science by paddy

11.23.2011

Ice Fingers of Death!

Y'know those times when you're doing something simple, like washing your dog, staring at waves or snorkeling on the Maine coast, and you suddenly find yourself captivated and slightly bewildered by the impossibly intricate nature of fluid dynamics?

Maybe it's just me.

Fluids--that is, liquids and gases--are amazing things, with movements so ridiculously complex that some scientists spend their whole lives trying to figure them out, while the rest of us take them completely for granted. The fluid nature of water, air, gasoline, or even crowds of people, not only allows us to use things like pipes and boats and airplanes, but it also allows us to do little things, like breathe. Or exist.

But, much as I am eager to dive into the world of fluid dynamics and the way that gasses and liquids move around us and each other, I really just want to explore one concept that I've just learned about: the brinicle.

Now, Sir David Attenborough (as always) gives an informative and poetic basic description of what's going on here, but after watching this clip, I wanted to know more. What exactly is going on here?

So let's start with the basics. We all know that water freezes, and that fresh water, at 1 atmosphere of pressure, freezes at 32˚F/0˚C/273.15 K. Seawater, however, has a slightly lower freezing temperature, due to the inclusion of salt, which interferes with the ability of water molecules to crystallize together (there's a good explanation and doohickey to explain how that works here). With a greater concentration of salt molecules in the water, the freezing point drops, so saltier water can get below 0˚ without freezing. Because the saltier water has all those salt ions dissolved in it, it becomes denser as well, so salty water sinks below less-salty water.

Water also happens to be one of the only things that is denser as a liquid than it is as a solid. That means that solid water will float on the surface of liquid water, because of the shape of the lattice that frozen water molecules form. That lattice doesn't allow for things like pesky salt ions to get in the way, so ice, even from seawater, is fresher than the water it came from. (And since ice forms on the top of water and not on the bottom, animals like frogs and turtles can hang out in the mud at the bottom of a pond all winter without becoming frogcubes and turtlecicles.)

Taking that into the real world, when it gets cold enough for ice to start forming in the ocean, all the water molecules start connecting up and pushing out the salt ions. Those salt ions collect in liquid water at the surface, creating pools of increasingly salty water that sit on top of the ice. Eventually that super-salty water, or brine, finds its way down through the ice in little tunnels called brine channels. If conditions are right, those channels will all end up in the same spot, creating a plume of sinking brine similar to a column of rising smoke. Since it's also heavier than the seawater under the ice, when it gets to the bottom of the sheet of ice, it keeps sinking.

But here's the neat thing: since that brine has been traveling through an ice sheet, it's just as cold as the ice, but the salt has kept it from freezing. So when it runs into the water below, that relatively fresher water freezes, creating a tube of crystals around the outflowing brine. As you see in the video, this tube grows and grows as the brine travels out of it, kind of like a stream of water building its own hose: a briny icicle, or brinicle.

If the ice is forming at the right rate, the water isn't moving around too much under the ice, and the sheet is in shallow enough water, you can get a brinicle that extends all the way to the seafloor. when it hits the bottom, it does the same thing that any other dense fluid would do: roll downhill. Even if a full brinicle didn't form, a pool of brine would collect in a low spot at the seafloor, if only until conditions changed and it dissipated. You can see this downhill travel happening in the video, except in this case, it becomes an icy stream of death!

Brinicle formation a pretty amazing phenomenon, and the conditions required to form one as big as this one are pretty unique. How fortunate that the cameramen from the BBC were able to catch it, but also, you really gotta give them mad props for diving in this climate. Setting up a time-lapse movie can be challenging on land, so imagine having to do it under an ice sheet in (literally) freezing-cold water, hauling heavy equipment a good distance from your diving hole while Weddell seals frequently zip by, knocking down your cameras and the brinicles you're trying to film. Mad props to these guys:

Some day when I have no use for a wife, kids, or dogs, I'm going to be a filmmaker traveling around the world collecting natural history footage for the BBC and hanging out with chipper Scotsmen:

Paddy

For more info, check out these resources:
The BBC's article about filming brinicles
Wikipedia's info on brinicles
Modeling brinicle formation in a lab
How salt affects the formation of ice
How zombie frogs survive winter

11.22.2011

The most advanced creatures on (and off) Earth

There is such a thing as a beneficial meandering about the internets, and today is no exception. It started out simply enough, with my brother sending me a link to a BoingBoing video of an octopus traveling across land:

While I've certainly heard about this happening, I'd never seen it before, and immediately it made me wonder about this octopus' decision to pull itself along mantle-first. I'd always expected that one would do the pulling with one's legs, and drag the big mantle behind, but watching this, it makes me think: "Well, that makes sense... when an octopus escapes in the water, it scoots itself along with the mantle in front, so perhaps it takes the same approach when escaping from predators on land." Maybe when they take over the world, they'll figure out that it's easier to go legs-first...

In any event, that led to a link to SciAm's new cephaloblog, The Octopus Chronicles, which sets out to catalog all the wicked cool stuff going on in current research around octopuses. They have a great little bit about the new discovery of camouflage adaptations in mesopelagic octopuses. (I especially liked the idea that these little guys' response to detection, indicated by persistent blue light, was to hide their heads inside their bodies... reminds me of one time when I was trying to avoid getting in trouble by hiding behind a tree while wearing a bright red jacket. Ineffectual, to say the least. But I digress...)

