"EPA tells staff don't talk to investigators, press"

This Republican administration can't be gone soon enough.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency is telling its pollution enforcement officials not to talk with congressional investigators, reporters and even the agency's own inspector general, according to an internal e-mail provided to The Associated Press.

The June 16 message instructs 11 managers in the EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, the branch of the agency charged with making sure environmental laws are followed, to remind their staff members to keep quiet.

"If you are contacted directly by the IG's office or GAO requesting information of any kind ... please do not respond to questions or make any statements," reads the e-mail sent by Robbi Farrell, the division's chief of staff. Instead, staff members should forward inquiries to a designated EPA representative, the memo says.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility obtained the e-mail and provided it to the AP. The group is a nonprofit alliance of local, state and federal professionals. Its Web site carries the slogan, "Protecting Employees Who Protect Our Environment."

Jeff Ruch, its executive director, said Monday the e-mail reinforces a "bunker mentality" within EPA under the Bush administration.

"The clear intention behind this move is to chill the cubicles by suppressing any uncontrolled information," said Ruch...

The e-mail, according to EPA, was a response to a May 2007 audit by the Inspector General's Office that found the agency had not responded to earlier IG reports on problems with water enforcement and other matters. However, the audit did not make any specific recommendations about communications between staff and the inspector general's office.

In a statement issued Monday, the Office of Inspector General said it did not approve of the language in the e-mail and was engaged in discussions with enforcement officials to ensure the electronic dispatch would not hinder its access to information.
"All EPA officials and employees are required to cooperate with OIG," the statement said. "This cooperation includes providing the OIG full and unrestricted access to EPA documents, records, and personnel."

...The EPA is currently under pressure from several congressional committees to disclose documents relating to its position on global warming and its denial of a petition by California to control greenhouse gases from motor vehicles. Just last week, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson denied a request to appear before two Senate committees to discuss whether the agency's decisions comply with its staff's technical and legal recommendations.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who heads the Senate environment committee, said Monday the administrator had turned "the EPA into a secretive, dangerous ally of polluters, instead of a leader in the effort to protect the health and safety of the American people."...

Rock Port, MO - 100% of Energy from Wind

Vehicles in this northwest Missouri farm community are likely to be pickup trucks, and "green" is the color of a John Deere tractor.
But when it comes to alternative energy, little Rock Port - population about 1,400 - is a pioneer: it's the site of a wind farm that's projected to generate more electricity than the town uses in a year.

Four 250-foot wind turbines on the town's western bluffs are the source of Rock Port's alt-energy designation. The massive turbines linked to the city-owned utility were installed early this year by St. Louis-based Wind Capital Group, with financing from Deere & Co., the world's biggest manufacturer of farm equipment.

"We are always going to be agriculture-based. We are always going to be rural," said Eric Chamberlain, project manager for the Loess Hills Wind Farm. "But there are things we can do certainly, and we're doing it.

"I mean, when you remove your carbon footprint for the entire town for electricity production, that's a pretty big deal."

The wind turbines in Rock Port are estimated to generate about 16 million kilowatt hours of energy a year, or about 3 million more than what Rock Port typically uses. That's thanks to northwest Missouri gusts that put the region, where Wind Capital has three other, larger wind farms, among the windiest parts of Missouri, which ranks 20th in the nation in terms of wind potential.

Wind energy has been gaining momentum in the U.S., growing by 45 percent last year and now providing about 1 percent of the nation's energy, according to AWEA. A study from the Energy Department and the industry found that wind could generate 20 percent of the nation's electricity by 2030.

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has been promoting his plan for erecting turbines in the Midwest and asked Congress this week to "clear the path" for his plan to boost use of wind and natural gas...

But that doesn't mean Rock Port is off the electrical grid and getting all its electricity from wind.

In May, for example, on days the turbines didn't spin, the town pulled its energy from the rural electric cooperative. But for the overall month, the turbines provided 107 percent of the town's needs, Chamberlain said.

When the turbines churn out more than Rock Port needs, the remaining energy is sold by Deere, which owns the turbines, back to the Missouri Public Energy Pool. The pool then distributes it to its other 31 co-op members...

Other cities like Hull, Mass., and Aspen, Colo., were earlier on the wind curve, but Rock Port's projected estimate of its turbines generating more wind than the town needs in a year appears to be a first for the U.S. Hull has been producing about 12 percent of its energy needs with two city-owned wind turbines since 2006.

