Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
The much miligned potato is entering the fast track on it’s way to genetic modefication. Being nearly perfect as it is the lowly potato could turn out to be the linch pin in the chain of food security.
The U.N. has named 2008 the year of the Potato. The lowely tuber is being looked upon as the ’silver bullet’ to fire into the heart of the rising food crisis.
Peru, where the Potato finds its origins, is sending thousands of seeds this year to the Doomsday Vault for storage. There are said to be nearly 5,000 different types of potatoes.
The potato grows almost anywhere, in almost any kind of condition and at nearly any altitude, it matures in as little as 50 days.
Of course blight on the potato was responsible for the great famine in Ireland and still causes about 20% of the world’s potato crop loss. But, never fear; the Potato is on the fast track for genetic modification!
Actually, fast track to genetic modification isn’t exactly correct. According to GM Free Cymru, Monsanto has been working on GM potatoes for a number of years.
The German company BASF was denied approval for Amflora cultivation in the EU. The genetically modified Amflora Potato was being developed for industrial applications for use in paper products and some types of glue by using the potato’s amylopectin starch. The EU Commission has delayed approval for planting Amflora in 2008.
The starch from the BASF Amflora potatoes could also be used in the textiles and even concrete. The residue of the crop was to be mix into animal feed as well. Monsanto and BASF have been working together on other GM projects.
Another player in the GM potato game is Syngenta. The South African government has allowed Michigan State University to experiment with GM Potatoes in an open environment for the past seven years. Syngenta owns the patent on the BT gene that causes the potatoes to be resistant to the tuber moth. What isn’t known is what damage this gene has on benificial insects that come into contact with the GM potatoes grown in the open. Also the risk of cross pollenation with natural crops is huge when the experimental crops are grown in open environments.
Ireland knows a little something about Potatoes. At this link you can find a lot of good information on the dangers of GM potatoes.
Photo Thanks: gm-free ireland.org The slide in the photo is rat colon tissue. The one on the left has been fed GM potato, and the one on the right has not.
Labels: BASF, GM foods, Monsanto, United Nations, Year of the Potato, gentically modified
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Hot Potatoes. Genetically Modified, Mashed or Boiled. Will Potatoes Save a Starving Planet?
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
A company called Aqua Bounty is developing advanced-hybrid fish. ‘Average’-Hybrids just aren’t good enough anymore. The new ‘avanced-hybrids’ come in the form of salmon, trout, and talapia broodstocks.
These fish are “engineered to grow faster than traditional broodstock. The Patented fish, called AquAdvantage ™, were developed to reach market size twice as fast and convert their feed into body mass 10-30 times more efficiently than normal fish.
Aqua Bounty thinks their new ’super fish’ will decrease fish waste and use their food more efficiently. Less time in the tank automatically means less waste in the water. The faster the fish grows to market size the fewer meals it needs to eat. With luck they will also grow faster than those pesky diseases known to affect aquaculture’s farmed, pen grown fish.
These fish can be grown efficiently inland which will also mitigate the need for more expensive “consequential ocean pens.” The fish are also neutered so there is no threat of interbreeding with native populations. I wonder if each little fish gets a vasectomy or a tubal ligation. That sounds pretty labor intensive. Maybe these fish are ‘engineered’ to be sexless. Maybe engineering creates a ‘happy accident’ of non-gendered fish.
At any rate, finding faster ways to provide food for an ever expanding population will turn out to be part of our salvation or part of our destruction.
Maintaining the status quo won’t solve the increasing problem of how to feed the world’s increasing population. It isn’t clear yet what increased and unintended problems we will be creating. Only time will tell and time is running out on a hungry world.
Labels: Aqua Bounty, Salmon, aquaculture, genetically altered fish, gentically modified, trout
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Touting the Virtues of Trout. Super fish may become the new Super Hero.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Would you eat a salmon that grows 10 to 30 times faster than a normal one? How about a nice piece of fried chicken that was grown from cells in a lab?
PETA is offering $1 million dollars to anyone that is able to produce an in vitro chicken meat product and sell it to the public by June 30, 2012.
Is it any wonder the Mayan calendar stops in December of 2012? Maybe the Mayan had a vision of what was to come and decided it just wasn’t worth going on to 2013.
In the PETA competition, the challenge is not only to grow the meat, but it must taste good and sell for a competitive price when compared to real chicken. If you’re interested in tossing your skillet and your gene splicers into the ring, you’ll need to also obtain the fried “chicken” recipe from the vegcooking.com website.
