The very helpful Bob Hole points me at this article from World Zoo Today. The research is talks about is actually the same work I blogged about a while back, but it is good to see it getting more coverage.
Environment
Penguins Speak Out on Global Warming
Someone here has been having way too much fun. Classic SFnal reference too. (Warning – the penguins say naughty words.)
Hat tip to Deep Sea News.
Italian Sea Snails Go Macho
Most of the stories we see in the news about “sex change chemicals” in the environment focus on male animals turning into females, with the blame often being placed on the use of contraceptives by human women. But all sorts of things can happen in the weird and wonderful world of biology. Here is a story to redress the balance.
Murex is a genus of carnivorous sea snails with impressively spiny shells. Different species are found in many places in the world, but the Mediterranean varieties are particularly famous for being the source of Tyrian Purple, the expensive dye that was beloved of Roman emperors and other potentates of ancient times. While the snails are no longer harvested to make dye, they are still eaten by people around the Mediterranean. Sicily was noted for its fisheries, until now.
According to a study by Italy’s Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA in Italian), populations of Murex around the Sicilian coast face extinction because all of the female snails have turned into males. The culprit is apparently a chemical called TBT which used to be used in anti-fouling paints. It was banned in 2001, but has yet to be totally phased out. A report in an Italian newspaper explains:
The exact mechanism behind the transexual molluscs is still being studied. A handful of Italian researchers are at the cutting edge. One of them, Antonio Terlizzi of Lecce University, explained that TBT boosts the production of testosterone in the female murexes, making them sterile and eventually turning them into males.
”It’s a little bit like all those women shot-putters with moustaches you used to see a few years ago,” he said.
Um, quite. So eating Sicilian sea snails might not be a good idea right now.
Weather FYI
Apparently the weather has been totally whacko in Brazil as well. Just sayin’.
All About the Numbers
Here’s a lovely post by Oliver Morton on how people are unclear on the concept when it comes to carbon emission reduction. Sadly, because this does involve politicians and journalists having a basic understanding of science and math, I suspect we are going to see a lot more of this.
Politics and Pollution
I’ve written before about the effect of complex chemical pollutants on the environment, in particular the “feminization” of animals such as fish and amphibians. There is little doubt that significant changes are being seen in many animal populations, and there is no credible explanation other than chemical pollution. However, the exact mechanism is unclear, as is the level of danger to more complex animals such as humans.
Up until now the favorite explanation for this effect has been estrogen. We know that there is a lot more of it going into the water than there used to be, and it is a popular villain chemical in a number of ways. For male journalists, estrogen is a physical embodiment of girl cooties. It allows them to write about how our environment is being polluted by “girl stuff” that is “turning our sons into sissys”. Puritans of various stripes have put the blame on vain women. If people didn’t use hormone replacement therapy, the argument goes, we wouldn’t have this problem. And the Catholic church has leaped at the chance to identify contraceptive pills as a major pollutant.
What does the science say? As usual, it is complicated. But a new study by some UK scientists suggests another potential cause. Estrogen isn’t the only hormone pollutant around, and the new study looked at what are called “anti-androgens” – that is chemicals that block the effects of testosterone. These chemicals are used in the treatment of prostate cancer, and also in fertilizer. They have also been shown in lab work to be important in producing the sorts of feminizing effects seen in nature.
The new study is statistical. That is, it doesn’t demonstrate actual causality, it simply shows that there is a strong correlation between high levels of anti-androgen pollution and high numbers of feminized fish. Nor does it exonerate estrogen – there could well be some complex effect requiring more than one chemical going on here. But the correlation between estrogen pollution alone and feminized fish is a lot lower.
As ever, there is more work to be done. But if there is a lesson here it is that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions simply because they happen to fit our particular prejudices.
I can’t find the original paper online, but you can read the abstract here.
