Beth, soon the snow will begin melting, new growth and plants blooming, the clothline with wonderours new finds, and the babies outdoors romping in the sunshine again.
Yep, four shamrocks!
Lovely St Patty's Day image, ul!
sue, will check out the links this afternoon.
Dan, and all wildclickers, have a good day!
http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674
Slainte a's beannachtam na Femle Padraig!
(I just had to show off. That's "Cheers on St. Patrick's Day" in Irish Gaelic.)
oops, couldn' watch the video - dial way to slow.
OMG! A Merry Andrew siting!
I guess this falls under the category of "No ****!".
Man-Made Chemicals May Put Strain on Fish
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 18, 2008; B01
The Potomac River contains an array of man-made chemicals that could play havoc with animals' hormone systems, federal scientists have found in their best glimpse yet of the river's problems with a mysterious new class of pollutant.
The research, unveiled at a conference last week, found more than 10 of the compounds, including pesticides, herbicides and artificial fragrances. Through an accident of chemistry, formulas designed to kill bugs or add smell to soap might also interfere with vital signals in fish, amphibians and other creatures.
The scientists said they hoped this new research might explain one of the Potomac's most bizarre discoveries: Some male fish have begun growing eggs. Scientists said there was no evidence of a threat to human health.
Taken with a recent report that drinking water samples from the river contain traces of drugs, the results provide troubling evidence about the river's health. People living along the Potomac, the results showed, have widely tainted it with pollutants that scientists are just beginning to understand.
"The types of things we're finding are the types of things that are associated with everyday life," said David Alvarez, a U.S. Geological Survey research chemist who analyzed samples from the Potomac. The contaminants flow into the river from sewer plants and in rainwater washing off of farm fields and suburban lawns, he said.
"If it's something we're using, ultimately it's going to end up in the water," Alvarez said.
The chemicals in the study presented at the conference, held in Berkeley Springs, W.Va., are suspected by scientists to be "endocrine disruptors." This group of contaminants interferes with natural hormone systems, twisting or aborting the processes that hormones control. The conference was sponsored by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
Much about the compounds is still unclear, including which of them really do have bad effects.
In 1996, the Environmental Protection Agency was ordered by Congress to create a testing program to identify endocrine disruptors, but the tests have not begun.
Along the Potomac, researchers have long suspected that hormone-mimicking chemicals were the cause of the "intersex" fish. The first of these creatures, male fish with eggs growing in their sex organs, were noticed in a rural West Virginia tributary in 2003.
Follow-up studies have found the fish throughout the
watershed, including near the Woodrow Wilson Bridge.
To investigate, scientists from the Geological Survey, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources began taking samples of water in 2005 and 2006.
In the river near the District's Blue Plains sewage plant, scientists suspended a device intended to serve as a facsimile fish. The device had a plastic-coated tube, which simulated a fish's permeable skin, and a layer of simulated fat.
"We're trying to see what the fish sees," Alvarez said.
They saw a lot. The tests on this fake fat revealed a range of potentially worrisome pollutants. Most have been found in other streams around the United States, scientists said, adding that the pollutants are of special concern in the Washington area because of the intersex fish.
The discoveries included trace amounts of atrazine, a herbicide commonly used on farm fields. The EPA has put the herbicide on a list of chemicals to be tested for hormone-mimicking effects. Some scientific studies have already linked atrazine to sexual abnormalities in frogs and fish.
"There's a weight of evidence that something's going on here," said Nancy Golden, a wildlife toxicologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service, who said she was summarizing a common view, not her own conclusion.
A company that makes atrazine, the agribusiness Syngenta in Basel, Switzerland, has insisted that the chemical presents no undue risks if used properly.
Also found in the Potomac were the insecticides chlorpyrifos and endosulfan and the herbicide metolachlor. All three are on the EPA's list of chemicals to be tested for hormone-mimicking effects. Researchers said the chemicals, as well as atrazine, might have washed off suburban lawns in the Washington area or farm fields farther upstream.
Other chemicals were apparently added, unknowingly, by urban residents in the course of daily life. These included two chemicals used to add fragrance to perfumes, soaps and other products: tonalide, and galaxolide. The chemicals, when washed down drains, can pass through sewage treatment systems and into rivers.
Geological Survey researcher Vicki S. Blazer said that some evidence suggested all of the chemicals could interfere with hormones.
The research study did not look for traces of pharmaceuticals, but a separate round of federal testing has found traces of six pharmaceuticals in local drinking water taken from the Potomac.
Researchers said this new set of results marked a big step toward finding the reason for the Potomac's gender-confused fish, though it did not solve the case.
"We're beginning to narrow down some of the . . . possible chemical causes," Blazer said. "Now we have a better idea of what's there."
The repercussions for human health are also unclear. At the Washington Aqueduct, the agency that turns river water into tap water for the District, Arlington County, Falls Church and parts of Fairfax County, the treatment process is not designed to remove the chemicals.
The agency's general manager, Thomas P. Jacobus, said tests on "finished" water showed trace levels of both atrazine and metolachlor last year. He said, however, that the levels of the chemicals were so low they did not seem to pose a danger.
Ed Merrifield, executive director of the environmental group Potomac Riverkeepers, said he still wants more information about the impact of the pollutants.
"None of these chemicals should be in our water," he said.
March 17, 2008
Chinook Salmon Vanish Without a Trace
By FELICITY BARRINGER
SACRAMENTO ?- Where did they go?
The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations ?- and coming up dry.