Fortunately, SciAm's page had a link to a new video produced by NASA and the International Space Station. I had heard that a good number of our astronauts were not only super-driven, super-nerdy and super-lucky, but also pretty good photographers. What I didn't know is that some of them are really good photographers, with a penchant for time-lapse videos like this one (fullscreen HD is a must):

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

This immediately made me think "Well of course, if you're doing things like flying around in space operating robotic arms and watching atmospheric events, you must be listening to Ambient or Microhouse"... but that's not true, of course. Several months in a small space station, and you must listen to at least a little bit of Peter Gabriel, especially when you're returning back to terra firma:

Time Lapse From Space - Literally. The Journey Home. from Fragile Oasis on Vimeo.

I've always loved the idea of going to space, and I have dreams of hosting an episode or two of Nerdy Jobs from the International Space Station, but in the mean time, thank goodness our super-driven super-nerdy super-lucky guys and gals are also great ambassadors, working hard to bring that experience back to Earth. Through the use of the internet, with high-quality videos, Twitter feeds (who knew that #fromspace was a literal hashtag?) and even video podcasts (Hehe... "Open the podcast bay doors, HAL"), our scientists in the thermosphere are working hard to connect us groundlings with the things one can learn from floating about the world at around 225 miles up:

Cupola Corner Episode 5 - Ron Garan Conversation With Satoshi Furukawa from Fragile Oasis on Vimeo.

I'm excited to be on this planet. Let's keep it healthy so the octopuses can take it over.

Paddy

10.31.2010

picture this II

A while back I blogged/ran a thought experiment/slightly panicked about the size of the known universe, and I have to say, even after that great video, I still haven't gained a complete mental picture of the size of the universe (I'm working on it, though... I'm at about 85%).

Another tool I can now use, and I'm happy to share with you, is a size comparison of different celestial objects, from moons to planets to stars. It was a bit startling to me to realize that, even though our sun is ridiculously huge compared to our planet, it is absolutely minuscule compared to some of the other things out there.

Prepare to have your mind blown again, hopefully with slightly less panic this time. It's yet another piece of evidence to suggest that astronomers must examine the fascinating cosmos all night, only to come home slightly depressed about the triviality of electric bills and changing the oil on their 15 year-old Corollas.

(Little-known fact: all celestial bodies actually have small labels just below them. This is how astronomers are able to keep track of so many.)

Paddy

10.14.2010

the majestic plastic bag

Just saw an amazing video that I want to share with everyone... this is the kind of documentary I want to make:

8.03.2010

holy cuss awesomeness!

I just found out that squid, those amazing funky-shaped demons that can make themselves invisible have another superpower that makes them infinitely cooler... they can fly!

The other day at a job interview, the old question "if you could be any kind of animal, what would it be?" came up. After thinking for a moment, I said "a duck," because, naturally, they can swim, they can walk and they can fly, and I think that combination is pretty sweet. I may have to call that interviewer back now, because I want to change my answer to "squid."

From SciAm:

With her husband and fellow biologist Michael Robinson, Maciá identified the airborne cephalopod as a Caribbean reef squid (Sepioteuthis sepioidea)—a lithe, torpedo-shaped critter with long, undulating fins. They think the squid was startled by the noise of the boat's outboard engine and estimated that the 20-centimeter-long mollusk reached a height of two meters above the water and flew a total distance of 10 meters—50 times its body length. What's more, the squid extended its fins and flared its tentacles in a radial pattern while airborne, as though guiding its flight.

"It was doing this weird thing with its arms where it had them spread out almost in a circle," recalls Maciá, who teaches at Barry University in Florida. "It had its fins kind of flared out as much as it could—it really looked liked it was flying. It hadn't accidentally flopped out of the water; it was maintaining its posture in a certain way. It was doing something active."

"From our observations it seemed like squid engage in behaviors to prolong their flight," Maciá says. "One of our co-authors saw them actually flapping their fins. Some people have seen them jetting water while in flight. We felt that 'flight' is more appropriate because it implies something active."

The aerodynamic benefit an airborne squid derives from flapping fins and spiraled tentacles is not clear, but some researchers hypothesize that these behaviors provide extra lift and help stabilize the squid when out of its primary element. In the water some squid spread their tentacles into a weblike pattern that facilitates swimming backward—a trick they could try to mimic in the air to gain an extra set of wings, some scientists have proposed. And rapidly changing the position of the tentacles could even function as a kind of brake.

Awesome. This creates a close contest between the squid and the octopus as the coolest animals ever. They both can swim, and octopuses can walk, but flying is key: but for that giant flying octopus that attacked Japan two years ago, it'd be a dealbreaker.

Paddy

5.22.2010

time microscopes

There's a sort of ironic poetry in the popularity of fail pictures and videos--that is, images and clips of people injuring themselves and/or breaking things in dramatic and painful fashion. In our increasingly connected world, where the latest information and innovations are available at the click of a button, we are still viscerally entertained by watching someone crash a bicycle into something hard and unforgiving.

