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Time mag. / raise flies / feed small fry fish / then feed to aquaculture fish .......................
October 15, 2018
AgriProtein
Turning waste into food
Aquaculture, where fish are raised and “farmed” in controlled circumstances, helps thwart the environmental consequences of depleting wild fisheries, but there’s a catch-22. Harvesting the small fry at the bottom of the marine food chain needed to feed farmed fish can also shrink wild stocks. AgriProtein founder Jason Drew, a South African who calls himself an “environmental capitalist,” came up with a solution while walking past a food waste dump swarming with flies. Insects have long been used as bait, so why not purposely grow a supply of flies that could serve to feed fish? After all, flies and their maggots will eat almost anything -- including organic waste from restaurants and supermarkets.
It took several years of trial and error -- turns out that flies don’t like to breed on command, or en masse. But now Drew’s flagship fly farm in Cape Town turns some 276 tons of organic waste into 26 tons of pure insect protein a day, which is sold as food to fish farmers as well as the local poultry industry as well. Last year, AgriProtein has partnered with engineering group Christof Industries to develop a blueprint for rapidly rolling out fly farms, with a goal of building 25 a year, and reaching 200 around the world by 2027. The company has also raised $105 million to break ground on three new farms within the next 12 months, in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. As the sustainability of our food sources grows more precarious with a burgeoning population, insects are increasingly seen as a viable alternative -- both for human and animal consumption.
Caught a bunch of smallmouth bass the other day, nice ones, but one seemed to have a muscle wasting disease or simply was dying of old age. Here is that poor fella compared to a nice, chunky/healthy.one.
Gary Rutherford uses a remote control to change the direction of an underwater camera in his fish house. Rutherford was using three different cameras and three big-screen television monitors to keep any eye on northern pike in Blue Lake. John Myers / jmyers@duluthnews.com1 / 5
ON BLUE LAKE — Gary Rutherford loves to watch televisions in the dead of winter.
So just about every morning in January and February, Rutherford fires up his big pickup truck, calls his yellow lab Ranger to join him and leaves his lakeside home in Pengilly to drive 7 miles to Blue Lake near Nashwauk.
He plows his way to his Ice Castle fish house, fires up a Honda generator, hooks up some electronics and then settles in to watch TVs.
Only Rutherford isn't watching Netflix or HBO or even the Outdoor Channel. He's watching Gary Rutherford's Fish TV, brought to you by three underwater cameras attached to three big-screen TV monitors bolted to the walls of the shelter.
Don't bother asking about watching the big game or a movie or playing a game of Fortnite. The only thing showing is northern pike, bluegills, crappies and the occasional perch.
This northern pike may look huge on a monitor but in reality it's only about 28 inches long. Photos by John Myers / News Tribune
"I probably watch more TV in these two months than I do all the rest of the year put together,' Rutherford said on a recent January day from the 70-degree above zero comfort of his fishing shelter. Rutherford, 69, insists he's a techno-novice, but the strings of HDMI cables in the shelter say otherwise. On this day he's using three underwater cameras — both Aqua-View and Marcum — but he owns several others just in case one goes bad.He's not just watching TV out here, of course, he also drops hefty sucker minnows impaled on treble hooks down the holes. The baits hovers just above the myriad stumps that haunt the bottom of the once small natural lake that has expanded in recent decades due to nearby mining operations.
And he catches a lot of fish.
Last year, Rutherford fished here more than 50 days, starting New Year's Day when the ice was safe for his big rig. He and his guests caught a combined 132 northern pike, his log book shows. His brother kept two — all the other fish were released.
This year he started Jan. 9. On the first day he and his guests caught 11 northerns. Blue Lake doesn't have many big pike; most of the ones Rutherford catches are between 24 and 28 inches.
"But they're fun to catch, for me,' he said. "I'm one of the few people out here who fishes northerns. Most people out here are going after panfish."
He uses stout, short ice fishing rods with casting reels spooled with PowerPro line and with a 12-inch steel leader. Sometimes his treble hooks are paired with a spinner blade and beads, sometimes not.
Rutherford used to fish competitive walleye tournaments in summer. But in recent years the retired National Steel Pellet Co. mineworker has been mostly targeting musky and pike during summer months. He used to make winter walleye trips to Red Lake and Lake of the Wods, too, but these days, in winter, it's strictly pike.
Gary Rutherford of Pengilly works to remove the hooks from a 26-inch northern pike caught on Blue Lake recently.
On a recent day Rutherford and a guest had five pike grab a bait, with two landed, over about three hours with lines in the water.But over that same time there were fish within view on Rutherford's underwater cameras almost constantly — an occasional crappie or bluegill and maybe a perch or two, but mostly northern pike. The water is gin-clear in this lake but the cameras still struggle to see very far out due to the lack of sunlight penetrating through deep snow on the ice. Rutherford plows an extra wide space around the fish house to let more light shine through.
