The Daily Bucket is a regular feature of the Backyard Science group. It is a place to note any observations you have made of the world around you. Rain, sun, wind...insects, birds, flowers...meteorites, rocks...seasonal changes...all are worthy additions to the bucket. Please let us know what is going on around you in a comment. Include, as close as is comfortable for you, where you are located. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the patterns that are quietly unwinding around us.
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This is the second edition of The Daily Bucket’s bimonthly nature news roundup. I have a particular interest in aquatic ecosystems and environmental integrity, so I have picked a few articles with that focus. For more information, click on the link in any of the short summaries.
First up, you may have heard about the exciting baby boom of orcas in the Southern Resident
population over the past year: 9 new calves! But amidst our joy here, there appears to be a problem: a sex ratio imbalance. One baby is a known female, 4 are known males, and the others are as yet undetermined. Since females lead the families of these highly intelligent and social creatures, a decreasing number of females will affect the population beyond just fewer mothers of future orcas. The concern scientists have is that the industrial toxin load in the Salish Sea is creating a male bias due to their hormone-disruptor effect. Even though some pollutants like PCBs and DDT are banned now they remain in environment and bioacculmulate in top predators like orcas. The sheer numbers of babies looks promising but the dearth of females spells a new crisis in this dangerously small population.
Growing rice in California’s central Valley strikes many of us as crazy, in an increasingly dry climate. But there they are: rice fields. Could some use be made of them to benefit nature? An experiment was conducted on the Yolo Bypass to see if the off season fields could be used as a nursery for Chinook salmon, a “surrogate wetland” for the natural floodplains that used to fill the valley before agriculture took over. Those salmon grew faster than any other Chinooks in the CV. The young salmon eat bugs which proliferate in an algae-rich floodplain. Birds also benefit. While rice fields persist, this might be a way to use them to help endangered salmon populations.
Fertilizer pollution has many deleterious consequences we already know about. Here’s a new one. The dynamics of animals and algae in mutualistic relationships change in the presence of nitrate pollution. EDIT: That’s a bad link. Use this one instead:www.news.ucsb.edu/... Here’s what happens: excess nitrates benefit the algal partner in the relationship which then provides less sugar to the animal or fungus partner it lives within since it’s not receiving as much nitrate from them. A kind of quantitative quid pro quo goes awry. Experimentally measured, it was found that animal or fungal partners show decreased growth in the presence of excess environmental nitrates. 300 experiments showed this effect, from coral reefs to tropical rainforests to savannahs to agricultural fields.
Plankton poop might reduce plastic waste in the ocean! Tiny plastic particles in the ocean are harmful to animals who inadvertently eat them, which causes reduced feeding, energy reserves and activity. The tiny plastics come from exfoliating products and the fragmentation of plastic litter like bottles and bags. Plastic has been found in the “intestinal tracts in a quarter of fish and a third of shellfish sold at markets in the U.S. and Indonesia.” Scientists have discovered a way plastic might be moved from the surface, where it is eaten by animals, down to the ocean bottom. Experiments were performed feeding copepods fecal pellets of smaller plankton, a common food for this abundant shrimp-like microscopic creature. The small plankton eat plastic and ordinarily their feces float, available to surface animals, but if these plastic-filled feces are eaten and excreted by copepods, those larger poops sink, taking the plastic with them, out of the reach of fish, turtles and birds, among other marine creatures.
Web data mining can be used as a citizen science effort to bust the illegal spread of invasive species. Specifically, in one case, a Japanese undergrad at Tokyo Univ of Marine Science and Technology saw bluegills and goldfish — nonnative and illegal — in a public swimming pond that was being cleaned. The pond was isolated from natural waters so fish could only come from someone have releasing them into it. He tweeted his observation, which was picked up by researchers. Use your smart phone: take photos of suspicious activity, and tweet that information. Let’s use our ubiquitous technology shine a light on illegal activity.
And back to California, where mud is good but there’s less and less of it in the Bay Area marshes where birds feed and rest. A smaller volume of sediment has been washing into SF bay since the 1950s, with dams, levees and stormwater channels diverting sediment-rich runoff before it reaches the bay. Between the loss of sediment and rising sea level, marshes are losing mud — valuable habitat for marshland bay birds. Wetland restoration efforts are underway but the question is can they keep up? One current proposal is to use mud dredged for shipping lanes to build up marshland, rather than dumping it at sea as it is now.
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The Daily Bucket is now open for your nature observations. Tell us what you’re seeing in your own natural neighborhood. Feel free to share any nature news articles you’ve come across, aquatic or otherwise :)
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