I usually avoid these types of videos because I've injured myself numerous times in a variety of similar ways, and I'm prone to vicarious sympathy pains. If I watch too many handrail-between-the-legs videos, I might not be able to have kids later on.

However, I do appreciate watching a ladybug tumble from takeoff position or a frog miss a dragonfly with dramatic bravado. Perhaps, on a deeper level, it's because the mechanics of flight or predation fascinate me in their beauty and complexity, and seeing it go wrong is a pleasant surprise. More likely, it's because I like to make airplane-crashing sounds as I watch that ladybug ungracefully sputter to the ground.

Thankfully, Andrew Mountcastle and his high-speed camera indulge us with slow-motion nature-fail.

As a grad student at the University of Washington studying the flight mechanisms of invertebrates, Andrew spends a lot of time filming the takeoff and flight of insects around campus. Using a slow-motion camera filming at 500 frames per second, he has captured valuable video that gives us insight into the mechanics of flight, specifically how wing flexibility affects a bug's flight. This also gives him the opportunity to catch some of the ephemeral yet epic-fail-worthy moments in nature that we rarely see.

Equally interesting, however, is something Andrew mentioned in an interview for a recent profile on the UW website that hadn't occurred to me before: "I view (high-speed cameras) as time microscopes. In the same way that microscopes allow you to magnify space, these allow you to magnify time -- to see details of time that we'd never see with the naked eye. It's a great tool."

A time microscope is indeed a great tool. I don't know how many times I've watched a ladybug take off, fly somewhere and land, but I remember it quite clearly as first a bug, then a blur, then a bug again. Watching his high-speed video of the same bug's successful ascent, the blur becomes a series of steps of orderly pre-flight preparation and carefully-orchestrated movements that allow the round little beetle to gracefully lift off and soar (I especially like the Superman-extension of the front legs).

A common misconception is that physicists have determined that, due to the laws of aerodynamics, it is impossible for a bumblebee to fly. This is clearly not the case, as we see them flitting about all the time. Rather than throwing up our hands and saying it must be some higher power carrying them about, however, we can examine the flight of the bee with a time microscope like Andrew's and see what most people can't: when a bumblebee flies, it moves its wings in a figure-eight motion that creates a vortex in the air, lifting them and carrying them about (A more scientific answer here)

If you'd like to check out more fascinating videos from Andrew's time microscope, head on over to http://students.washington.edu/mtcastle/movies.php, where you can see ladybugs, dragonflies, bees--and most importantly, inept frogs--flying slowly through the air. For those of you less bug-minded, I'd also encourage you to check out Time Warp and Things But Very Slowly, which turn the time microscope on everything from a slap in the face to a finger in a table saw (now I know you want to see that).

Patrick

via UW News

5.14.2010

you can do it, put yo' [butt] into it

(http://legalplanet.wordpress.com/2009/05/30/no-butts-about-it/)

I work, play, eat, sometimes sleep, and occasionally poo outdoors, and wherever I go, whether it's on a busy city street or in the most remote of Sierra wilderness, I am guaranteed to see at least a handful of cigarette butts.

I see them sitting on sidewalks, in gutters, on hiking trails, all over parking lots, in the nooks of trees, in National Forest, at dog parks and, once, in a discarded beer can inside a sneaker on an otherwise pristine and remote river beach (thanks for consolidating, buddy). Just yesterday, on a whim, I picked up about 20 from a small pile of debris next to a storm drain at my office. Had I more time, I would have dug out the other 40 or so.

They are the most common piece of litter in the United States and the world, and have annually topped the Ocean Conservancy's list of most frequently collected trash in the International Coastal Cleanup. Last year, ICC volunteers picked up 2,189,252 butts, making up 21% of all of the litter found on the world's shores. One study estimated that around 4.5 trillion cigarette butts per year are discarded somewhere other than a trash can and enter the environment.

Apparently, the common belief among smokers is that their butts are somehow biodegradable, or perhaps that the impact of their waste is minimal. In truth, cigarette butts are to the health of the environment as the rest of the cigarette is to the health of a smoker. The butts hold the cellulose acetate filters of the cigarettes, which supposedly protect the smoker from the toxic and carcinogenic chemicals the cigarettes release when they burn; chemicals like Arsenic, Formaldehyde, Tar, Cadmium, Hydrogen Cyanide, and more than 4000 others. These filters collect this cornucopia of crap from what smoke passes through the butt, and store it up until it's washed out by the next rainstorm, processed in a baby bird's stomach, or absorbed through the gills of a fish. According to a study by (the unfortunately named) Slaughter et al, the chemicals found in one cigarette butt can kill half the fish in a 1-liter tank of water in less than a day.

Clearly, we need to do more work to reduce not only the number of cigarettes people smoke, but also the vast number that they flick into the forest. But rather than sending them all to a landfill to leach and not-degrade, can't we find another use for them?

Apparently, we can, and in an ironically topical way.

A team of crazy chemists at the School of Energy and Power Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University took it upon themselves to soak a bunch of cigarette butts in hydrochloric acid (the same stuff found in your stomach), and apply the resulting solution to some industrial-grade steel, the kind used in underwater pipes. When treated, the steel developed a greater resistance to corrosion--up to 95% greater--than that of steel left untreated.