It’s a Global Economy
Remember all those people celebrating the “death of capitalism” and saying how the world would be a much better place because of the economic troubles? Well, one of the effects of those troubles has been a massive collapse in the prices paid for recycled materials. As a result the recycling industry in the USA is being pretty much wiped out. This, I suggest, is probably not a good thing.
Risks of Geoengineering
It appears that terraforming is now known as geoengineering. Whether this is because you can only terraform worlds that are not actually dear old Terra, or whether someone decided that they needed a word that was not tainted by association with science fiction, or indeed whether whoever coined geoengineering had never heard of terraforming, I do not know. However:
- Oliver Morton on why it is likely to become more politically acceptable
- Gary Jones with some cogent commentary
- Oli responds
Planet Earth
After many evening of happy viewing I have finally come to the end of the BBC’s Planet Earth series (thank you, Kevin!). I’ve seen a fair amount of nature programming in my time, and I have to admit that this series really does have some awesomely spectacular photography. Scenes like the surfing dolphins, the chimp war, the great white shark and snow leopard hunting, the vampire squid and so on will stay with me for a long time. If you have an interest in the natural world, the series is definitely worth buying.
If I have a complaint at all it is that the series is still very much bogged down in the traditional male naturalist view of what a nature program should be about: sex and death. Animals do exhibit a wide range of different behaviors, but put a man behind a camera with some animals and what he’ll want to film is them either fucking or killing each other. With mammals in particular an essential part of behavior is raising their young, but this is much less often shown, and even when we do get shots of mother leopards and bears the narrative is all about how she catches food for the cubs, not how she trains them to hunt, which she surely must do.
Still, given the quality of the shots, and the efforts that the camera crews went through to get them (the “diary” sections at the end of each program are very revealing), I can hardly complain.
What is more, some of the best stuff was added at the end. The final DVD contains three 1-hour programs that are illustrated with shots from the series, but are primarily talking head debates about the current state of the conservation debate. I have to admit that the BBC did a superb job in finding the most oily and unconvincing people to put the Rethuglican case (not that this really mattered – their position was fatally caricatured long ago by Shea and Wilson in the form of the guy in Illuminatus! whose ambition was to be the person who killed the last ever bald eagle in America). On the other hand, some of the environmentalists, particularly James Lovelock, are equally scary. In the end what matters is that we save the planet, not that someone with a rigorous and narrow ethical standpoint forces everyone to do what he says.
Because Climate is Complex
There’s an interesting article over at Nature on the effect of aircraft contrails on climate. As you may remember, the lack of air travel in the days immediately following 9/11 coincided with a significant rise in average temperatures in the US. This led one group of scientists to speculate that perhaps contrails had a significant effect. No one should have concluded that this proved anything either way, because coincidence does not prove causality, and to be fair to the scientists involved they never said that it did. The media, however, latched onto the story with its customary enthusiasm and lack of rigor.
The right thing to do is, of course, to investigate possible mechanisms, and so another group of scientists has looked at the effect of clouds on climate to try to see if the type of clouds created by aircraft have significant effects. Their conclusion, as Nature reports, is that they don’t.
Note that this does not prove that air travel has no effect on climate. It simply casts doubt on one possible mechanism. But I can see where this will go. Sections of the environmental movement are already convinced that contrails are “Destroying the Planet!!!” and will assume that any evidence to the contrary is simply lies paid for by the airline industry. Meanwhile the PR flacks in that industry will be preparing material explaining how the effect of aircraft on climate has been “proven to be false”. And the people who will suffer most will be the scientists trying to make sense of all this.
Live From the AGU
Oliver Morton and some of his colleagues from Nature are blogging from the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. There’s lot of good climate science and space material there.
An Endangered Gender
Today’s Independent contains a classic science scare story. It alleges that, because of certain types of chemicals that have been commonly used in recent times, the male gender is under threat, throughout the animal kingdom. Some of this is doubtless traditional journalistic scaremongering, but some of the studies on animals are quite startling, for example:
Research at the University of Florida earlier this year found that 40 per cent of the male cane toads – a species so indestructible that it has become a plague in Australia – had become hermaphrodites in a heavily farmed part of the state, with another 20 per cent undergoing lesser feminisation.
