Biosphere

May 1, 2008
Call to stop use of grain-based biofuels
Food scientists say such a move would cut prices of corn and other grains
WASHINGTON - BILLIONS of dollars have been poured into developing ethanol and biodiesel to help wean rich economies from their addiction to carbon-belching fossil fuels, the overwhelming source of man-made global warming.
But now some top international food scientists have recommended a halt in the use of food-based biofuels like corn-based ethanol because they say such a move would cut corn prices by 20 per cent during a world food crisis.
A ‘biofuels frenzy’ and other misguided policies have led to the global food crisis in which prices have soared and rice consumption has outpaced production, threatening a billion people with malnutrition, experts said on Tuesday.
International agriculture researchers warned that farmers will need to double global food production by 2030 to meet rising demand.
They said nations need to rethink programmes that divert foods like corn and soya beans to ‘greener’ fuel, given the expanding worldwide food crisis. Such programmes force prices higher and remove farmland from food production.
If leading nations stopped biofuel use this year, it would lead to a price decline in corn by about 20 per cent and wheat by about 10 per cent from 2009-10, said Mr Joachim von Braun of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a global network that uses science to fight hunger.
Mr von Braun, who heads the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, the policy arm of the CGIAR, and two other scientists in the group said that work should be stepped up on the use of non-grain crops, such as switchgrass, for biofuel.
Soil sciences professor Rattan Lal of Ohio State University, who is not associated with the group, agreed with their call for a halt on the use of grain for fuel, saying: ‘We have one billion people who are food-insecure. We can’t afford the luxury of not taking care of them and taking care of gasoline.’
Mr von Braun said the US and other countries have to make a hard choice between fighting high fuel prices and fighting world hunger.
‘If you place a high value on food security for poor people, then the conclusion is clear that we step on the brake awhile,’ he said.
‘If you place a high value on national energy security, other considerations come into play.’
On Tuesday, US President George W. Bush declared that the United States should increase ethanol use because of national energy security and high gasoline prices.
A World Bank study has estimated that corn prices ‘rose by over 60 per cent from 2005-2007, largely because of the US ethanol programme’ along with market forces.
Other nations, such as South Africa, have stopped or slowed the push to ethanol. But as the US is the biggest producer, if it does nothing, other nations’ efforts will not amount to much, said Mr von Braun.
He said that many issues are causing the food crisis, especially market forces and speculation, but that biofuel use is a top cause.
But just how big biofuel’s effect is on food prices depends on who is talking.
A soon-to-be-released International Food Policy Research Institute analysis blames 30 per cent of the overall food price rise from 2000-2007 on biofuels.
An industry-funded study put the food cost rise from biofuels at 4 per cent.
WASHINGTON POST, ASSOCIATED PRESS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE


This might be a milestone in macroevolutionary studies. How does a tetrapod lose its lungs?

Sad thing is that frog faces severe threat of habitat degradation.

For more reads -

The Enigmatic Bornean Lungless Frog – Barbourula kalimantanensis (Anura: Bombinatoridae) - A First Hand Encounter - By Dr Tan Heok Hui

First Lungless Frog Found - By National Geographic

Siva’s writeup

Bringing Cancer to the Dinner Table: Breast Cancer Cells Grow Under Influence of Fish Flesh
Tests of river fish indicate their flesh carries enough estrogen-mimicking chemicals to cause breast cancer cells to grow
By David Biello

Many streams, rivers and lakes already bear warning signs that the fish caught within them may contain dangerously high levels of mercury, which can cause brain damage. But, according to a new study, these fish may also be carrying enough chemicals that mimic the female hormone estrogen to cause breast cancer cells to grow. “Fish are really a sentinel, just like canaries in the coal mine 100 years ago,” says Conrad Volz, co-director of exposure assessment at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute’s Center for Environmental Ecology. “We need to pay attention to chemicals that are estrogenic in nature, because they find their way back into the water we all use.”
Volz and colleagues, including biochemist Patricia Eagon, took samples from 21 catfish and six white bass donated by local anglers as part of a study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Los Angeles this week. The fish were caught in five places: a relatively unpolluted site 36 miles upstream from Pittsburgh on the Allegheny River; an industrial site on the Monongahela River; an Allegheny site downstream from several industries that release toxic chemicals; and the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, where Pittsburgh dumps much of its treated sewage and sewer outflows. “This is the largest concentration of combined sewer outflows in the U.S.,” Volz notes, about the confluence, known as the Point. The researchers also bought several fish at the store as controls.