This means that underwater pipes, such as those broken ones spewing oil from a hole in the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico, can be treated with a solution derived from cigarette butts and stomach acid to increase their strength and decrease the likelihood of catastrophic failure.

In this weird twist of science and engineering, the same butts that pollute our oceans, poison our waters, and kill our fish and wildlife can be used to prevent similarly deadly oil spills like the one going on right now.

So don't smoke, but if you absolutely feel compelled to do so, hold on to that butt when you're done. See if you can make it all the way to a trash can, and perhaps some day we'll have special filter recycling stations to collect the materials to fortify our also-recycled steel.

Paddy

http://www.oceanconservancy.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=14151&news_iv_ctrl=0&abbr=program_
http://www.cigarettelitter.org/index.asp?PageName=Home
http://www.knowledgebase-script.com/demo/article-393.html

2.20.2010

gettin' hyphae with mycelium

What do you think is the largest living thing in the world?

A blue whale? They are indeed the largest animal that has ever lived...can grow up to 108 feet long and 172 metric tons...

A giant sequoia? General Sherman, at 274 ft high and 108 ft in circumference, contains 52,584 cubic feet of wood...

So that's it, right? Plants and animals?

Oh wait, there's bacteria and archaea and fungi, too. Of course bacteria and archaea are microscopically small, but there's no way that there's a mushroom bigger than a giant sequoia, right?

As epic as that would be, the answer is no. However, what you see when mushroom hunting is just the ephemeral fruiting body, the distributor of spores, and far less than the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The bulk of a fungus is actually underground, in a dense network of cells called a mycelium. There are a few really cool things about mycelium: 1)it's made up of cells called hyphae, which are all pretty much identical, 2)strands of these hyphae are only one cell thick, 3)hyphal growth is directed by organelles called "spitzenkörper" (which is just a really cool word) and 4)the cobweb-like structure of mycelium can be so dense that a single cubic inch of soil can contain up to eight miles of hyphae!

Since the majority of a fungus is a spongy mesh of single-celled tubes underground, it can absorb nutrients and water directly from its surroundings, it's pretty well protected, and it doesn't need to hold itself up. These factors should allow it to grow pretty much indefinitely... and it does, in some cases.

Up in the Malheur National Forest of eastern Oregon, there's a giant network of genetically identical mycelium that spans... 8.9 square kilometers. Almost three and a half square miles. Not only that, but it's estimated to be 2400 years old. Dude.

But let's take that density thing and run with it. Eight miles of hyphae in a cubic inch of soil means that there's a lot of criss-crossing fibers, hundreds or maybe thousands of layers thick, forming a redundant, resilient network, like kevlar... or fiberglass insulation...

Hey, what if we could do something with that? What if we grew a bunch of super-dense mycelium into forms that we could use, and then dried it, so that we'd have a really tough custom-shaped material for, say, structural strength, or insulation, or packaging? We could build things out of it, or keep our houses warm, or ship fragile things in it... and since it's made of mushrooms, we could just throw it away or compost it, and it would be completely biodegradable!

Well, lucky for us, such a thing does exist. A bunch of ~~non-scientists~~ engineers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute came up with this idea, and have turned it into a couple products, called Greensulate™ and EcoCradle™.

To make this kind of fungal Styrofoam, they take byproducts of agricultural crops, such as cotton burrs or buckwheat hulls, load them up with fungal spores and fungus food, and let 'em grow. After a few weeks, the hyphae have surrounded and consumed the agricultural byproducts, forming that dense mycelium. As it grows, the mycelium fills out whatever mold it's started in, whether that's in the form of a brick, a large flat panel, or a custom shape that perfectly fits whatever product you need to carefully package.

Once it has grown to the proper size and shape, they cook it to render it "biologically inert," which is a fancy engineer way of saying "dead." Depending on the proportion of ag byproducts and fungal spores they use, they can change the properties of the "fungoam" (I just made that up) to make it harder or softer. Grown in the right proportions, they can actually make this stuff stronger than concrete, but a whole lot lighter. Plus, it's mold- and moisture-resistant, is a better thermal and vibration insulator than Styrofoam, and it's fireproof!

This stuff is super eco-friendly, too. Not only is it made from living things that require no light and only room-temperature heat (requiring one tenth of the energy of synthetic foam), but

"The raw material inputs of EcoCradle™ are selected based on regionally available agricultural by-products. So a factory in Texas or China might use cotton seed hulls, and a factory in Virginia or Spain might use rice husks and soybean hulls. By manufacturing regionally, and using local feedstocks, we aim to minimize the trucking of raw and finished materials." (http://www.ecovativedesign.com)

Since it's made of fungus instead of synthetic materials, after you're done with it, you can just throw it in your compost and return it to the environment whence it came, returning its nutrients to the soil to fuel the next generation of fungus.

According to Ecovative Design, EcoCradle™ is going to be protecting a soon to be shipped unnamed product, and their website shows packaging for some cylindrical device, but presumably, with a large enough mold, they could make anything, like entire buildings! Or Paul Bunyan statues! Or life-size models of General Sherman!

Paddy

Check out:
http://www.ecovativedesign.com/
http://www.ecovativedesign.com/press/publications/download/Popular_Science.pdf

via Time

1.28.2010

the details

I read an article the other day about how people are forming online support groups to cope with the depression that sets in after they watch Avatar and subsequently think they'll never see something so beautiful anywhere other than Pandora.