Your in vitro stem cell chicken meat will have to taste great bathed in this batter and submitted to the judges! No doubt, using the same ‘fry’ recipe is meant to put everyone on an even playing field. Most of us however don’t have the first clue as to how to splice a gene or harvest a stem cell from a chicken; average Joe need not apply.
In vitromeat uses animal stem cells placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. According to the PETA website, some promising steps have been made toward this technology.
Whether or not the public will eat meat grown in a dish from a few cells, would perhaps depend on how hungry they become. It may also depend on whether or not they would ultimately know the origins of the meat.
Art Thanks: Lauren Barnes
Labels: PETA, genetically altered fish, gentically modified, in vitro meat, meat stem cells, million dollar meat
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Would you eat a steak grown in a petri dish?
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Rainforests cover only 2% of the Earth’s surface, or 6% of its land mass, yet they house over half the plant and animal species on earth. They originally covered at least twice that area.
By some estimates 137 plant, animal and insect species vanish everyday from the earth. 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients. Less than 1% of the treasure trove of what is available has been tested by scientists. Think of all the possible cures for disease and possible future antibiotics that are being lost daily.
Achim Steiner, executive direct of of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) says,”the world is losing the intellectual patents of nature before we even have the chance to understand or unravel them.” Stiener also believes biodiversity is linked to the phenomenon of climate change.
The loss of biodiversity in our oceans is impairing the ocean’s capacity to provide food, maintain water quality and recover from stresses.
The depths of the oceans also hold untold treasures that are unexamined, making the loss of biodiversity in the seas even more heart wrenching. What has been lost with the extinction of species such as the southern gastric brooding frog, science is able to imagine. Having only been discovered in the 1980’s it has already gone extinct and with it a possible cure for peptic ulcers from which 10’s of thousands of people suffer. We are losing species everyday in our oceans we don’t even know about.
The problem with losing species we don’t even know existed isn’t just the loss of their existence and potential benefits to the environment and mankind, but not knowing what we have lost gives some sort of creepy credence to Donald Rumsfeld’s statement:
“…there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Photo thanks: Science News. New fish discovered off Ambon Island, Indonesia.
Labels: Biodiversity, Donald Rumsfeld, Environment, Extinct Frogs, Ocean, Ocean Habitat, UNEP
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
The loss of biodiversity and Donald Rumsfeld; the connection is creepy!
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
A TV show from the 50’s used to pick one lucky woman per show to be “Queen for a Day”. It’s been called THE schlockiest game show of the era. It seemed like the entire world would tune in to see which lucky woman would win the ‘royal treatment’. The catch was each contestant had to tell their personal ‘hard luck story’. She would have to bare it all, in her own words in front of the ‘world’.
One at a time, four women would tell everyone her tragic story. The more tragic the story, the more burdened she was the better her chance of becoming ‘Queen for a Day”. The an applause meter was used to measure the enthusiastic applause of the audience. The most wretched of the contestants would be adorned with a crown, a dozen long stem roses, a flowing velvet robe and a night on the town, maybe even a new appliance or two. At the end of the show the host would say, “Make every woman a queen, for every single day!”
On this Earth day, the 38th we have seen, everyone from Oprah to QVC is dropping clues as to how we can applaud our Earth and make her green for a day. Retailers are using Earth Day as another ploy to sell more ‘earth friendly’ products. Local news shows are interviewing people that are avid recyclers. There is a lot of “earthy-ness” swirling around on this 38th Earth Day. At least half seems to be bound tightly with the idea that we still need to consume. Keep buying, but buy more earth friendly products.
I had my hair cut today and the owner of the salon actually gave me his ‘green tip’. He said I could use the hair that was cut off to plant in my garden. “It’s really good for it.” I planted my earth friendly vegetable garden yesterday sans the hair, but thanks anyway.
38 years after the first Earth Day, no one could dispute our Earth is in wretched condition. Is the condition of the planet worse than it was 38 years ago? Hers is a sad story. She’s just trying to hold up under the pressure…fast approaching the end of her rope.
I guess it never hurts to give a girl a break, even if it’s only for a day. Like the guy said, make every single day Earth Day.
Labels: Earth Day, Green for a Day., Queen for a Day
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Earth Day. Queen for a Day! Green for a Day. Just another Hallmark Holiday.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Some U.S. consumers may be buying up extra bags of staples figuring the prices will only be going up in the near future. Others are buying up staples in a survival mode.
The so-called survivalists who have previously been viewed as the lunatic fringe are now being seen through what might be called a more pragmatic lens.
The NY Times ran a piece in it’s Fashion and Style section on April 6Th on the ‘new survivalists’. Is the implication it is now ‘fashionable, or stylish’ to stockpile supplies for a crisis?