After a while Rutherford gets to know the fish. On this day a chubby, roughly 28-inch pike came around every few minutes to check out our baits. He never once bit. Rutherford pointed to one of the TV monitors and the curious pike's unusually big belly for its size.
"That fat boy has been coming around for four or five days now, every day. But he won't eat,' Rutherford said, jigging one of his rods in a futile effort to tantalize the pike to bite. "They get you excited just watching... get your heart going."
Sometimes Rutherford would jig a hookless spearing decoy in an effort to attract a fish to bite, and it seemed to work. But it became very clear over the morning that not all fish that come in to check out a bait are interested in biting.
"Everybody thinks northerns hit anything you throw down there, that they will attack anything they see. But that's not true at all. A lot of them come in slow and just look, then swim over and look at another bait, then slowly swim off,' Rutherford noted after another visit by "fat boy." "I mean, you gotta be kidding me! A fish with that reputation is that close to an easy meal but not hungry?"
But when they do bite, the pike can come in fast and hard, swooping up a sucker minnow in seconds. They also tend to come in pairs. Rutherford has become a bit of a pike behavior expert after watching hundreds of them over recent winters.
"They don't school up, but they do tend to come in hungry pairs a lot of the time,' he noted.
Indeed, twice on our outing we had two pike on at the same time.
Gary Rutherford of Pengilly holds up the camera end of an underwater video system.
The Shipwrecked Sailors & the Wandering Cod getpocket.com
Captain Pietro Querini, a Venetian merchant sailor, and his crew of 68 were bound for Flanders from Crete in the fall of 1431 when his ship was blown off course by ravaging storms near the English Channel. Damaged beyond repair, the drifting vessel was abandoned for two life rafts, one of which disappeared and was never seen again. The other floated up to the North Sea, finally landing on the rocky southern tip of Norway's Lofoten Islands. Near frozen and delirious with hunger, Querini and his 10 remaining men clambered ashore in January 1432.
A father and son from the island of Røst rescued Querini's crew. A small fishing village punctuating the island chain, Røst welcomed the starving men, feeding them with stockfish, air-dried until stiff as a board and salty as the ocean air ripping along Norway's shoreline. It was this unlikely, petrified beacon of hope and the hospitable people of Lofoten that sparked a centuries-long love affair between Italy and Norway.
Salmon cannon could restore the population in the Upper Columbia
Whooshh Passage Portal
August 19, 2019 at 3:32 pm
A so-called salmon cannon could restore salmon populations in parts of the upper Columbia river that have not seen the fish in 90 years.
The salmon cannon is actually a fish-propelling system made by a Seattle company called Whooshh Innovations, which uses a series of tubes and computers to gently detour the salmon around dams, so they can travel upstream to reproduce. Whooshh is working with the Colville Tribe to see if its fish-moving tubes can restore salmon runs above the Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee dams, reports The Spokesman Review.
“In truth, the fish aren’t shot anywhere. The fish actually swim in on their own, and they are then sorted into a tube that’s misted inside so it’s very slick and air pressure gently movies them up and over the dam,” Michael Messina of Whooshh told KIRO Radio. “Each female is carrying 3,000 to 5,000 eggs, and that’s really important versus going up a ladder or not being able to go up at all. In terms of fisheries restorations this is really important.”
Along with salmon moving, the system can redirect predatory and invasive species to other parts of a river and away from the endangered fish.
“This is where all the computers and everything come in. There’s a lot of scanning of imagery taking place that makes a quick decision, and then they are routed up in the proper lane or if they are a fish that’s not supposed to go up they can be routed back out,” Messina said.
The Army Corp of Engineers is set to make a decision soon on whether to install the fish cannons below the Chief Joseph dam and possibly Grand Coulee.
NYT -- polystyrene (Styrofoam) decomposes in sunlight much faster than thought .................
Oct. 11, 2019
In the Sea, Not All Plastic Lasts Forever
Polystyrene, a common ocean pollutant, decomposes in sunlight much faster than thought, a new study finds.
By William J. Broad
A major component of ocean pollution is less devastating and more manageable than usually portrayed, according to a scientific team at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Mass., and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Previous studies, including one last year by the United Nations Environment Program, have estimated that polystyrene, a ubiquitous plastic found in trash, could take thousands of years to degrade, making it nearly eternal. But in a new paper, five scientists found that sunlight can degrade polystyrene in centuries or even decades.
“Policymakers generally assume that polystyrene lasts forever,” Collin P. Ward, a marine chemist at Woods Hole and the study’s lead author said in a statement on Thursday. “That’s part of the justification for writing policy that bans it.” A main rationale for his team’s study, he added, “was to understand if polystyrene actually does last forever.”