To you sullen homebodies, I say this: get yourself a microscope, a black light, and some scuba gear, and come with me.

A marine biologist and a designer have started a little company called Morphologic Studios in Miami, Florida, with the mission of bringing to light the beautiful living art that exists right here on Earth, specifically in the form of microscopic coral reef-dwellers. They've just started a blog of videos of these vibrant little creatures, including a number of different invertebrates, from crabs and shrimp to corallimorph polyps and Christmas Tree Worms. For those of you who have seen Avatar multiple times (I'm up to twice so far, including in IMAX 3D), you'll be happy to know that the latter is the inspiration for those giant flowers that disappear when you touch them.

I'm always excited to find kindred spirits who agree that the most beautiful art comes not from a brush, a pencil, or a hammer, but from the oldest tool in the world: evolution.

'The Christmas Tree Worm' from MORPHOLOGIC on Vimeo.

paddy

via boing boing thanks to liam

1.12.2010

picture this

Y'know how Spider-man had that "spider sense," where he could tell when something probably large and no doubt painful was about to smack him from behind? Do you ever get that feeling?

Maybe it's just me. And radioactive spiders, of course.

Anyway, let's try a little experiment:

Take a look around... maybe you're sitting at a desk, maybe you're in bed, maybe you're on a boat or a bus or a plane or on horseback (you'd better not be driving, though... there are laws against reading science blogs while driving cars or operating horses). Memorize your surroundings, looking at the people and the things around you, how big they are, and how far they are away from you. Without sounding too much like a hippie, I want you to close your eyes and try to "feel" the distance between you and your computer screen, between you and the closest light, between you and the nearest exit in the event of an emergency. Maybe you can picture in your head what it would look like from outside your body, to see the distance between you and that thing. Go ahead, try it out, close your eyes. Feel it.

Okay, now, open them.

Um, open them.

[This is a problem. Perhaps I should start video blogging...]

Well, I'm going to assume you're all here, with eyes open again. That was lovely, wasn't it? I could picture in my head the things in my room, almost sensing their presence and proximity to me.

Let's go up in scale a bit, and picture yourself inside your house, or your apartment, your boat, your office building, or your horse paddock. Picture how big (or small) you are relative to those things, how you might look to the bird up on the telephone pole. Now picture how big you'd look if someone could see your entire town, or city, or if they were flying overhead at a few thousand feet. You'd be pretty tiny, right?

Now picture yourself, your big muscles and your fine tall stature that your grandmother is so proud of, relative to the size of the entire known universe.

Can you do it? I can't. I think my head would explode.

Maybe this video will help. It was created by the American Museum of Natural History to demonstrate just how big the universe as we know it really is. Using sophisticated computer technology (probably Mathematica on a Mac), they've created a scale map of everything in the cosmos we know about, starting from the Himalayas (tallest mountains on Earth, in case ya didn't hear) and zooming out to the remnant energy of the Big Bang.

What I find particularly interesting is that they've shown just how far out our first radio waves have broadcast. They should be hearing Al Jolson over at the center of the galaxy in the next 70,000 years or so.

Stuff like this makes me want to cry a little bit, for a number of reasons:
1. The universe is so impossibly large, with so many stars and so many planets, that I can't believe that the evolution of life as we define it is unique to our planet,
2. Even if there are other "civilizations" out there, we'll never meet them, as they wouldn't even pick up our earliest radio waves for another couple billion years, and
3. By that time, the Sun will have swallowed up the Earth.
4. Furthermore, on the scale of the known universe, where it takes light so incredibly long to travel between two points, and our own galaxy is but a mere speck in the sky from anywhere else, it really doesn't matter if your socks match today.
5. And your life comprises such a short time on such an inconsequential ball of dirt (during which light will travel practically nowhere), that your existence will have essentially no impact on the history of the universe, so it really doesn't matter if that really cute and popular girl with the blond hair and braces snubbed your request to go to the middle school dance with you. Get back to work on that FTL drive in your mom's basement.

In sum, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvpcOqSK7YU

paddy

12.05.2009

an inspiration speaks

11.11.2009

coho restoration

Salmon all along the west coast have had a rough time for many years. Since the gold rush, salmon populations have been steadily declining due a combination of historical and current factors, including stream diversion, damming, mining, timber harvesting, agricultural runoff, and overfishing in addition to natural predation, drought, and climate change. Salmon numbers have gotten so low that California and Oregon had to completely shut down the 2008 and 2009 salmon fishing seasons. Coho salmon have had a particularly rough time, to the point that the Central California Evolutionarily Significant Unit is now on the Endangered Species List. In central California, the only remaining viable population is in Lagunitas Creek in western Marin county, and even there, the annual return is but a small fraction of historic runs. A little farther north, in the Russian River watershed that spans Sonoma and Mendocino counties, the return has been so small that restoration efforts have expanded to the artificial stocking of local creeks with juvenile Coho salmon.