And Aspen gets 75 percent of its energy from renewables, said Sally Spaulding, Aspen's director of community relations. Aspen also won the Department of Energy's Wind Power Pioneer Award for 2008 because it buys three times more wind power than any other public utility in the country on a per capita basis...

"State panel recommends strict measures to reduce plastic marine debris in California"

LAtimes

In a report to be release next week, the Ocean Protection Council advocates banning plastic foam cups and plastic bags, items that often end up in coastal waters and on beaches.

California's leaders should ban smoking on beaches, forbid fast-food joints from distributing polystyrene cups and containers and require markets to recycle plastic bags or ban them outright as part of an aggressive campaign to reduce plastic marine debris.

These and dozens of other recommendations are included in a report to be released next week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Ocean Protection Council, a policy body designed to coordinate the patchwork of local efforts to protect California's waters and beaches.

Some of the recommendations would compel the state to catch up with coastal cities that are outlawing single-use plastic containers and plastic supermarket bags.

"We need to charge forward and have an overarching policy that is no less vigorous than these cities'," said Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who was instrumental in ordering the report when he was a member of the council.

Some recommendations in the 23-page report could push California to the forefront of the anti-plastic litter campaign, by regulating toxic chemicals used in plastics and going after litterbugs more aggressively.

Besides the traditional public education campaigns, the report recommends attaching redemption fees or punitive charges to items that commonly wind up in coastal waters and on beaches.

Notably, the report says, bottles with monetary redemptions are rarely found amid the debris.

"The debris that is found on our beaches has no value," the report said. "There are costs associated with cleaning up litter, and there is no financial incentive to the individual who caused it to do otherwise."

Meanwhile, plastic bags, which are often free and can't be redeemed, make up 25% of the tonnage of debris scooped each year from storm drains in Los Angeles.

The council's report suggests toughening enforcement of anti-litter laws and increasing fines to $2,000 for a first violation and $5,000 for subsequent infractions....

An estimated 19 billion plastic bags are distributed in California each year. Fewer than 5% are recycled...

"Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" to hit record size: NOAA"

(Reuters)

The Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone" -- a swath of algae-laden water with oxygen levels low enough to choke out marine life -- will likely reach record size this year, and the main culprits are rising ethanol use and massive Midwest flooding, scientists said on Tuesday.

The dead zone, which recurs each year off the Texas and Louisiana coasts, could stretch to more than 8,800 square miles

this year -- about the size of New Jersey -- compared with 6,662 square miles in 2006 and nearly double the annual average since 1990 of 4,800 square miles.

Scientists from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University said the algae that lowers oxygen levels in the dead zone is being fed by farm use of fertilizers like nitrogen and phosphorus.

For fishermen who look to the Gulf of Mexico for crabs, shrimp, crawfish and other seafood, the growing dead zone means they must venture farther out into the gulf's waters to find their catch.

The record dead zone is due to soaring use of ethanol in U.S. motor gasoline supplies and by massive flooding in the Midwest earlier this year, scientists said.

"We're planting an awful lot of corn and soybeans," said Eugene Turner, a scientist at Louisiana State University. "It rinses off easily when there is a rain."

One-third of this year's U.S. corn crop, or 4 billion bushels, will go to make the alternate fuel ethanol, the U.S. government has projected, compared to 3 billion bushels of the 2007 crop.

The dead zone starts in Midwestern corn country when farmers fertilize their fields with nitrogen. The fertilizer run-off flows down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, making algae bloom on the surface and cutting oxygen to creatures that live on the bottom.

Substances in this runoff include the nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus, which can stimulate the growth of algae. These algae settle and decay in the bottom waters of the Gulf, and the bacteria that decompose them gobble up oxygen faster than it can be replenished from the surface, which means lower levels of dissolved oxygen in the water.

U.S. scientists estimate that a record 83,000 tons of phosphorus seeped into the Gulf of Mexico from April through June, up to 85 percent above normal seasonal levels.

"Excess nutrients from the Mississippi River watershed during the spring are the primary human-influenced factor behind the expansion of the dead zone," said Rob Magnien, director of the NOAA Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research.

To reverse the pattern, U.S. farmers must plant more perennial crops that trap rainwater and keep it from running into the Gulf of Mexico, Turner said.

And eventually, scientists need to invent new breeds of perennial corn plants that can remain in the soil from one planting season to the next, avoiding the need to strip fields bare and leave them susceptible to flooding, he said.

