New EPA rules label a dozen more Collier, Lee waterways as polluted

More Southwest Florida streams and canals would violate water quality standards under a proposal by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to limit pollution in Florida waters, according to a Naples Daily News analysis.The EPA is proposing to set specific numeric limits for nutrient pollution, replacing Florida's more general standard that requires only that nutrients not upset the natural balance of a waterway.Nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, end up in Florida waters from urban and farm runoff, triggering ugly algae blooms that can poison water supplies, kill fish and smother marine life.A dozen Collier and Lee county streams and canals considered not polluted under current state rules would be considered polluted under the EPA proposal, the analysis shows.They include the L-28 tieback canal on the eastern edge of the Big Cypress National Preserve, the Tamiami Trail canal, the Faka Union canal, Camp Keais south of Immokalee, canals that drain into Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and the Golden Gate canal that drains into Naples Bay.In Lee County, the newly designated polluted water bodies would include the eastern Caloosahatchee River above the Franklin locks and Palm Creek as well as Bayshore Creek/Chapel Creek, which drain into the Caloosahatchee.Some water bodies — the Estero Bay drainage area and the Ten Mile canal in southern Lee County — would be dropped from the polluted waters list under the EPA proposal, the analysis shows.The Daily News analysis compared the DEP's current lists of polluted waters with a database created by the DEP, applying the EPA's proposal to water bodies around the state.A spot on the list of polluted waters triggers cleanup requirements under the federal Clean Water Act.The EPA proposal is an outgrowth of a settlement of a lawsuit that environmental groups filed in 2008 after Florida missed a 2004 deadline to shore up the state's water quality standards.Agribusiness groups and utilities have objected to the EPA proposal, saying it will be too costly and questioning the science behind it.Collier County commissioners are set to decide in the coming week whether to formally object to the EPA proposal."This seems to be the sledgehammer instead of a little mallet approach," said Jerry Kurtz, the county's principal stormwater project manager.He said the county hasn't estimated how much it might cost to comply with the EPA proposal — or even whether it would be possible."We can't get our arms around it at all," Kurtz said.The longer list of polluted waters shows that the state's current standards aren't doing the job, said Earthjustice attorney David Guest, who represented environmental groups in the 2008 lawsuit."When you have numeric standards, you learn things you didn't know before," he said.The state's current standard is akin to waiting for a fish kill or a toxic slime outbreak to determine a water body is polluted, Guest said."That's too late," he said.Guest accused the DEP of using the database as "scare literature" to whip up opposition to the EPA's proposal on the grounds that it will cost too much to clean up all the newly designated water bodies.The DEP database is meant to try to determine whether the EPA proposal is properly assessing water quality in the state's streams, lakes and canals, said Julie Espy, environmental administrator in the DEP's watershed assessment section."If a canal seems to have good water quality to you and it fails (the EPA criteria), you might wonder why is that," she said.Naples News

New Picture of Ancient Ocean Chemistry Argues for Chemically Layered Water

A research team led by biogeochemists at the University of California, Riverside has developed a detailed and dynamic three-dimensional model of Earth's early ocean chemistry that can significantly advance our understanding of how early animal life evolved on the planet.