The Russian River Coho Salmon Captive Broodstock Program (we'll call it the Coho program) is working to supplement the wild Russian River Coho population in the hope of restoring it to a sustainable size. Since 2001, NOAA, CDFG, and the US Army Corps of Engineers has been breeding Coho salmon at Warms Springs Hatchery just below Lake Sonoma and releasing them as juveniles into local creeks that feed the Russian River. The young fish, released as parr, grow up in the creeks for about a year before they turn into smolts, when they head out into the ocean to get a lot bigger. After 2-3 years in the ocean, some adults return to their natal creeks to spawn and create the new generation of fish.

Lil' baby Coho

I recently started a one-year volunteer position with Conservation Corps North Bay working at University of California Cooperative Extension in Sonoma County. The mission of UCCE is to establish working relationships between UC researchers and farmers, natural resource managers, and the community to apply the resources of a world-class university to real-world problems. UCCE's role in the Coho program is to evaluate the efficacy of the program and apply advances in scientific knowledge to its management.

One of the ways we're evaluating whether the program is working is by monitoring the development of the young parr, how many fish are going out to the ocean, and who's coming back. There are a number of neat ways we're doing this.

Since 2004, the Coho program has been releasing increasing numbers of fish into the watershed, starting with 6,160 in 2004. This year, we'll end up releasing about 81,000 baby Coho into a variety of creeks in the watershed, with about 29,000 going into Mill Creek, west of Healdsburg (If that sounds like a lot, consider that historic statewide Coho populations used to number in the hundreds of thousands, and each spawning female produces hundreds of eggs). All of these fish have coded wires implanted in their noses. When they return as adults, spawn and die, we can retrieve the wire, read the code, and figure out where they were put in. But what if we want to find out who's going where while they're still alive and swimming around?

Stocking a creek with a backpack full of fish

For that, we insert little tags called Passively Integrated Transponders, which are just like the microchips we put in dogs and cats and old people. When the juvenile fish swim downstream or the adults swim back up and the tags pass through the sensory field of an antenna, they broadcast an individually identifiable number, which the antenna records along with date and time. Of the 81,000 fish we're letting go, 4,000 of them have these PIT tags, acting as a representative sample of the overall population. When we learn about a PIT-tagged fish leaving or returning, we can make assumptions about the rest of the overall population.

So what do our antennae look like? We use two main kinds: hand-held ones that look and act like metal detectors, and large stationary ones that span the creeks and detect any fish swimming through them.

A stationary antenna

We also monitor for fish by walking the creeks looking for juveniles, adults, and redds (fish nests), snorkeling in the frigid water, and by trapping them on their ways in or out.

As a research assistant, I get to do all sorts of cool things, and my job pretty much requires me to walk around in waders all day, every day. Some days I'm measuring stream flows and changing batteries on the antennae, other days I'm working on setting up traps or scanning for fish, and other days, as I have been for the past week and a half, I don backpacks full of fish and help release them into the creeks. As the year progresses and the rains fill the creeks, I'll be doing a lot more walking spawner surveys, snorkeling, and measuring the fish.

At work

This year I'll be working on a video of my experiences with the Coho program, but in the mean time, you can check out this great video by KQED's Quest on the restoration program:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

I get to work with Ben White at the hatchery, and there are also some special cameos by my friends Andrew and Julie measuring and PIT-tagging at 8:47, and Louise, who helped start the monitoring project, at 9:18. At 9:38 you can see our trap on lower Mill Creek.

(Incidentally, the scenic waterfall you see at 9:48/9:58 is actually a privately-owned man-made concrete waterfall that creates a major barrier to upstream migration, preventing many salmon from returning to the streams whence they came. It's pretty though, isn't it?)

In good news, University of Washington researchers have said that this year should be a good one for Coho salmon, based on a strong coastal upwelling, cold water, and plenty of yummy copepods. Fingers crossed that we get a good return!

Paddy

5.30.2009

bird class

On May 30th, our Field Methods in Conservation Biology class went out to UC Davis' Russell Ranch to learn about catching, measuring, and banding birds. The majority of this film is the two Ash-throated Flycatchers stuck in our mist net... they make a rather annoying high-pitched squeak, so you my want your headphones on if you have neighbors. =)

No animals were physically harmed on this trip, though they will have some stories for their grandchicks. The Tree Swallow at the end was banded as a chick several years ago.

Tagging and Bagging from Patrick Hilton on Vimeo.

Side note: My first HD video on my new camera and computer. =)

For more pictures of this trip, see a series of young birds in compromising positions.

Paddy.

4.07.2009

we are sequential 'ermaphrodites!

I was worried for a while that my posts were getting too crude, too full of inuendo, too.... graphic. Thanks to Isabella Rossellini, I don't feel so bad about using sex to educate.

Rossellini has produced a new series on the Sundance Channel, entitled "Green Porn."
Using marvelous costumes and props and her own special weird Sweditalianess, she explores the many ways that animals mate, from the lowly earthworm to the great whale. It is at once informative, entertaining, and slightly disturbing. I heartily encourage you to check it out.

http://www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno/

Paddy

2.24.2009

i, too, want skylights... in my head

thanks to zooillogix

2.12.2009

vavelta is people!

For years, an epic battle has raged between old people with too much money and the incessant plague of wrinkles in their skin. Not satisfied to appear older than 30, these puckered spendthrifts have employed various tactics to flatten their faces, including everything from lasers to silicone fillers to deadly neurotoxins. One solution, Botox, is short for botulinum toxin, a protein produced by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum, the spores of which produce a paralyzing compound that is lethal in doses of 1 nanogram/kg.

