First Lake Sierra Nevadas wallpaper
US food waste worth more than offshore drilling
Recent estimates suggest that 16 per cent of the energy consumed in the US is used to produce food. Yet at least 25 per cent of food is wasted each year. Michael Webber and Amanda Cuellar at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin calculate that this is the equivalent of about 2150 trillion kilojoules lost each year.
I wonder what percentage of the food we eat and waste is processed food, always seemingly loaded with corn syrup, is wasted. That we eat so much food out of a box – dried or processed and frozen is amazing. The figures above do not include the 8 and 23 per cent of fish caught in the world’s fisheries – killed – than thrown back in the ocean as unusable by-catch. That by-catch includes marine mammals like dolphin.
Some trees ‘farm’ bacteria to help supply nutrients
Some trees growing in nutrient-poor forest soil may get what they need by cultivating specific root microbes to create compounds they require. These microbes are exceptionally efficient at turning inorganic minerals into nutrients that the trees can use. Researchers from France report their findings in the July 2010 issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
…Certain microbes are efficient at breaking down inorganic minerals into nutrients. This process, called mineral weathering, is especially important in acidic forest soils where tree growth can be limited by access to these nutrients. Mineral-weathering bacteria can release necessary nutrients such as iron from soil minerals. This gives trees with increased concentrations of mineral-weathering microbes an advantage over other trees.
I found out very quickly in my tree planting that acid loving pines and spruces are exactly that. I could give them the water and compost to get them off to a good start, but they didn’t fare too well if I let the soil around them become too alkaline.
Scientists Find Evidence That Oil And Dispersant Mix Is Making Its Way Into The Foodchain
Scientists have found signs of an oil-and-dispersant mix under the shells of tiny blue crab larvae in the Gulf of Mexico, the first clear indication that the unprecedented use of dispersants in the BP oil spill has broken up the oil into toxic droplets so tiny that they can easily enter the foodchain.
Marine biologists started finding orange blobs under the translucent shells of crab larvae in May, and have continued to find them “in almost all” of the larvae they collect, all the way from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to Pensacola, Fla. — more than 300 miles of coastline — said Harriet Perry, a biologist with the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.
And now, a team of researchers from Tulane University using infrared spectrometry to determine the chemical makeup of the blobs has detected the signature for Corexit, the dispersant BP used so widely in the Deepwater Horizon..
We’re not seeing the giant oil slicks from a few weeks ago, but there is still floating around in large plumes. Crab larvae are not cute and many may find it difficult to work up any concern about them, but these zooplankton are in the food chain of larger ecologically and commercially important fish and shrimp.
tangledwing 