"Hundreds of baby penguins found dead in Brazil"

(AP) Hundreds of baby penguins swept from the icy shores of Antarctica and Patagonia are washing up dead on Rio de Janeiro's tropical beaches, rescuers and penguin experts said Friday.

More than 400 penguins, most of them young, have been found dead on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro state over the past two months, according to Eduardo Pimenta, superintendent for the state coastal protection and environment agency in the resort city of Cabo Frio.

While it is common here to find some penguins — both dead and alive — swept by strong ocean currents from the Strait of Magellan, Pimenta said there have been more this year than at any time in recent memory.

Rescuers and those who treat penguins are divided over the possible causes.

Thiago Muniz, a veterinarian at the Niteroi Zoo, said he believed overfishing has forced the penguins to swim further from shore to find fish to eat "and that leaves them more vulnerable to getting caught up in the strong ocean currents."

Niteroi, the state's biggest zoo, already has already received about 100 penguins for treatment this year and many are drenched in petroleum, Muniz said. The Campos oil field that supplies most of Brazil's oil lies offshore.

Muniz said he hadn't seen penguins suffering from the effects of other pollutants, but he pointed out that already dead penguins aren't brought in for treatment.

Pimenta suggested pollution is to blame.

"Aside from the oil in the Campos basin, the pollution is lowering the animals' immunity, leaving them vulnerable to funguses and bacteria that attack their lungs," Pimenta said, quoting biologists who work with him.

But biologist Erli Costa of Rio de Janeiro's Federal University suggested weather patterns could be involved.

"I don't think the levels of pollution are high enough to affect the birds so quickly. I think instead we're seeing more young and sick penguins because of global warming, which affects ocean currents and creates more cyclones, making the seas rougher," Costa said.

Costa said the vast majority of penguins turning up are baby birds that have just left the nest and are unable to out-swim the strong ocean currents they encounter while searching for food.

Every year, Brazil airlifts dozens of penguins back to Antarctica or Patagonia.

"First tidal power turbine gets plugged in"

From the Guardian

An underwater turbine that generates electricity from tidal streams was plugged into the UK's national grid today. It marks the first time a commercial-scale underwater turbine has fed power into the network and the start of a new source of renewable energy for the UK.

Tidal streams are seen by many as a plentiful and predictable supply of clean energy. The most conservative estimates suggest there is at least five gigawatts of power in tidal flows around the country, but there could be as much as 15GW.

The trial at Strangford Lough, in Northern Ireland, uses a device called SeaGen and generates power at 150kW. However, engineers have plans to increase power to 300kW by the end of the summer. When it is eventually running at full power SeaGen will have an output of 1,200 kW, enough for about 1,000 homes.

SeaGen was designed and built by the Bristol-based tidal energy company Marine Current Turbines (MCT), which also installed the test device at Strangford in May.

"The best way to think of it is an underwater windmill," said Martin Wright, managing director of MCT. "There are big masses of water moving on the Earth's surface as a result of the gravitational attraction of the moon. Therefore you have streams occurring where you have accelerated flow."

Tidal generators harvest the energy of these moving streams with the added advantage that the resource is, unlike wind, predictable.

The secretary of state for business, John Hutton, said: "This kind of world-first technology and innovation is key to helping the UK reduce its dependency on fossil fuels and secure its future energy supplies.

"Marine power has the potential to play an important role in helping us meet our challenging targets for a massive increase in the amount of energy generated from renewables."

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform supported Seagen with a £5.2m grant, helping take its plans from the drawing board to the first demonstrator.

The cost of installing the marine turbines is £3m for every megawatt they eventually generate, which compares to £2.3m per megawatt for offshore wind. The costs will drop if the technology is more widely adopted.

Robin Oakley, head of Greenpeace UK's climate and energy campaign, welcomed the SeaGen trial: "Britain should be at the forefront of marine renewable energy development. Our windswept island has huge renewable resources and we should seize the opportunities to secure energy from around our coasts...

Kay Ryan - Poet Laureate

I really like the idea of Poet Laureates and such. I think our country could use more of this sort of thing. People recognized in that way. Brought to our attention.

A clip from the New York Times

Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1994, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000.

Still, she has remained something of an outsider.

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”

Dana Gioia, a poet and the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was an early supporter of Ms. Ryan’s work, describing her as the “thoughtful, bemused, affectionate, deeply skeptical outsider.”