Wary of sticking the deadliest natural substance known to man into the saggy skin around your eyes? Have no fear, science comes to the rescue! Vavelta is a new wrinkle-relief technology on the market in the UK. Vavelta is a solution containing millions of little fibroblasts, cells found in human connective tissue that create collagen, elastin, and hyaluronic acid, three proteins that promote strong, elastic, and moist skin. But whence do these fibroblasts come?

Well, let's see. Fibroblasts occur naturally all over the human body, but as people age, the quality and abundance of their tissues decline, and the loss of cells means that their skin loses its elasticity, giving them wrinkles. In that case, we'd want to find a source of human skin that is relatively young and healthy, full of fibroblasts, but that nobody would miss...

I know! How about the discarded foreskins of circumcised boys?!

Yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen, the latest victim of the ongoing wrinkle war is the leftover former tips of little Jewish and Muslim boys all over the world.

A British company, Intercytex, takes the former foreskins of circumcised penises, isolates the fibroblasts, allows them to grow over the course of a few months in cellular incubators, and then ships them off to select physicians in the UK. Each treatment, which is good for about 4 sq. cm. of your old face, contains about 20 million fibroblasts. The cost? An absolute steal of 750 GBP, or $1,000 USD, much less than a pound of flesh, an arm and a leg, or your first born child (not all of him, anyway).

It's not FDA approved for use in the US, so you'll have to fly to the UK to get it done. But you can rest comfortably on the flight home thinking of all the little boys' penises that went into taking away those pesky crow's feet.

Paddy

From sciam

2.10.2009

happy birthday chahlie!

Okay, so I'm a couple days early, but I just found something I'm really excited about.

Charles Robert Darwin (known as "Chahlie Dahwin" to his friends) was born on February 12, 1809. He grew up, went to medical school, didn't pay attention, did some other stuff, then died. (Truthfully, I hope you know a little bit more about him than that... if you don't you can always look him up on the omniscient Wikipedia.)

On his famous trip around the world aboard the HMS Beagle, Darwin served as the resident naturalist/geologist and man-companion to the captain, kinda like Paul Bettany in Master and Commander (booby shot at 1:42!). On that trip, he catalogued those wonders of the natural world he encountered, including many of them in his subsequent publications, including numerous parts of The zoology of the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle.

The entirety of Darwin's writings, including all of his drawings, are now available online for free, at http://darwin-online.org.uk. Feel free to read the text of his works (the first edition of Origin of Species is the least watered-down), but don't miss the numerous plates of everything from bones to fossils to live animals he encountered, all in high resolution, perfect for printing and framing, if I do say so myself).

Paddy

And here's a great example of old-school science:
"In doubling the point, two of the officers landed to take a round of angles with the theodolite. A fox, of a kind said to be peculiar to the island, and very rare in it, and which is an undescribed species, was sitting on the rocks. He was so intently absorbed in watching their manœuvres, that I was able, by quietly walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer. This fox, more curious or more scientific, but less wise, than the generality of his brethren, is now mounted in the museum of the Zoological Society."

-- From Darwin, C. R. 1839. Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836, describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagle's circumnavigation of the globe. Journal and remarks. 1832-1836. London: Henry Colburn.

2.03.2009

beartrek (not the large, hairy, gay men version)

Last year I met a guy named Chris Morgan, a wildlife biologist in Alaska making a movie about the bears of the world. He's a great guy, and I dream of one day doing the things he is now (If only I can get my girlfriend as interested in cinematography as I am... I may have to go the Les Stroud route). Here's a few clips from his film, stil in production:

Six minutes, no narration:

Twenty minutes, narration:

http://wildlifemedia.org

paddy

1.14.2009

from the Department of Scientific Words that Sound Dirty

I’d like to speak with you about your mother’s albedo. That’s right, her albedo.

No, I’m not referring to her insatiable drive for reproduction, her creative energy, how wet she is (well, not entirely), or those places where the sun don’t shine, I’m talking about how all her exposed parts just seem to glisten.

And by your mother, of course, I mean Gaia. Mother Earth.

Get your mind out of the gutter.

So what, exactly, am I talking about?

Your mom’s--okay, the Earth’s--albedo is the amount of sunlight that hits the surface and reflects; that which isn’t absorbed. Usually albedo is more of an astronomical term for the general amount of sunlight that a planet or other celestial body reflects, but since we have a planet covered in all sorts of different solids, liquids, gasses, plants, animals, and fungi, we can break the surface of the planet down and look at how much each thing reflects.

So how does it work? Simply measure the amount of incident light striking a surface, and the amount of light that reflects off of it. The ratio of reflected light to incident light is the albedo, sometimes read as a percentage.

So why is this a cool thing? (Haha!...ah, you’ll get it in a bit)

First, let’s talk space. When the sun shines electromagnetic radiation (some of it in the form of visible light) on objects in our solar system, they reflect these waves back at us, and from those reflections we can get an idea of what those objects are composed of, or “how the weather is out there.” In the case of planets and moons, we can tell how much ice cover they have, or what the surface might look like. Our own moon has an albedo of around 7%, which is enough to light up the landscape on a good night like last weekend’s. One of Saturn’s moons, the ice-encrusted Enceladus, has an albedo of 99%, meaning that it reflects almost all the sunlight that hits it. From the albedo of other space rocks like asteroids, we can figure out their metallic properties from how they reflect waves outside the visible spectrum.