CNN also ran an articlelast Sunday about ’survivalists’. A ‘former U.S. army intelligence officer’ featured in the piece has a 3 year supply of food stashed on his property; a ranch in an ‘undisclosed location.’
For whatever reason people are suddenly waking up to the fact that life as we know it is teetering on the brink of…not being what we will recognize…deciding to become more self-reliant can’t be a bad thing, or can it?
Of course we should all be responsible for our own survival during times of disaster. Anyone that has grown up in earthquake or tornado country knows there is always a possibility we could be left to our own devices for a number of days or even weeks following either.
Is the new trend toward survivalism going to lead to a nation of stingy, jaded-eye hoarders? Will people start to secretly hide sacks of rice under their beds and potatoes under their floor boards? Will they be looking at their neighbors wondering who among them they will have to fight with to protect the rice under their beds?
Will people become isolationists in their own neighborhoods and buildings in an effort to keep friends and neighbors in the dark about their stockpiles of food? Too few of us don’t know our neighbors now. Won’t the ‘every man for himself’ mentality pit us all against each other even further?
It looks to me like we are in the first stages of a total breakdown of civility. Is this the divide and conquer tactic, and if so by whom are we being divided?
Stories like this one are sprouting up all over. Costco employees snatching bags of rice from customers buggies who try to buy more than the limit. Keep in mind the limit varies. Apparently Costco is looking at ‘prior purchasing history’. At a Costco in Queens there was no limit on rice, but there was a limit on oil and flour.
Each one of these articles I’ve linked to above, reference the same ‘former U.S. army intelligence officer’. No small deal. Maybe he’s gone into the P.R. business in his spare time.
In researching this entry I found about 668,000 matches for survivalism.
Like the Boy Scouts say, “Be prepared”. But, I have to wonder if I’m prepared to defend what’s in my cupboard.
Labels: Costco, Food Crisis, Food Riots, Food Shortage, Hoarding, Rice, Survivalist, survivalism
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Food Shortages and Buying Limits Reach the U.S. Now that Mother Hubbard’s cupboard is full, will she have to shoot her dog to protect it?
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Biofuels are becoming the next Bogeyman. Is an explosion of fear over food shortages creating a new enemy or is it the Oil Industry?
The best quote I’ve seen in defense of biofuels comes from Brazil’s President Lula. “Don’t tell me, for the love of God, that food is expensive because of biodiesel. Food is expensive because the world wasn’t prepared to see millions of Chinese, Indians, Africans, Brazilians and Latin Americans eat,” say Lula.
Biofuels are being billed as the diversion of food resources. Jean Ziegler at the U.N. calls biofuels a “crime against humanity,” Oil-rich Venezuela warns that biofuels could increase malnutrition in Latin America.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel says, the rise in food prices is due to “inadequate agricultural policies in developing countries”. Merkel says “insufficient forecasts of changes in nutritional habits” in emerging markets are also part of the problem.
Imagine having debate over the ’second meal’. I guess that’s what Merkel feels is a change in nutritional habits. It must be shocking to think people might consider two meals a day. Merkel says of India, “People are eating twice a day, and if a third of one billion people in India do that, it adds up to 300 million people.” Indeed.
Imagine 100 million Chinese suddenly start drinking milk. I would imagine if the world starts eating like the Americans they will start dropping from heart disease and obesity like the Americans too. Perhaps those figures should be added into the mix of long range food forecasts.
Germany is the largest biofuels producer in Europe. Second is France whose biofuels program is said to use up only 7% of French fields.
The World Bank reports, increased bio-fuel production has contributed to the rise in food prices. World Bank President Bob Zoelick called biofuels a “significant contributor” to soaring food prices around the world.
On Tuesday a law went into affect in Britain that requires 2.5 % of all gasoline and diesel sold be derived from biofuels.
What’s the upshot? For now it seems we can’t move to cleaner forms of energy and feed the planet.
How is it possible this global food crisis has seemingly blind-sided the globe?
Labels: Bio Fuels, Climate Change, Food Shortage, Global Warming, Merkel, Survivalist, World Bank
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Will Biofuels Die of Starvation?
Friday, April 18, 2008
On April 9, we published a little entry about bigger families becoming the new status symbol. We mentioned that Ted Turner thinks global warming could lead to cannibalism. Could it be the famous ‘mouth of the south’ got it right?
Market analysts started to verbalize that the cost of food would be taking a sharp
rise as the price per barrel of oil kept hitting record highs. Stories about an eminent lack of food looming on the horizon weren’t being dealt with, not with any sense of urgency at least. No, there was no time for that, not with the U.S. election coverage, designed to send the nation into a collective coma playing non-stop.