Using an organic solvent, the researchers created an extract from the skin, flesh and fat of the various fish. They then bathed a breast cancer cell line—known as MCF-7—in the extract. “We used this cell line because it has estrogen receptors in it, meaning that if estrogens are present it causes this cell line to proliferate,” Volz explains. “If you put something on it and it grows, then it must be stimulating the estrogen receptor.” In addition to responding to pure estrogen applied as a positive control, the extract from two of the white bass and five of the catfish caused the breast cancer cells to thrive.

The highest response came from fish caught in the industrial section of the Monongahela River. “The Monongahela River area is the area in Pittsburgh that was the site of most of the steel production over the last 100 years,” Volz says. “That area is still an industrial beehive.” But the broadest response came from where the sewer outflows and sewage treatment plants flow into the rivers from Pittsburgh; three of the four catfish caught here caused the breast cancer cells to proliferate. “Sewage might be more responsible for putting estrogenic chemicals in the water than the industries alone,” Volz adds. “All of the hormone replacement products that women use go down the drain, along with birth control pills, antibacterial soaps, and many of the plastics we use, like Bisphenol A, have such effects.”

It remains unclear exactly what estrogen-mimicking chemicals were actually present in the fish and what kind of cancer-causing role they might have. But their effects on the fish themselves were clear: the gender of nine of the fish could not be determined. “Increased estrogenic active substances in the water are changing males so that they are indistinguishable from females,” Volz says. “There are eggs in male gonads as well as males are secreting a yolk sac protein. Males aren’t supposed to be making egg stuff.”

And this estrogen burden is widespread. The store-bought white bass caused breast cancer cells to grow like its river-caught counterparts (as well as containing higher levels of mercury, arsenic and other contaminants) after being trucked to Pittsburgh from Lake Erie. “These fish, again, were in waters that were seeing industrial waste as well as possible combined sewer outflows,” Volz notes. “This isn’t just happening in Pittsburgh, this is happening everywhere in the industrialized world.”

Volz says he and his fellow researchers are launching a broader survey this summer that will entail sampling fish all along the Allegheny River. Efforts will be made to determine if it is industrial waste, sewage or agricultural runoff—or all three—that is responsible for the problem. In the meantime, cooking the fat out of fish may be the best defense. “If you broil fish and let the fats drip out that will take most of the contaminants out,” Volz says, though that may not be enough given other exposures to potentially tainted water. “What our study does show us is that there is exposure potential to vast populations that use water from our rivers as their drinking water supply.”

Pulled this off an older post. Still relevant nonetheless.

If the prediction of biodiversity loss, environmental damage is not enough a wakeup call. Perhaps dollars and cents will do.

Another article from thisismoney.co.uk - ‘Economy faces climate ‘calamity‘

Here are some figures from the article -

CLIMATE CHANGE BY NUMBERS

£3.68 trillion - the total cost of tackling climate change per year unless drastic action is taken, according to the Stern report.
1% - how much of global gross domestic product (GDP) must be spent if climate change is to be tackled now.
200 million - the number of people who could become refugees after their homes are hit by drought or flood.
40 - the percentage of species that could become extinct due to climate change.
0.5% - the temperature increase across Africa in the past 100 years.
20% - Britain’s current target for reducing carbon emissions.
30% - the EU’s target for reducing carbon emissions by 2020 under proposals by Gordon Brown.
£10.6bn - the total amount the Stern report recommends should be spent on global research into carbon emissions.
1 in 6 - the number of people in the world whose drinking-water supply could be affected by climate change.