“She would certainly be part of the world if she could manage it,” he said. “She has certain reservations. That is what makes her like Dickinson in some ways.”

Poems:

Death by Fruit

Only the crudest
of the vanitas set
ever thought you had to get
a skull into the picture
whether you needed
its tallowy color
near the grapes or not.
Others, stopping to consider
shapes and textures,
often discovered that
eggs or aubergines
went better, or leeks,
or a plate of string beans.
A skull is so dominant.
It takes so much
bunched up drapery,
such a ponderous
display of ornate cutlery,
just to make it less prominent.
The greatest masters
preferred the subtlest vanitas,
modestly trusting to fruit baskets
to whisper ashes to ashes,
relying on the poignant exactness
of oranges to release
like a citrus mist
the always fresh fact
of how hard we resist
how briefly we’re pleased.
___

Nothing Ventured

Nothing exists as a block
and cannot be parceled up.
So if nothing's ventured
it's not just talk;
it's the big wager.
Don't you wonder
how people think
the banks of space
and time don't matter?
How they'll drain
the big tanks down to
slime and salamanders
and want thanks?
___

Repulsive Theory

Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it's got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth,
all the dimpled depths
of pooling space, the whole
swirl set up by fending-off—
extending far beyond the personal,
I'm convinced—
immense and good
in a cosmological sense:
unpressing us against
each other, lending
the necessary never
to never-ending.
___

Soft

In harmony with the rule of irony—
which requires that we harbor the enemy
on this side of the barricade—the shell
of the unborn eagle or pelican, which is made
to give protection till the great beaks can harden,
is the first thing to take up poison.
The mineral case is soft and gibbous
as the moon in a lake—an elastic,
rubbery, nightmare water that won't break.
Elsewhere, also, I see the mockeries of struggle,
a softness over people.

"Forests to fall for food and fuel"

From the BBC

Demand for land to grow food, fuel crops and wood is set to outstrip supply, leading to the probable destruction of forests, a report warns.

The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) says only half of the extra land needed by 2030 is available without eating into tropical forested areas.

A companion report documents poor progress in reforming land ownership and governance in developing countries.
Both reports will be launched on Monday in UK government offices in London.

Supporters of RRI include the UK's Department of International Development (DfID) and its equivalents in Sweden and Switzerland.

"Arguably, we are on the verge of a last great global land grab," said RRI's Andy White, co-author of the major report, Seeing People through the Trees.

"It will mean more deforestation, more conflict, more carbon emissions, more climate change and less prosperity for everyone."

Rising demand for food, biofuels and wood for paper, building and industry means that 515 million hectares of extra land will be needed for growing crops and trees by 2030, RRI calculates.

But only 200 million hectares will be available without dipping into tropical forests.


The report foresees demand increasing further into the century.

It cites studies suggesting that "...if the current plateau in productivity continues, the amount of additional agricultural land required just to meet the world's projected food demand in 2050 would be about three billion hectares, nearly all of which would be required in developing countries."

According to UN figures, the world currently has about 1.4 billion hectares of arable land and about 3.4 billion hectares of pasture...

"A Warning From the Sea"

From the LA Times

For decades, the unwritten motto at shellfish hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest was “Better oysters through science.”

Scientists mated the heartiest, fastest-growing stock to produce plumper, sweeter oysters for slurping raw on the half-shell or frying up to dip in tangy sauces.

They probed the genetic code to select for the most desirable traits of the Pacific oyster, an import from Japan that now weighs in, pound for pound, as the No. 1 aquacultured crop in the world: 4.5 million tons a year (shells included) valued at $3 billion.

They even bred out sexual organs that at certain times of the year can take up more than a third of an oyster’s body weight and give it a soft, mushy texture.

With selective breeding and genetic fingerprinting, they were on their way to developing a super oyster resistant to summer mortality, keeping one step ahead of a warmer, more polluted planet. Or so they thought.

Suddenly, oyster research bogged down as a riotous bloom of bacteria went on a West Coast killing spree, wiping out billions of oyster larvae.

The outbreak first shut down an oyster brood stock program run by Oregon State University in Newport, Ore., in 2005. “All we saw was our larvae were dying,” said fisheries professor Chris Langdon, “and we couldn’t put our finger on why.”

Then the microscopic culprit overran commercial hatcheries in Washington and Oregon, crippling production over the last couple of years and causing a shortage of oyster “seed” needed to replant tideland farms from Southern California to Canada.