Working on rock samples from the Doushantuo Formation of South China, one of the oldest fossil beds and long viewed by paleontologists to be a window to early animal evolution, the research team is the first to show that Earth's early ocean chemistry during a large portion of the Ediacaran Period (635-551 million years ago) was far more complex than previously imagined.
Their work is the first comprehensive geochemical study of the Doushantuo Formation to investigate the structure of the ocean going from shallow to deep water environments. It is also one of the most comprehensive studies for any Precambrian interval. (The Precambrian refers to a stretch of time spanning from the inception of the Earth approximately 4.5 billion years ago to about 540 million years ago. It was in the Precambrian when the first single-celled microbes evolved 3.5 billion years ago or earlier, followed by the first multicellular animals much later, around 700 million years ago.)
The researchers' model for the ancient ocean argues for a stratified marine basin, one with a chemically layered water column. While the surface ocean was oxygen-rich, the deep ocean was ferruginous -- oxygen-deprived and iron-dominated. Further, sandwiched in this deep ocean was a dynamic wedge of sulfidic water, highly toxic to animal life, that impinged against the continental shelf.
Dominated by dissolved hydrogen sulfide, the sulfidic wedge was in a state of flux, varying in size and capable of encroaching on previously oxygenated areas of the continental shelf -- killing all animal life there. The overall picture is a marine basin with co-existing oxygen-rich, sulfidic and ferruginous water layers.
Study results appear Feb. 11 in Science Express.
In the modern sulfur-rich ocean, hydrogen sulfide in oxygen-poor waters reacts with iron to form the mineral pyrite, thus stripping the dissolved iron from the water column. But the researchers' results show that under specific geochemical conditions in the early ocean, when levels of dissolved sulfate (the source of hydrogen sulfide in the ocean) and oxygen were particularly low compared to the modern ocean, layers of sulfidic waters could coexist with ferruginous water masses, and even persist for long periods of time.
"This is an entirely new interpretation of ancient ocean chemistry," said Chao Li, a research specialist in UC Riverside's Department of Earth Sciences and the first/lead author of the research paper. "Our model provides a brand-new backdrop for the earliest evolution of animal life on the planet. We show that the sulfidic ocean wedge, along with an absence of oxygen, can hinder the colonization of early animals on the shallow seafloor and influence their evolution as they take a foothold. In other words, we cannot ignore hydrogen sulfide when piecing together how animals and other eukaryotes such as algae evolved on our planet."
The researchers posit that their robust pattern of a stratified marine basin is the best example of a new paradigm in studies of Precambrian ocean chemistry. They predict the record of much of the early ocean elsewhere will show similarities to the complex chemical layering seen in South China.
"This new world order asks that we take into account co-occurring spatial variations in water chemistry in an ocean basin, specifically when moving from near the shallow shoreline along continental shelves to progressively outwards into deeper waters, and when applying a diverse range of complementary geochemical analyses to elucidate these changes in ocean chemistry," said Gordon Love, an assistant professor of biogeochemistry, who collaborated on the study and in whose lab Li works.
Li explained that in the scientific literature the generally patchy fossil record of early animals observed through the Ediacaran has largely been attributed to poor preservation of fossils. The new research shows, however, that changes in environmental conditions, in this case variations in distribution of hydrogen sulfide, may explain gaps seen in the Ediacaran fossil record.
"Our model points to early animal life having to cope with changing chemical environments even in the shallow waters of the continental shelf," said Love, the principal investigator on the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant that funded the study. "At times, movement of toxic sulfide-rich waters into the shallow water would be calamitous to animal life. This well explains the patchy time record of animal fossils in most Ediacaran basins."
Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry and a co-principal investigator on the NSF grant, explained that only an incomplete temporal record of animal microfossils has been unearthed in the Doushantuo Formation despite considerable efforts.
"Much of the unequivocal fossil evidence for animals is in the form of microfossil cysts found in only a few sedimentary layers, suggesting that the early animals were environmentally stressed," he said. "An explanation for this pattern is certain to lie in our model."
According to the researchers, a stratified marine basin was favored by an overall deficiency of dissolved sulfate in seawater following a long history of oxygen deficiency in the ocean. Ordinarily, sulfate gets introduced into the ocean from the weathering of continental sulfide minerals exposed to an atmosphere with photosynthetically produced oxygen. But the researchers argue that major glaciation events predating Doushantuo time exacerbated the scarcity of sulfate. They note that if glaciation was globally extensive, gas and chemical interactions between the oceans and atmosphere would be suppressed by a layer of ice cover in many areas.
"Ocean chemistry changes as the ice coverage acts like a pie crust sealing off the ocean interior from the atmosphere," Love said. "The effects of such ice coverage are a reduction of sulfate inputs into the ocean brought in by rivers and a buildup of dissolved iron in the deep ocean sourced by volcanic activity along the mid-ocean ridges. Later, as the ice cover abated, sulfate inputs from rivers localized the animal-inhibiting wedge of hydrogen sulfide along the shallow basin margins."
Li, Love and Lyons were joined in the study by David A. Fike at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo.; Alex L. Sessions at the California Institute of Technology; and Xuelei Chu at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.
Besides the NSF, the Agouron Institute funded the study.

First Successful Use Of New Ocean Observation Technology – Investigation Of Ocean Acidification In The Baltic Sea

For the first time scientists and technicians from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel, Germany, successfully used an offshore observing system to study environmental changes in the oceans.

