Sick nature

Darla Rooks, a fisherwoman, told Al Jazeera that she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”...

...Along the Gulf there have been reports of collapsing fisheries, mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, and eyeless crabs and shrimp...

-- from Sick Fish, Eyeless Shrimps and Dead Dophins

Simplot's fish

Simplot acknowledges...that the nearby waterway of Hoopes Springs still measures 70 parts per billion of selenium, 14 times the federal limit.

So Simplot decided to also make a case for a different standard. Mr. Prouty, the company vice president, said the trout population in the nearby creeks has remained stable over 30 years. Perhaps, he suggested, local cold water trout are more resistant to selenium than other fish. “The five-parts-per-billion standards are based on warm water fishes that are typically more sensitive than our trout, “ he said.

So Simplot officials hired scientific consultants, and in August 2010 they submitted a draft report to the government, which suggested that the brown trout could support selenium tissue levels of 13 to 14 parts per million in their tissue...

-- report

Widening gyre

One Rainbow runner...had 84 pieces of plastic in its stomach.

-- from Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash by Lindsey Hoshaw.

At the time of writing the background to the header of this blog is a detail of trash found in the stomach of an albatross. See also photos by Chris Jordan.

A river runs with it

When government scientists went looking for mercury contamination in fish in 291 streams around the United States...Emissions from coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury contamination in the U.S.

-- NYT

Disruption

Some of the first eerie signs of a potential health catastrophe came as bizarre deformities in water animals, often in their sexual organs.

-- notes Nicholas Kristoff (It’s Time to Learn From Frogs).

If concerns prove to be justified this could be a nightmare worthy of H G Well's character Edward Prendick in The Island of Dr Moreau.

Stuffed

The centre pages of today's Guardian newspaper feature a photograph of brightly coloured bits of plastic arranged neatly in rows and shading nicely through the colours of the rainbow, and from white to black. Individually, the objects are junk and jetsum: a battered cigarette lighter with "my shop" on the side, a mangled toothbrush, bottle tops. Together, so arranged, they resemble semi-precious stones laid on dark velvet in a cabinet. You wouldn't be surprised to see it as a collage of 'found art' in a degree show.

The punch comes in the caption. All these pieces were found in the stomach of a fledgling Laysan albatross at Kure atoll, and killed it.

I cannot find the photo online, but here is an image from the same imagino-morpho-gut-space, posted by Zern Liew in 2007.


See also here

Soundtracks

There are few personal notes in this sketchbook, but here's one. I am looking forward to The Magic Hour, an OCM event. We will even take our little daughter, Lara, whose perceptions may still be open in ways we don't quite understand.

I am interested by what the musicians and artists are doing with ambient sound in projects like Botanic Bats and Bamboo DNA . And it will be good to see Max Eastley, who found amazing noises in the Arctic when we travelled there in 2003.

I was struck by the following extract from Gretel Ehrlich's The Future of Ice (see part three of this), included in Cape Farewell's Strategic Plan 2008 - 2011 that arrived on the same day:

Cycles and circles enclose us. They are all fixed paths, closed circuits, and we have to live with what we've created within them. Beauty and pollution ride the same trails. The aurora is beaded with lead and cadmium. Snowbanks drift hard with heavy metals, rain is toxic, drift ice is radioactive, roaring rivers are pollution highways, the oceans are mercury sinks, the midnight-sun-filled days are cluttered with smoke and dust motes, and earth and its atmosphere are becoming a hot cauldron where disease and contamination are stirred.

On first reading this I had doubts as to its cognitive precision. Do, for example, heavy metals like lead and cadmium released as a result of human activity really make it up into the ionosphere, more than 85km above the earth's surface? Well yes they do, if I understand this, this and this correctly.

Art that pays attention to science and nature and "struggles for exactitude" [1] probably has a future. How far would this be from exploding fertility symbols and marionettes? [2]



Footnotes

1. The phrase is appears in Jason Cowley's introduction to Granta 102.

2. See also A bestiary of 25,000 years.

Stink or swim

Trouble is brewing in the waters off the Chukotka Peninsula in the far east of Siberia. In the past few years, the aboriginal whalers of the eastern coastline who hunt grey whales for meat have reported that an increasing number of the creatures they catch smell so foul that even dogs won't eat them. The few people who have tried the meat suffered numb mouths, stomach ache and skin rashes...

-- Amitabh Avasthi.