“It’s pretty scary,” said Sue Cudd, owner of Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in Netarts, Ore. The hatchery, she said, has been drowning in costs and failing to produce sufficient oyster larvae for West Coast shellfish farmers. “We almost decided to close, and people panicked. I realized if I go out of business, I take a lot of people with me.”

Science has identified the culprit, a strain of bacteria called Vibrio tubiashii, which is harmless to humans but fatal to baby oysters. It attacks them in their vulnerable, free-swimming larval stage before they settle to the seafloor, latch onto rocks or other oysters and grow thick shells.

The Vibrio blooms appear to be linked to warmer waters in estuaries and the oxygen-starved “dead zones” that have showed up this decade off the coast of Oregon and Washington, researchers said.

These low-oxygen waters correlate with stronger winds coming from a warming planet.

Scientists note that Vibrio tubiashii has an advantage over other microscopic life in the sea. This bacterium thrives in oxygen-starved dead zones, feasting on decaying plant and animal matter littering the seafloor. And when brought to the surface with water welling up from the deep, it can switch survival strategies to flourish in warm, well-oxygenated waters.

Researchers were not surprised to find this type of bacteria in seawater but were stunned that it had become so dominant over other microbes: It was nearly a pure concentration of this one bacteria, one that happens to be deadly to oyster larvae.

“It seems to be logical that the dead zone is playing a role,” said Ralph Elston, who runs a veterinary medical practice in Sequim, Wash., that offers advice to shellfish farmers. “It’s the perfect bacterial setup, and we get these explosive blooms along the coast.”

...The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which funds the Molluscan Broodstock Program at Oregon State’s hatchery, is exploring microbial warfare.

Gary Richards, a USDA researcher at the University of Delaware, has been screening seawater samples to find a virus, or bacteriophage, that would seek out and destroy Vibrio tubiashii. Marine bacteria often have such natural enemies. An intervention, such as releasing the right “phage,” as they are called, could avoid “an ecological disaster of monumental proportions,” Richards wrote in an e-mail to scientists and hatchery managers.

As filter feeders, shellfish clean seawater of excess algae and nutrients, maintaining healthy coastal waters. When oysters disappear, as they did in the Chesapeake Bay, an estuary’s water can turn murky and foul.

“With the loss of oysters, the water in the Chesapeake became more turbid, restricting light penetration to plants and sea life, and the higher nutrient levels made algal blooms more common,” Richards wrote. “The West Coast needs to avoid this at all cost.”

So scientists like Donal T. Manahan and Dennis Hedgecock at USC, among others, have spent decades hovering over bubbling tanks of oysters to improve on nature. They’ve been selecting stocks with more productive pedigrees that offer the double benefit of cleaning coastal waters and multiplying the bounty of this gastronomic treat.

“Our hybrids do better than wild oysters,” producing two to three times more oyster meat per acre of shellfish beds, Hedgecock said. Yet as the bacterial outbreak reminded them, the first step of any successful breeding program is to make sure oysters don’t die....

"Chesapeake watermen fear blue crab not coming back"

(AP) Chesapeake Bay crabber Paul Kellam has advice for the teenage boys who help tend his traps every summer: You better have a backup plan.

It's an anxious summer for watermen harvesting the Chesapeake's best-loved seafood, the blue crab. The way some see it, the crabbing business here isn't just dying. It's already dead.

Crabs have thrived in the bottom muck of the Chesapeake and its tributaries even as centuries of overfishing harmed oysters, fish and other species in the nation's largest estuary. Now blue crabs are in trouble, too, and when they go, a way of life is sure to go with them.

"There was a time when crabbers were only out here from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Now, it's about all we have left," says Kellam, 53, steering his 30-year-old rig "Christy" out of the Potomac River and onto the bay for a day of crabbing. The contradictory decor in the cabin sums up the outlook of today's waterman: a red wooden good-luck horseshoe dangles over a mud-splattered copy of "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook."

The bay's blue crab stock is down about 65 percent since 1990 due to overfishing and water pollution, according to Virginia and Maryland fisheries managers. The states have imposed steep cuts on this year's female crab harvest, aiming to reduce the number of crabs taken by more than a third.

For Kellam and his neighbors in southern Maryland, where the working rigs and crab picking houses that sustained these communities for generations have been replaced by yachts and vacation homes, hopes are dim that the blue crabs will ever come back.