Polystyrene, one form of which often carries the brand name Styrofoam, is used to manufacture single-use cups, straws, yogurt containers, disposable razors, plastic tableware, packing materials and many other everyday items, which are discarded daily by the ton. Much of it ends up in the ocean. A swirling mass of throwaway junk known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California, is estimated to occupy an area roughly twice the size of Texas.
Many nations, companies, citizen groups and ocean institutes, as well as United Nations programs, have worked hard to ban single-use items and better regulate their disposal.
“We’re not calling the concerns or the actions wrong,” Christopher M. Reddy, a marine chemist at Woods Hole and another author on the study, said in an interview. “We just have a new thread to add and we think it’s significant.”
The study was published Thursday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, a publication of the American Chemical Society, a scientific group based in Washington.
The research was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Frank and Lisina Hoch Endowed Fund at Woods Hole, the Stanley Watson Chair in Oceanography at Woods Hole and a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation, a federal agency.
It’s common knowledge that sunlight can cause plastics to weather. “Just look at plastic playground toys, park benches, or lawn chairs, which can rapidly become sun-bleached,” Dr. Ward noted in the Woods Hole statement.
The new study demonstrated that sunlight does even more, breaking down polystyrene into basic chemical units of organic carbon, which dissolves in seawater, and trace amounts of carbon dioxide, at levels far too low to play a role in climate change. By the end of this process the plastic has effectively disappeared from the environment.
In the paper, the researchers described the study as “the first direct evidence” of how of sunlight can break down polystyrene in the environment into its basic chemical building blocks.
Previous studies focused largely on the degrading effect of microbes. That made sense, Dr. Reddy, said, because microbes can eat many forms of organic carbon. But, he added, the chemical structure of polystyrene -- particularly its backbone of large, ringed molecules -- made the plastic unappetizing to decomposing bacteria.
However, that same molecular backbone turned out to be “the perfect shape and size to catch certain frequencies of sunlight,” Dr. Reddy said. And the energy that is absorbed breaks the chemical bonds.
In the lab, the researchers tested five different samples of polystyrene to see if sunlight could tear them apart. The team submerged each sample in a sealed glass container of water and exposed it to light from a solar simulator, a special lamp that mimics the frequencies of sunlight. The scientists then studied the water for evidence of breakdown products.
With sophisticated tools of detection and analysis, Dr. Ward and his colleagues then traced the origin of the loose materials back to the polystyrene. “We used multiple methods, and they all pointed to the same outcome,” he said in the statement: sunlight can turn polystyrene from a solid material back into basic chemical units.
The study also found that additives to polystyrene, which can determine its color, flexibility and other physical features, can slow or speed decomposition.
In a joint interview, Dr. Ward and Dr. Reddy said that one remaining puzzle concerns the exact nature of the dissolved organic carbon, which is too small in size to form visible particles. “We feel confident we can figure it out,” Dr. Reddy said.
The research team included Cassia J. Armstrong and Julia H. Jackson of Woods Hole, and Anna N. Walsh of Woods Hole and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the paper, the authors noted that the newly identified means of polystyrene breakdown “should be incorporated into global fate models” for plastics and help frame policy. None of the current inventories “account for degradation,” Dr. Ward noted.
In the interview, he and Dr. Reddy suggested that the new finding might eventually shed light on one of the outstanding mysteries of ocean pollution: that more than 99 percent of the plastic that should be identifiable is missing. Expeditions that have specifically looked for evidence of the calculated mass of plastic have repeatedly come up with surprisingly low returns.
In time, Dr. Ward said, the accelerating search for the breakdown products of polystyrene and other kinds of oceanic pollution may let scientists “balance the books.”
In Ireland, few things are black and white, especially the law—and the tales of men who break it to dive for treasure under cover of darkness.
Like many stories of Ireland, this one begins in a bar. It was after closing time one quiet night during the mid 1960s in Connemara, and in the corner of the pub, a group of lads talked in low voices while nursing their pints. The publican went about his business, wiping up the bar top and rearranging stools. Soon, the men had empty glasses, but made no moves towards leaving. They were waiting for something. When the headlights of a pick-up truck shone through the window, they scattered out into the night. This is the first oyster poaching memory V (as he wishes to be referred to in this article) can recall. The men in the bar were waiting for a buyer who agreed to meet under the cover of darkness. The product was oysters, dredged from a neglected bed about two miles offshore. A typical poaching expedition took place under the glow of moonlight with three men setting out in a currach, a wooden Irish rowboat. For two to three hours at a time, the men—fishermen, farmers, and laborers by day—collected oysters from the sandy sea floor, filling mesh bags to the brim. Making as little noise as possible, they rowed back to the coastline...