But let’s get back to your mom, er, the Earth. You may have noticed that this planet is covered in all sorts of different surfaces, from oceans, deserts and tropical forests to the ice caps, huge buildings and cherry pies. Each of these surfaces has its own individual albedo, and conversely, absorbs a different amount of light.

So what does all of this matter to you? One thing to consider is that water, which covers about 70% of the Earth's surface, has a pretty low albedo, making it a good way to absorb the Sun's radiation and warm up the planet, supporting things like, y'know, life. Soaking up warmth in the day and maintaining it through the night is a good way to keep the temperature stable enough for us to survive, unlike on waterless orbs like the moon, where the temperature difference between day and night is about 356˚C. Our atmosphere is a big help, too, because it helps store this saved heat.

On the flip side, the sandy deserts near the equator and the snowy ice sheets near the poles have a higher albedo, up to 90% in the case of fresh snow. When these regions reflect a lot of light, they tend to stay a little bit cooler.

Most of the planet is somewhere between these extremes, however, with the majority of land covered in different kinds of plant cover, soil, and pies. Through local and satellite measurements, we can determine the albedo of these different surfaces, and also see a inverse correlation with the local temperature. The trees in tropical rain forests have a pretty low albedo, absorbing much of the incident sunlight (of which they get a lot), which in turn makes for higher local temperatures. However, if you're a farmer wise enough to cut down the rain forest for the excellent topsoil underneath, the decrease in albedo from green trees to dark brown soil will cause the temperature to go up on your new plot of land, making it even harder to grow anything while contributing to global warming.

Speaking of global warming, what happens if we're not reflecting as much light as we should? What if the highly reflective surfaces like the polar ice caps start shrinking, or if we create more dark surfaces, like giant parking lots and buildings and millions of miles of paved roads?

For the former, this presents a big problem, in that the melting of the ice caps initiates a positive feedback loop. Smaller ice sheet means smaller area of high albedo, which means less reflection and more absorption, which means higher temperature, which melts more ice, which means less area of high albedo... you get the picture. It's this positive feedback loop that has climatologists worried, because as it progresses, the ice at our poles will be melting at faster rates, and global temperatures will rise even faster. As far as rising ocean levels go, melting of the floating ice wouldn't drown us, but as soon as the ice on top of Antarctica and Greenland starts melting, we might start sailing on the Sacramento Bay.

So what about all the blacktop on our buildings and roads? In some places (like Maine), it's been common knowledge that having a black rooftop keeps your heating bill down and helps keep snow from piling up. However, urban planners are starting to figure out that all of this tar on our Walmarts and freeways is contributing to global warming, and is part of the reason why it gets so damn hot on the ubiquitously paved New York City (where everyone's wearing black, oddly) on an otherwise mild day. A new solution: paint everything white. Cool roof technology is a new engineering movement to paint the roofs of buildings white, increasing their albedo and consequently decreasing local and global temperatures. Other projects underway involve cloud seeding, where the creation of more cloud cover will reflect more of the sun's light, and spraying reflective aerosols into the stratosphere to keep some light from coming anywhere near the planet. While still in the infant stages, they may be part of the solution to combating global warming.

Paddy

12.30.2008

i am so excited

One of the many reasons I am a biologist is because the world is absolutely chock full of amazing plants, animals, ecosystems, and natural phenomena, which are unbelievably complex but overwhelmingly fragile, especially in the face of increasing pollution, expansion, and destruction by the human race. A major hurdle to reversing the effects of habitat decline all over the world is getting people to care about these fragile ecosystems and understand how local actions can have global impacts... "Why should I care about rainforests in Borneo when I live in Kentucky?"

For all the things that globalization and the internet has done, one thing that it has failed to do is truly expose those who don't have the money to the beauty of the natural world in places far from their homes. I've been fortunate enough to have traveled to the rainforests of Costa Rica, the top of a New Zealand Volcano, the ruins of Termessos in southern Greece, even the coasts of California and Maine. However, not many people have the time or money to get away from their homes to explore these wondrous places.

As a scientist and teacher consumed with wanderlust, I dream of taking everyone to see the sights, to show them the world and how amazing it all is. However, instead of leading 7 billion people through a rainforest trail or down the Yosemite valley, I could take them there with an immersive video experience, beyond National Geographic photos or a television show to a place where they can explore freely on their own time and see what they want to look at. Since almost everyone has an internet connection, why not create a website accumulating tours of amazing places around the world, guided with interactive videos that allow the user to look around as they are hiking on a trail or sailing past a fjord, clicking on things of interest like birds, plants, fish, or mountains, and learning more about them? This way, learning becomes self-driven, and people around the world can come one step closer to the natural world they may never see in person.

A company called Immersive Media has the technology to do this. They are best known for cataloging the streets of major cities for Google Street View, but they can also do 3-D video and live streaming, allowing you to look around a video world. This is the ticket to the future, and I can't wait to get started on this project.

Paddy