"It's looking worse every year," says Bob McKay, who at 74 is the oldest working waterman in St. Mary's County. He still sells crabs out of a shed in his yard but doubts the industry will live much longer than he does. "I don't know what the solution could be."

Watermen have turned to real estate and automobile repair. They've opened seafood restaurants and bakeries.

The best way to make money on the Chesapeake these days is taking businessmen from Washington and Philadelphia on charter fishing trips. Those who still rely on crabbing are further hurt by a double punch of higher fuel costs and an economic downturn that's meant fewer consumers dropping up to $200 on a bushel of crabs.

"People don't have the disposable income. They're just not buying," says Kellam, who spends up to $150 a day on diesel, which costs about $5 a gallon at a nearby marina.

There was a time when Chesapeake watermen made their living off the winter oyster harvest, using hand tongs and later power dredges to supply most of the world's oysters. But disease and over-harvesting nearly wiped out Chesapeake oysters in the 1980s, and despite millions invested in restoration, they've never recovered. Scientists estimate the Chesapeake now contains about 1 percent of the oysters it once did.

After the oyster industry collapsed, watermen looked to hardy blue crabs to make up the slack. But the next generation may not have another option.

"I want to make a living on the water," says Randy Plummer, a chain-smoking 19-year-old who works on Kellam's crab rig. "But there ain't no future in it. Everybody knows that."

Plummer has wanted to crab since he was a boy, but is instead headed to community college this fall, at the urging of Kellam and his parents.

Even scientists who called for the harvest reductions say overfishing isn't entirely to blame.

The main culprit is water pollution and soil runoff from development throughout a watershed that is home to 10 million people. Excess nutrients wash into the Chesapeake, causing algae blooms and choking the native plant life that crabs rely on for food and habitat. In the summer, large swaths of the Chesapeake contain so little oxygen that scientists call them "dead zones," because few critters can live there.

Watermen call it "bad water," and they track it all summer, following crabs as they skitter to shallower water that contains more oxygen. Even when watermen luck out and pull up a pot full of crabs, long-timers say the crabs are nothing like they used to be.

"Sometimes in the summer, you pull the pots up, they've got algae and mud all over them. The bad water comes in and coats everything and the crabs can't stand it," Kellam explains.

He now spends hours hauling up the same number of crabs he could catch in a few pots a decade ago. And what he catches isn't as healthy-looking as the crabs he caught as a boy. Wholesalers are buying them anyway.

"They're buying a lot of stuff that 10 years ago they would've turned away," Kellam says.

Maryland and Virginia officials have responded to the watermen's plight by asking the federal government for a disaster declaration that would free up about $20 million to subsidize crabbers and seafood processors until blue crabs rebound.

Maryland is also working on sweeping revisions to state planning laws with an eye toward protecting its 3,000 or so miles of shoreline. Already this year, the state toughened zoning laws dealing with development closest to the water, a law that aims to reduce sediment and pollution running into the Chesapeake and its tributaries.

"It's certainly getting more difficult to make a living on the water," conceded Lynn Fegley, a biologist in charge of crabs for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. But Fegley says the cynicism along the Chesapeake is unfounded. There will always be Chesapeake blue crabs, she says — as long as watermen lay off them when the stock dips.

"As the watershed gets more crowded, the face of the fishery may change. But people are always going to want seafood, right? It's healthy and it's delicious. What we have to do is find a way to harvest seafood that's sustainable for the future," Fegley says.

But Thomas Courtney, who sells Kellam the alewife fish he uses for bait, laughs when asked whether state efforts to revive blue crabs will bring them back.

"It ain't what we're pulling out of the water. It's what we're putting in the water," says Courtney, 62. "You've got a cornfield, 20 acres, you put 80 or 90 houses on it, hook 'em up to sewer pipes, put roads and ditches down. That's what's destroyed the bay. It ain't us. They let development take over and then, that's it, we're done."

"Invasion Of The Jellyfish" (CT)

From Theday.com

Waterford beach lifeguards Anders Drew and Silvia Stockman spend most of their mornings now scooping up swarms of jellyfish from the shoreline before beachgoers arrive. But all their scooping still can't stop people from getting stung.

”This is probably the worst year we have had,” said Stockman, who's been at the beach four years.

Drew, the head lifeguard, agreed.

”They beat us here this year,” he said.

While jellyfish are common at the region's beaches each summer, they've arrived earlier than normal.

