A View From The Brink ... the beach is backwards

Happy 4/20!

 

 

Photographs by Thomas K. Pendergast

 

April 20, 2012 @ 4:20 p.m., Pacific Time, on "Hippy Hill" in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Every year there is a gathering of a certain tribe, to celebrate a certain plant. There are many rumors as to why they do this. Nobody really knows for sure. Who can remember? They apparently don't much care either.

 

Go here for the full photo essay   --->>>

 

 

Fish Off Corona del Mar May Have Ingested Radioactive Kelp After Fukushima, Study Finds

 

"It's not a good thing," says researcher after discovery that a radioactive isotope of iodine was absorbed by kelp off Laguna Beach and Corona del Mar a month after the disaster in Japan.

 

Nisha Gutierrez-Jaime of CoronaDelMarPatch.com reported that fish along the Orange County coast may have been affected by radioactivity that fell on California in the days after Japan's 2011 nuclear disaster, as small levels of radioactive isotopes accumulated in local seaweed.

A study poses the possibility that small amounts of Fukushima radioactivity entered the California coast's food web, but the Long Beach State marine sciences professor who co-wrote a new study said he does not know if there is a measurable detrimental effect.

The radioactive forms of cesium and iodine "get dispersed over a variety of organisms" including fish, said marine biology professor Steven L. Manley. "I would assume it's there" in the biomass of plants and animals off California's coast.

"It's not a good thing, but whether it actually has a measurable detrimental effect is beyond my expertise," he said in a news statement issued by the Long Beach State public affairs office.

Writing in the scientific journal "Environmental Science & Technology," Manley and co-author Christopher G. Lowe said researchers measured a radioactive isotope of iodine in kelp within a month after massive radiation leaks were caused by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

 

Go here for the full story at CoronaDelMarPatch.com   --->>>

 

On NPR the BLM defends its work with 'legacy wells'

 

REMEDIATION: Plugging just one carries price tag in the millions of dollars.

 

Wesley Loy of the Petroleum News reported that officials with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management say the agency is monitoring environmental risk from old wells on federal land on Alaska's North Slope, as well as updating plans for remediating the sites.

The comments come in response to an Alaska state legislator's charge that the BLM has neglected the dozens of so-called legacy wells.

Rep. Charisse Millett, R-Anchorage, is sponsoring House Joint Resolution 29, which urges the BLM "to plug legacy wells properly and to reclaim the legacy well sites as soon as possible." Artealia Gilliard, spokeswoman for BLM Alaska, said the agency's priority is monitoring the wells posing the most risk.

Extreme coastal erosion has threatened a few legacy well sites, and the BLM has spent large sums to deal with those.

BLM manages the Indiana-sized National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, located to the west of Alpine, Kuparuk, Prudhoe Bay and other central North Slope oil fields.

Between 1943 and 1982, the Navy and the U.S. Geological Survey drilled 136 wells and "test holes."

"It would be great if we could go out and remediate them all at once, but it's just not realistic," Gilliard said.

 

Go here for the full story on the Anchorage Daily News website   --->>>

 

Read Go more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/02/04/2300910/blm-defends-its-work-on-npr-a.html#storylink=

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/02/04/2300910/blm-defends-its-work-on-npr-a.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/02/04/2300910/blm-defends-its-work-on-npr-a.html#storylink=cpy

Parasites turning California honeybees into ‘Zombie-like slaves’

 

Photo of a honeybee pollinating a blackberry flower in Golden Gate Park, June of 2011, by Thomas K. Pendergast 

 

KTVU Channel 2 News reported today that a San Francisco State University researcher has come up with an explanation for a stunning decline in Northern California honeybee colonies that sounds more like a plot for a science fiction movie.

According to John Hafernik, a biology professor at San Francisco State University, the die off has been triggered by parasites that inflect and transform honeybees into “zombie-like slaves.”

Hafernik had collected some dead honey bees that were found on campus, but then forgot about them.

“Being an absent-minded professor,” he said in a prepared statement, “I left them in a vial on my desk and forgot about them...The next time I looked at the vial, there were all these fly pupae surrounding the bees.”

Further examination found that the fly pupae were those of the Apocephalus borealis – a parasitic fly.

 

Go here for the full story on the KTVU Channel 2 news website   --->>>

These great white sharks are snobs, study says

 

Photo: Courtesy Stanford University

*******

Peter Fimrite of the San Francisco Chronicle reports that 'the ferocious great white sharks of Northern California spend their time devouring sea lions, traveling, mating and, occasionally, touring San Francisco Bay, but they never socialize with sharks from other regions, according to a Stanford University-led study' released yesterday. 

According to Fimrite, researchers have concluded that these particular predators have been isolated from other white shark populations for so long that they are genetically unique to the world. The scientists tracked this group between 2000 and 2008 from the SF Bay Area to San Diego, Hawaii and back as the sharks followed a route that was carried out with surprising precision and under a strict time frame. 

They lived in the deep ocean near Hawaii between January and July and in Northern California between August and December. Researchers were surprised that these top hunters occasionally strayed from their Northern California feeding grounds for jaunts under the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco Bay, apparently in search of snacks.

The study was conducted by scientists from Stanford, UC Davis, the Point Reyes Bird Observatory and the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation. The researchers used a decoy to lure the sharks to their boat, where they took tissue samples and used a dart attached to a pole to affix satellite and acoustic monitoring devices to 179 great whites along the coast. 

Go here for the full SF Chronicle article --->>>