is what led U.P.S. to limit further the number of left-hand turns its drivers make.

The company employs what it calls a “package flow” software program, which among other hyperefficient practices involving the packing and sorting of its cargo, maps out routes for every one of its drivers, drastically reducing the number of left-hand turns they make (taking into consideration, of course, those instances where not to make the left-hand turn would result in a ridiculously circuitous route).

Last year, according to Heather Robinson, a U.P.S. spokeswoman, the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons. So what can Brown do for you? We can’t speak to how good or bad they are in the parcel-delivery world, but they won’t be clogging up the left-hand lane while they do their business.

[From Left-Hand-Turn Elimination - New York Times]

Arctic melt opens Northwest passage

McClure Strait, long the bottleneck in the Northwest Passage, has been opened by warming seas.

A warming globe has created what a lot of very cold explorers could not find: Arctic melt has opened the Northwest passage, as described in good stories at ABC.com, ScienceMode, and in Nature:

The most direct shipping route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, connecting Asia and Europe, is fully navigable for the first time since records began, data show. Warming has led to a record retreat of Arctic sea ice, which covers about 16 million square kilometres during March each year and melts to a minimum sometime in September or October. The previous record minimum was 5.32 million square kilometres, set in 2005, but this year it has already reached a low of 4.24 million square kilometres, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado."

As noted in articles at the CBC and in Harper's (subscription required), this is likely to accelerate a struggle for control of the Passage -- as well as related resources -- involving Russia, Canada, and the U.S. One of the many pleasures of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams was his chapter on the search for the Passage. The determination and suffering of those who searched for it was stunning. Who would know they could have just waited? My home here in Vermont feels a bit more south by the day.

European heat waves double in length since 1880

A recent study in the American Geophysical Union'sJournal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres confirms that it really is getting hotter. The study found heat waves in Europe have doubled in length and that extremely hot days are three times as common as a century ago.

From the AGU press release:

The new data shows that many previous assessments of daily summer temperature change underestimated heat wave events in western Europe by approximately 30 percent.

Paul Della-Marta and a team of researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland compiled evidence from 54 high-quality recording locations from Sweden to Croatia and report that heat waves last an average of 3 days now—with some lasting up to 4.5 days—compared to an average of around 1.5 days in 1880. The results are published 3 August in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. The researchers suggest that their conclusions contribute to growing evidence that western Europe’s climate has become more extreme and confirm a previously hypothesized increase in the variance of daily summer temperatures since the 19th century.

The study adds evidence that heat waves, such as the devastating 2003 event in western Europe, are a likely sign of global warming; one that perhaps began as early as the 1950s, when their study showed some of the highest trends in summer mean temperature and summer temperature variance.

“These results add more evidence to the belief among climate scientists that western Europe will experience some of the highest environmental and social impacts of climate change and continue to experience devastating hot summers like the summer of 2003 more frequently in the future,” Della-Marta said.

You can read the whole press release; download the paper (for $9); or check out the rest of Della-Marta's work tracking the history of recent climate change in Europe.

Bird Nannies Give Mom a Break

A splendid -- and to parents and young'n's, painfully relevant -- bit of research news from Science :

Every parent can use a little help now and then, and birds are no exception. Some species even use nannies to feed and care for chicks. These 'daycare' babies don't seem to do any better than offspring raised by mom and dad alone do, however, and researchers have struggled to figure out how birds benefit from the assistance. A new study has cracked the mystery: The nannies apparently allow mother birds to save their strength so they can lay eggs later on.

If you've a Science subscription you can read the news story or t the actual paper. Sans subscription you can still read the abstract or, elsewhere, a web site about the lovely birds in the study, superb fairy-wrens, pictured above -- male at left, female at right.

Image via Wikipedia Commons.