The so-called mesocosms resemble oversized test tubes with a length of 20 metres. They are used to simulate the future ocean in situ, i.e. under realistic conditions. IFM-GEOMAR scientists used six of these mesocosms, each encompassing about 60,000 litres of sea water, at the observing station Booknis Eck in the Baltic Sea in order to study the effects of ocean acidification.
Above the sea surface they seem unimpressive: six vertical orange sticks connected by a transparent plastic roof. The dimension of these devices which were installed at Booknis Eck in the western Baltic Sea is revealed under water. A 20 metre long, flexible plastic tube is affixed on a rack that serves for buoyancy and stability of the system. In this tube scientists can isolate about 60 cube metres of seawater under natural conditions in terms of temperature, stratification and ecosystem.
“So far we had studied the impact of changes such as the increase of fertilizers or of the carbon dioxide concentrations in small tanks in the laboratory. The new mesocosms enable us to study the developments under natural and controlled conditions Thus, we can better estimate their impact on the ecosystem,” states project leader Prof. Ulf Riebesell from IFM-GEOMAR.
The first mission of the mesocosms, a technology developed at IFM-GEOMAR, was dedicated to research on the impact of ocean acidification. “The ocean absorbs more than a third of the carbon dioxide produced by human beings. As a consequence the pH-value decreases and the ocean acidificates,” says Prof. Riebesell. Many marine scientists regard this process as equally dangerous as the ocean warming. “Now we want to know how the impact of the acidification on the marine ecosystem looks like,” Riebesell explains. A final assessment of the experiments at Booknis Eck cannot be given yet. But according to Riebesell the experiments were very successful since a large amount of data was generated.
The study was conducted together with partners of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde, the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin and 19 students from Kiel. It is part of the joint project SOPRAN (Surface Ocean Processes in the Anthropocene) funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research that has also part-financed the development of the worldwide unique mesocosm systems. International parties from the USA and the UK have already expressed interest in the new technology.
The experiment in the Baltic Sea was a test for a large-scale project which will take place off the coast of Svalbard in spring 2010 under the leadership of IFM-GEOMAR with contributions of 15 other European partners in the context of the European project EPOCA (European Project on Ocean Acidification). The main focus will be again the ocean acidification.
A decision on proposals seeking for funding of additional mesocosm experiments in the context of SOPRAN is expected soon.
Adapted from materials provided by Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR), via AlphaGalileo.

Scientists urge global action to preserve water supplies for billions worldwide

Chinese, Indian, American, British scientists release conference declaration urging a region-by-region response to increased water scarcity, heightened hazardsMelting glaciers, weakening monsoon rains, less mountain snowpack and other effects of a warmer climate will lead to significant disruptions in the supply of water to highly populated regions of the world, especially near the Himalayas in Asia and the Sierra Nevada Mountains of the western United States, according to an international group of scientists who met for three days at the University of California, San Diego.More than two dozen international water experts participating in the "Ice, Snow, and Water: Impacts of Climate Change on California and Himalayan Asia" workshop held at UC San Diego issued a conference declaration May 6 that noted heavy rains in Indian deserts, a recent drought in what is typically one of the wettest place on earth along the foot of the Himalayas, and other extreme weather events in recent decades. Major rivers in both regions, like China's Yellow River and the Colorado River in the southwestern United States, routinely fail to reach the ocean now. These extremes are signs of the climate- and societally induced stresses that will be exacerbated in the future under continuing climate changes, threatening massive and progressive disruptions in the availability of drinking water to more than a billion people in the two regions.The workshop was convened by UC San Diego and the University of Cambridge and coordinated by UC San Diego's Sustainability Solutions Institute (SSI) and Cambridge Centre for Energy Studies (CCES) based at Judge Business School. The workshop seeks to use the intellectual resources amassed at these and other universities — ranging from climate change research at Scripps to the computing power of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and bringing social sciences together with physical and biological sciences – to promote solutions to the world's most pressing sustainability issues."Solutions to immense problems have small beginnings and we began here," said SSI Senior Strategist Charles Kennel, who served as director of Scripps from 1998 to 2006. "I continue to be impressed by what a small group of dedicated people can achieve."Workshop leaders plan to present the declaration at the 2009 Forum on Science and Technology in Society in Kyoto, Japan, taking place in October. Additionally, the University of Cambridge will continue the discussion of the global water crisis when it hosts in September a companion workshop focused on African water problems.Research performed at Scripps and at other research centers around the world have indicated that global warming and particulate air pollution, especially in the form of black carbon (essentially soot), are already disrupting natural supplies of water by raising air temperatures and by increasing the light absorption of snow and ice as pollutants darken the frozen surfaces.Participants at the workshop held May 4-6 at Scripps Oceanography's Robert Paine Scripps Forum for Science, Society, and the Environment presented methods used by California researchers to study water supply from the Sierra Nevada, the state's largest source of water for municipal and agricultural users. Scripps and California state officials project possible 40- to 90-percent declines in Sierra Nevada snowpack by the end of the century.Chinese experts characterized water quality problems affecting many of the country's major rivers and lakes and outlined government plans to protect water supply. Representatives from Nepal reported on the dangerous spread of mountain moraines, masses of debris left by retreating glaciers, which have become unstable reservoirs created by rapid glacial melt. Himalayan glaciers supply more than 1 billion people in Asia with drinking water.Participants also discussed methods by which water resource management solutions that are equitable can be achieved. They concluded in the conference declaration that more resources must be committed to detailed climate modeling and collection of high-resolution data to more rapidly understand threats to water supplies. Declaration co-authors said that water availability can be doubled or tripled in some areas with a combination of conservation, technology, planning, and changed behavior, but that the most effective solutions would likely need to originate at the regional level. Workshop experts represented the United Nations World Climate Research Program, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Indian Space Research Organization, the British Antarctic Survey, the California Department of Water Resources as well as several American universities.