Then Ted Turner came out with his comments on too many people too little food and how someday we would all be dead from starvation and those left would be eating each other.
A day or two later the news did mention the Haitians were actually rioting over the price of food. Those riots did result in lowering the price of rice. Then, like a pot that finally boiled over, the stories began to spill out over the Internet. The crisis is still only trickling out over cable news. But, the news about LiLo, the Britster, Obama and Clinton is still abundant. Abundant Hollywood and Washington D.C. news, unlike the world wide lack of food.
Port-Au-Prince, Cairo, the sub-Saharan, and Malaysia. Governments in some Asian countries have too limits on how much rice can be purchased in an effort to limit the hoarding of food by panicked shoppers. Even Thailand which exports millions
of tons more rice than it consumes has taken steps to limit the amount of rice shoppers can buy.
El Salvador’s President Saca calls the impending crisis a scandalous storm that might become a hurricane. “How long can we withstand the situation? We have to feed our people, and commodities are becoming scarce.” Saca also said, “This is a perfect storm,” while attending the World Economic Forum on Latin America earlier this week.
On April 11, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)warned that food riots in developing countries will spread unless something was done about the price of food for the poor. FAO director General Jacques Diouf said at a news conference “The reality is that people are dying already in the riots.”
There are reportedly food riots taking place in 22 nations already. Food riots had already broken out in Indonesia, the Philippines and Haiti plus several African countries. North Korea may be on the brink. Will global warming clean out a cupboard near you?
Labels: Food Crisis, Food Riots, Food Shortage, Global Warming, Ted Turner, U.N. FAO
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Where Has All The Food Gone? Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard; maybe it’s there.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Sport fishermen have always tossed back the little fish they caught. In theory the young ones are released back into the water so they can fully mature. But, little fish make more little fish.
“It’s not the young ones that should be thrown back, but the larger older fish that should be spared.” says George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD. “Not only do the older fish provide stability…to the population, they provide more and better quality offspring.”
In a four-year study that was released back in 2002 that was headed by David O. Conover at the Marine Sciences Research Center at State University of New York at Stony Brook, harvesting the largest of a population leaves only the smaller fishbehind to breed which practically ensures more small fish in the long run.
Science magazine published Conover and a graduate student’s findings in July 2002. When the smallest fish in a group were removed the remainder became individually larger. (4.5 grams) When the largest in a group were removed the mean weight of individuals left was decreased. (2.5grams) In a third group where random sized fish were removed the remaining fish stayed similar to the size they started out at which was about 3.5 grams.
A member of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission said when striped bass were protected up to 36 inches, the fish of that size were depleted until the minimum limit was lowered to 28 inches.
Taking only the larger older population of fish creates an age-imbalanced population. A lack of older fish induces early maturation in the younger fish.
Young fish left behind, thought to be too small to bring to market, are also more vulnerable to suffering from changes in their environment.
The absence of only the larger fish being harvested must have a ripple effect on the whole ecosystem.
It’s a tangled web we weave. There is one bit of conventional wisdom that remains constant…It’s not wise to fool with Mother Nature…
Labels: Environment, Fish, Ocean, Size limit, ecosystems
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Size Does Matter! Conventional Wisdom Proves Wrong when it comes to fish. Size limits have backfired!
Monday, April 14, 2008
Scientists using the Navy’s SOSUS, SOund SUrveillance System, hydrophones have been continuously listening to underwater sounds since 1991. That’s when the Navy program designed for Anti-Submarine Warfare was declassified. Since the early 1950’s, acoustic sensors installed across the ocean bottom at key locations have been doing sentry duty.
Since the end of the cold war and the advent of quieter submarines, designed to evade the pointed ears of the SOSUS, the hydrophones have been listening in on the underwater sounds such as volcanic eruptions, landslides, marine mammal and fish vocalizations, even weather. This swarm of latest earthquakes is another thing scientists are able to hear using this technology.
Click on this link to listen to earthquake sounds recorded by the SOSUS hydrophones. At this link you will also be able to hear the undersea sounds of volcanoes, both large and small ships, several types of Whales and explosives.
In the nearly 2 decades they have been listening scientists haven’t heard anything quite like what they are hearing recently. The 5.9 earthquake that may have kick off this latest swarm could be the one that happened on March 15Th. This quake, like the latest swarm happening over the past 10 days was also relatively shallow happening about 6 miles down.
Photo Thanks noaa.gov spectrogram of earthquake
Labels: NOAA, Oregon Earthquake, SOSUS, undersea sounds
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Swarms of Earthquakes Off Oregon Coast. More than 600 quakes in 10 days. What’s going on?