”They've been stung today already,” said Barbara Stack of Waterford Saturday afternoon, motioning towards her two daughters and a friend who were playing at the water's edge.

Barbara and her husband, Ted, grew up in Waterford. Both said they did not remember a jellyfish problem in their childhood.

Dave Simpson, the acting director of marine fisheries for the Department of Environmental Protection, said the jellyfish invading Long Island Sound this year are “typical” lion's mane jellyfish, which, apart from a minor sting, do not present much of a threat to beachgoers unlike the Portuguese man-of-war that washed up on Westerly and Stonington beaches last summer.

The fruitful jellyfish population, however, is not as alarming as their ahead-of-schedule debut to southeastern Connecticut shores, according to jellyfish expert Megan Pried.

Pried, who has worked for the last year and a half at the Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration, said it is normal for jellyfish to be this abundant. What is out of the ordinary is their advanced arrival.

Pried said that locals reported jellyfish sightings as early as April. The normal jellyfish season begins at the end of May or the beginning of June, she said.

She credited the jellies' early arrival to warmer water temperatures.

”I do believe that global warming has some play in the temperatures warming up,” she said. “A lot of animals just go by temperature. They don't really know what else is going on.”

Pried explained that if jellyfish sense the water has reached a certain temperature, they will start reproducing and grow larger regardless of the season. She also said when the water is warmer, there is more food, helping the jellies grow faster, and prompting them to migrate to an ample food source.

The jellyfish follow their food - algae blooms - or come this direction with the Gulf Stream.

At the aquarium, Pried said the water is purposefully warmed, causing baby jellyfish, called ephrya, to come off of their polyps and begin feeding and moving about.

This is currently taking place in Long Island Sound. Due to balmy seas, the ephrya are now starting this process prematurely. But jellies are not the only confused marine life. ”Lionfish and other tropical fish that follow the Gulf Stream pop up in our waters and are not normally here,” Pried added.

She warns that lionfish are a venomous species that can cause a great deal of pain to bathers.

"Fuel rationing may have to be formalised" (India)

From Expressindia

Petrol supplies already down 25%, diesel 50% as oil firms have cut purchases in response to rising global crude prices

Rationing of petrol and diesel, already a de facto reality in many of the city’s petrol pumps, may well become a way of life if the authorities get emboldened to come clean on the prevailing fuel situation, which has been plaguing the city for a month now. Pune Petrol Dealers’ Association president Babasaheb Dhumal said that such a situation may come to pass soon as there is already a 25 per cent shortfall of petrol supplies while diesel supplies are down 50 per cent. “We have been told that oil companies have cut down on purchases with the rising crude oil prices and rationing of fuel is, therefore, bound to come into effect,” he explained.

Ali Daruwalla, who owns a petrol pump in the Camp area agreed, saying that the fuel shortage was a reality and oil companies are helpless in sorting out the issue as there is a directive from the Central government to cut down sales by 10-20 per cent compared to last year. “Last year, our pump sold 500 kilolitres. This year our sales are up 20 per cent but the oil company has requested us not to uplift more than what we sold last year. To overcome this shortage, we have started closing at 10 pm as against at midnight, when we used to close shop till only a week ago,” Daruwalla said. He added that this situation will continue for a couple of months.

The fuel shortage is all too real for Sagar Khare, a student who had a harrowing time today as he saw that two petrol pumps in Pimpri had put up “no stock” boards. “I had to push my vehicle for almost 4 km to get petrol,” he said.

The situation was no different in the Camp area as Seema Yadav, a government officer, has been only too aware. “I’ve been filling petrol worth Rs 200 a go for the last one month as pumps keep putting up “no stock” boards regularly these days. Till a month back, I used to fill petrol worth only Rs 100,” she said.

Normally, the district needs 300 tankers of diesel and 150 tankers of petrol a day; currently there is shortage of both. “We are getting only 150 tankers of diesel and around 125 tankers of petrol. What’s worrying is that even this supply is decreasing. Yesterday, there was a 15 per cent shortage and today it has dipped to 25 per cent,” he said.

"Fall in tiny animals a 'disaster'"

Global warming is considered to be a factor.

From the BBC

Experts on invertebrates have expressed "profound shock" over a government report showing a decline in zooplankton of more than 70% since the 1960s.

The tiny animals are an important food for fish, mammals and crustaceans.

Figures contained in the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) document, Marine Programme Plan, suggested a fall in abundance.

Charity Buglife said it could be a "biodiversity disaster of enormous proportions".