Whatever the cause, there was widespread agreement among those attending a five-day meeting of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council here last week that the regional $150 million fishery, which usually opens for the four-month season on May 1, is almost certain to remain closed this year from northern Oregon to the Mexican border. A final decision on salmon fishing in the area is expected next month.
As a result, Chinook, or king salmon, the most prized species of Pacific wild salmon, will be hard to come by until the Alaskan season opens in July. Even then, wild Chinook are likely to be very expensive in markets and restaurants nationwide.
"It's unprecedented that this fishery is in this kind of shape," said Donald McIsaac, executive director of the council, which is organized under the auspices of the Commerce Department.
Fishermen think the Sacramento River was mismanaged in 2005, when this year's fish first migrated downriver. Perhaps, they say, federal and state water managers drained too much water or drained at the wrong time to serve the state's powerful agricultural interests and cities in arid Southern California. The fishermen think the fish were left susceptible to disease, or to predators, or to being sucked into diversion pumps and left to die in irrigation canals.
But federal and state fishery managers and biologists point to the highly unusual ocean conditions in 2005, which may have left the fingerling salmon with little or none of the rich nourishment provided by the normal upwelling currents near the shore.
The life cycle of these fall run Chinook salmon takes them from their birth and early weeks in cold river waters through a downstream migration that deposits them in the San Francisco Bay when they are a few inches long, and then as their bodies adapt to saltwater through a migration out into the ocean, where they live until they return to spawn, usually three years later.
One species of Sacramento salmon, the winter run Chinook, is protected under the Endangered Species Act. But their meager numbers have held steady and appear to be unaffected by whatever ails the fall Chinook.
So what happened? As Dave Bitts, a fisherman based in Eureka in Northern California, sees it, the variables are simple. "To survive, there are two things a salmon needs," he said. "To eat. And not to be eaten."
Fragmentary evidence about salmon mortality in the Sacramento River in recent years, as well as more robust but still inconclusive data about ocean conditions in 2005, indicates that the fall Chinook smolts, or baby fish, of 2005 may have lost out on both counts. But biologists, fishermen and fishery managers all emphasize that no one yet knows anything for sure.
Bill Petersen, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's research center in Newport, Ore., said other stocks of anadromous Pacific fish ?- those that migrate from freshwater to saltwater and back ?- had been anemic this year, leading him to suspect ocean changes.
After studying changes in the once-predictable pattern of the Northern Pacific climate, Mr. Petersen found that in 2005 the currents that rise from the deeper ocean, bringing with them nutrients like phytoplankton and krill, were out of sync. "Upwelling usually starts in April and goes until September," he said. "In 2005, it didn't start until July."
Mr. Petersen's hypothesis about the salmon is that "the fish that went to sea in 2005 died a few weeks after getting to the ocean" because there was nothing to eat. A couple of years earlier, when the oceans were in a cold-weather cycle, the opposite happened ?- the upwelling was very rich. The smolts of that year were later part of the largest run of fall Chinook ever recorded.
But, Mr. Petersen added, many factors may have contributed to the loss of this season's fish.
Bruce MacFarlane, another NOAA researcher who is based in Santa Cruz, has started a three-year experiment tagging young salmon ?- though not from the fall Chinook run ?- to determine how many of those released from the large Coleman hatchery, 335 miles from the Sacramento River's mouth, make it to the Golden Gate Bridge. According to the first year's data, only 4 of 200 reached the bridge.
Mr. MacFarlane said it was possible that a diversion dam on the upper part of the river, around Redding and Red Bluff, created calm and deep waters that are "a haven for predators," particularly the pike minnow.
Farther downstream, he said, young salmon may fall prey to striped bass. There are also tens of thousands of pipes, large and small, attached to pumping stations that divert water.
Jeff McCracken, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which is among the major managers of water in the Sacramento River delta, said that in the last 18 years, significant precautions have been taken to keep fish from being taken out of the river through the pipes.
"We've got 90 percent of those diversions now screened," Mr. McCracken said. He added that two upstream dams had been removed and that the removal of others was planned. At the diversion dam in Red Bluff, he said, "we've opened the gates eight months a year to allow unimpeded fish passage."
Bureau of Reclamation records show that annual diversions of water in 2005 were about 8 percent above the 12-year average, while diversions in June, the month the young Chinook smolts would have headed downriver, were roughly on par with what they had been in the mid-1990s.
Peter Dygert, a NOAA representative on the fisheries council, said, "My opinion is that we won't have a definitive answer that clearly indicates this or that is the cause of the decline."
good god...{sigh}
pesticides could cause, may be the reason, not conclusive...
who are those people???
Where have the Chinook Salmon gone??? Katmandu
http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674
And now his and his cronies' negligence, failure of oversight and common sense, and stupid, stupid "let the market rule" philosophies have significantly contributed to the morgage and financial markets melt-down.
If the Dems screw up this year's opportunity, then I guess we truly deserve the government, and country, we get.
You and your 300 friends have supported 2,873,904.2 square feet!
Hey, during the 60's a lot of USA'ers went to CANADA !!!!!!!!
We could all invade ehBeth !!
I'll wait until the snow melts.
Not a speck of snow here - temps in the 70's to 80's.
ehBeth, you are not out of the invasion window of possibilities yet.....
Maybe a bit later, I say, quite so.
Just another mid week day in a row.
Spring officially starts tomorrow - it started weeks ago here. What to expect in the future? Spring Light Savings programs. We'll push Spring up a month or so.
All clicked.