Fish are apparently the worst affected types of animals, but the effects have been noted all through the animal kingdom, including in otters, deer, antelope and polar bears. The report on which the story is based concludes:
Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence. All vertebrates have similar sex hormone receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore, observations in one species may serve to highlight pollution issues of concern for other vertebrates, including humans.
Hard line feminists will doubtless continue to suggest that there is no biological component whatsoever to gender identity, and I’m not qualified to pronounce one way or another. However, here is an article by a qualified doctor who also happens to be a male-to-female transsexual and who was exposed to one of these “gender bending” chemicals in the womb.
I should note, by the way, that exposure to chemical pollutants is by no means the only possible cause of gender confusion. However, if it happens then it provides firm proof that biological mechanisms can be a contributory factor. And if that is the case then it is further reason to give short shift to those who prefer to believe that all gender variance is a form of sexual perversion.
Katrina & The Waves
OK, so I’m sure I haven’t been the first person to use that pun about New Orleans, but it seemed appropriate given the subject matter of this post.
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We Have Turtles!
In amongst all of the doom and gloom, here’s an environmental feel-good story: leatherback turtles are visiting California again. Apparently they have been attracted by larger than usual swarms of jellyfish, which are a favorite delicacy:
Hungry as they are, leatherbacks don’t eat the jellyfish’s transparent globular bells – it’s the viciously stinging tentacles they love, and Benson and his colleagues found themselves “covered with stinging jellyfish slime” whenever they hauled any of the turtles aboard, he said.
I’m all in favor of other creatures that want to help in the fight against tentacles beings from beyond the stars. Especially if they happen to find the slimy bits tasty.
The Planet is Leaking
With all of the fuss about financial markets I completely missed this potentially more serious story. I just caught up with it via Nature, and they don’t seem too worried right now, but it has a small potential to be very, very bad indeed.
Become an Emissions Trader
It seems to be a good day for news that fits both my work and my blog. This time the subject is carbon emissions trading.
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Green Trains
Here is a birthday post for Kevin: Nature on the greening of the railways.
The Recycling Business
One of the things that always depresses me about coming back to the UK is the ridiculous level of bureaucracy surrounding recycling. I know it is different in different parts of the country, but here in Darkest Somerset there are all sorts of complex rules about what you can and cannot recycle, what has to be separated from what, and so on. According to my mother if you get any of this wrong the council will simply refuse to collect your recycling. And they are now talking about fining people for not recycling properly.
Back in California all of our recycling goes into a single bin (together with that of our neighbors, so there’s no possibility of fining individual households). It ll gets collected. But that’s nothing compared to what goes on in San Francisco. According to the Chronicle, not only is everything collected, but there is a thriving business in theft of recycled materials. The stuff is now so valuable that there are organized gangs who go around at night stealing it before the council can pick it up. Here’s why:
Prices for aluminum run more than $3,700 per ton, glass $210, plastic $180 and cardboard $130, according to Sunset Scavenger, a division of giant Norcal Waste Systems Inc.
Prices for metal in particular are only going to go up. So why is recycling still such a problem here? (I have some ideas, but I’m interested in hearing yours.)
Another Weather Record
Scarcely a summer goes by without the UK media reporting some weather event as the most extreme “since records began”. It gets a bit predictable. This one, however, is a good one. A climate scientist from the University of Colorado is suggesting that, for the first time in recorded history, the North Pole could be free of ice this summer. Ah, Martin Frobisher, if only you were alive today.
Smileys Can Save the Planet
Being an energy economist by trade, I take an interest in ideas that might help encourage people to use less energy, and thereby do their bit to combat climate change. Sometimes the simplest things work best, as this post on The Economist’s blog explains. Sometimes all it takes is one of these 🙂 (or one of these 🙁 ).