They said it could have implications for creatures all the way up the food chain, from sand eels to the seabirds, such as puffin, which feed on the fish.

"Zooplankton is the basis of many food chains in the marine environment"
Craig Macadam

Defra described the Marine Programme Plan as one of the department's high impact programmes, reporting directly to the Defra board and used to guide policy.

Buglife director Matt Shardlow has written to Rodney Anderson, director of marine and fisheries at Defra, praising the level of information in the document but also expressing the organisation's serious concerns.

In his letter, seen by the BBC Scotland news website, Mr Shardlow said: "The disappearance of butterflies, moth, bees, riverflies and other small animals is an environmental tragedy.

"But, despite this experience, we were profoundly shocked to read that zooplankton abundance has declined by about 73% since 1960 and about 50% since 1990.

"This is a biodiversity disaster of enormous proportions."

A graph shown in the report charts a steady decline in zooplankton from 1990 to 2006.

Buglife Scottish officer, Craig Macadam, said climate change could be a factor.

He said: "Zooplankton is the basis of many food chains in the marine environment.

"Without them it is going to cause problems further up the chain."

Gardens and Moths

I was outside by the wildflower garden this evening around 9:30 - it was almost dark - but light enough to see pretty well without lights. The moon, the half that was visible, was out.

So I hear all of this buzzing and it looked sort of like hummingbirds at the daylilies nearby - but it wasn't. It was some kind of hawk moth with a striped body. There seemed to be several. Later there was another kind of smaller darker moth at the same kind of lily.

I looked it up online and it sounds like they like to lay their eggs on cherry trees. There are several of those trees nearby. I'll have to look when it's light out.

"Overfishing worse than thought"

I think the conclusions here are suspect. The idea that whatever fishing is going unreported is attributable to people fishing for their families. I don't buy that subsistence and recreational fishing is equal to commercial fishing - which is how I am interpreting the articles....

From Nature:

Global fisheries statistics generally paint a grim picture of ocean health, revealing rampant overfishing and declining fish catches in various regions. But a new study suggests that, in the tropics at least, the statistics have been telling only half the depressing story — if that.

Subsistence fishing in the tropics has a much greater impact than previously thought.Punchstock
The work, presented Tuesday at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, suggests that for fifteen of twenty tropical island nations and territories examined, subsistence and recreational fishing has gone almost completely unreported over the past half-century. Such fishing actually collects a volume of reef fish at least as great as official statistics show, and in most cases much more.

"The whole picture of fisheries that we have is basically wrong," says lead author Daniel Pauly, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. "The underreporting is of such magnitude that it boggles the mind." The results, say Pauly and his colleagues, have major implications not only for how fisheries are managed in these areas, but also for how long local subsistence fishers can continue to support their families.

Another article: Hawaiian Islands' reef fish declining, study finds

Sharks, jacks, parrot fish and other colorful reef fish are quickly disappearing from coral reefs encircling the Hawaiian Islands, federal scientists reported Tuesday.

The scientists blamed overfishing for the steep decline, which affects three-quarters of the species once commonly found on coral reefs, delighting snorkeling tourists and feeding subsistence fishermen in Hawaii's coastal communities.

Many of these fish, ecologists say, are key to maintaining healthy coral reefs because they keep reefs clean by grazing on algae that can quickly overgrow the stony corals and cause them to collapse.

Alan Friedlander, a federal fisheries ecologist, said that Hawaii still had relatively healthy reefs. "So everything hasn't collapsed yet," he said. "But we need to protect healthy reefs, because it's so much easier and safer to conserve now than it is to try to rebuild later."

The results of the study were released at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Nearly 3,000 scientists, managers and conservationists have congregated there to pore over the latest science and wrestle with ways to protect the world's coral reefs, which are in a state of steep decline.

Many prominent scientists think that overfishing represents one of the greatest challenges to maintaining and restoring healthy coral reefs.

Daniel Pauly, director of the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Centre, pointed out Tuesday that international authorities and local governments on Pacific island nations had little understanding of how many fish were being removed from coral reefs by small-scale subsistence fishermen.

For the most part, catch data compiled by American Samoa and other such island nations do not include all the small-boat fishermen who paddle or motor out to catch fish for themselves and their families. Comparing census data of per-person fish consumption and other sources, Pauly and his team of researchers discovered that in some cases the unreported catches were 17 times higher than reported catches. On average, they were at least twice as high.