Sharkwater

For filmmaker Rob Stewart, exploring sharks began as an underwater adventure. What it turned into was a dangerous journey into the balance of life on earth. Driven by passion fed from a lifelong fascination with sharks, Stewart debunks historical stereotypes of sharks as bloodthirsty, man-eating monsters and reveals the reality of sharks as pillars in the evolution of the seas. Filmed in visually stunning, high definition video, Sharkwater takes you into the most shark rich waters of the world, exposing the exploitation and corruption surrounding the world’s shark populations in the marine reserves of Cocos Island, Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. In an effort to protect sharks, Stewart teams up with renegade conservationist Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Their unbelievable adventure begins with a battle between the Sea Shepherd boat and shark poachers in Guatemala, resulting in pirate boat rammings, gunboat chases, mafia espionage, corrupt court systems and attempted murder charges, forcing them to flee for their lives. Through it all, Stewart discovers these magnificent creatures have gone from predator to prey. Each year 100 million sharks are caught to meet the demand for shark fin soup in Asia. Despite surviving the earth’s history of mass extinctions, sharks could easily be wiped out within a few years due to human greed. Destruction of shark populations is a major problem for oceanic ecosystems, and all life on earth, as 70% of our oxygen comes from life in the seas. Stewart’s journey of courage and determination changes from a mission to save the world’s sharks into a fight for his life, and that of humankind.

Interesting story in ecology by Scientific American

Of Ants, Elephants and Acacias: A Tale of Ironic Interdependence
Without large grazing herbivores to eat them, acacia trees suffer because of a shift in the ant populations they house
By David Biello

Acacia trees are the iconic shrub of the East African savanna. Their thorny thickets house a host of creatures and provide sustenance to the local charismatic megafauna, from elephants to zebras. In light of this continual foraging, the plants have struck a mutually beneficial bargain with several species of ants. The insect armies swarm intrusive browsers in exchange for housing and food. But according to new research in Science, it appears that without such browsing—a state of affairs the acacia might be thought to long for—the trees suffer.

Zoologist Todd Palmer and his colleagues examined the interdependence of one such acacia species—the whistling thorn tree, Acacia drepanolobium—the ants it hosts and the herbivores that eat it. He compared six such trees in Kenya that have been surrounded by an electrified fence since 1995 (by entomologist Truman Young of the University of California, Davis) with six trees open to local giraffes, elephants and other acacia-eaters.

In the absence of herbivores, the whistling acacia stopped producing little ant houses in hollow thorns—known as domatia—and excreting the sweet nectar that its bodyguard ants eat. But instead of spurring more growth, the acacias found themselves more than twice as likely to be providing a home to another type of ant—Crematogaster sjostedti—which do not defend the trees and rely on invasions of the bark-boring cerambycid beetle larvae to build the holes in which they dwell. “The cavity-nesting antagonistic ants actually promote the activities of the stem-boring beetle,” says biologist Robert Pringle of Stanford University.

This, in turn, stunts the trees’ growth and causes them to die twice as often than when they are being regularly eaten by giraffes, elephants and other large African herbivores. “The trees are actually making a shortsighted decision by defaulting on their end of the mutualism bargain,” Pringle says. “If they sustained production of ant rewards in the absence of large mammals, they would reduce their probability of being taken over by this somewhat nasty antagonistic ant.”

This counterintuitive result may apply only to the whistling thorn acacia, one of the only species of that genus in Africa that relies on ants as bodyguards rather than thorns and / or chemical defenses. After all, in the wake of disappearing large mammals across Africa, these other types of acacia have proliferated, says ecologist Jacob Goheen of the University of British Columbia.

But it does provide an example of how the disappearance or extinction of elephants, giraffes, zebras and other large herbivores in a region can have unexpected and unintended consequences—much like the boom in leaf-eating beetles and the lizards that prey on them shown in earlier work—whereas the decline of such mammals continues nearly continent-wide through the loss of habitat and overhunting.

“Large herbivores are tremendously important players in these systems,” Pringle says. “Not just because of the direct effects they have upon plants, but also because of the myriad effects they exert on smaller, less conspicuous components of biodiversity.” For want of an elephant, a protective ant species diminished and left the whistling thorn acacia in dire straits.

A comparative guide to mangroves by Dr Jean Yong, NIE.
Comparative Guide to Mangroves

Fragmentation and species loss -
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/99/1/263

http://scitizen.com/screens/blogPage/viewBlog/sw_viewBlog.php?idTheme=22&idContribution=265

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/100/24/14069.pdf

Planktos - phytoplankton as carbon sinks.

Greenlink - Carbon offset while searching

Global rush to energy crops threatens to bring food shortages and increase poverty, says UN - on biofuel issues

Carbon emission calculator - Posted by Guardian Unlimited

Interesting photo album from TIME.

What the world eats