Seaglider monitors waters from Arctic during record-breaking journey under ice

The University of Washington has surpassed its 2-year-old world record for operating a glider under the ice, this time by successfully operating one of its seagliders for six months as it made round trips hundreds of miles in length under the ice at Davis Strait. The result contributes to the longest continuous measurement of fresh water exiting the Arctic through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Davis Strait and into the Labrador Sea. Scientists worry that climate change may increase the amount of fresh water so much that it impacts the formation of very dense water in the Labrador Sea. That dense, cold water is a critical component driving the circulation of the world's oceans, according to Craig Lee, a principal oceanographer with the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory. Lee and senior oceanographer Jason Gobat lead the group developing the under-ice seaglider.The UW group is the first and only one in the world sending gliders under the ice. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the UW has developed a glider able to: •Consider how long it has been under the ice and how urgent it is to try to reach an opening in the ice to transmit its data; •Use an internal ice atlas to weigh the odds of having open water above and then check as it rises to determine if the water temperature actually indicates whether ice is overhead. If conditions aren't right and there isn't an urgent need to download data, it just dives back down rather than chance damaging itself on the ragged underside of the ice; •Sense an impending mechanical, electrical or communications failure and make a run for it – that is, try to get out from under the ice and into open water where it could relay its position and possibly be recovered. Seagliders developed by the UW School of Oceanography and Applied Physics Laboratory are small, reusable underwater vehicles meant to operate on their own, gliding without propellers from the surface to as deep as 1,000 meters, or 3,300 feet, while collecting such information as temperature, salinity and level of dissolved oxygen. When seagliders are at the ocean surface they can be commanded remotely from nearly anywhere in the world via the Internet and can transmit their data via satellite telephone. Unlike faster-moving propeller-driven autonomous underwater vehicles, which may need to be retrieved by ships only days after being deployed, UW seagliders can operate on their own for months at a time. The ability to do so under ice, developed by Lee's group, is important in a place such as Davis Strait where scientists want to measure how much fresh water flows through the strait and at what times of year so they have a baseline for comparison in coming years. Early development of UW seagliders was paid for by the Office of Naval Research. The National Science Foundation funded work to add under-ice capabilities so it might take samples in hostile Arctic waters. "This cutting-edge technology has the potential to make year-round measurements over broad areas where access by other means is severely limited, due to the presence of sea ice for part or all of the year," according to Martin Jeffries, the foundation's Arctic Observing Network program director. In the latest deployment, two Applied Physics Laboratory seagliders went into the water Sept. 5. They relied on five sound sources in Davis Strait to figure out where they were and navigate once under the ice. One operated for 25 weeks, spending 51 days and traveling more than 450 miles under the ice, before being collected Feb. 26 by the Danish Navy. During under-ice operations, the glider periodically sought small openings in the ice cover and succeeded in surfacing 10 times to transmit data. It made two round trips under the ice of about 230 miles each. Its journey was not as direct as desired on some legs because of weak signals from the navigation beacon and a now-known bug in the glider's navigation system, Lee says. Still it collected an unprecedented record of fresh water moving through the strait. The second glider operated as if it were in the open ocean because it dipped under the ice just before operators activated its "under-ice" mode. It then proceeded to prove the wisdom of Lee and his group's decision that, when properly operating, their seagliders stay just a brief amount of time at the surface and transmit only priority data before diving back into the ocean. The errant seaglider wasn't following that instruction: It surfaced in an opening in the ice and stubbornly tried to transmit all its data and ask for directions. It tarried too long, became frozen in the ice and couldn't be retrieved. Moorings – strings of instruments tethered to the seafloor – also are monitoring water in Davis Strait but are not ideal for detecting plumes of fresh water, Lee says. For one thing, the freshest water is often found in a thin layer about 50 meters thick, or 165 feet, just under the sea ice. Tethering an instrument atop a mooring so it reaches that thin layer puts the instrument at risk of being ruined if an especially thick, low-hanging piece of ice comes along and strikes it. Seagliders pass through that upper layer as they dive from the top to the bottom of the strait and so can supply data in places that instruments on the mooring cannot, Lee says. The seaglider project is one of more than 35 projects in the National Science Foundation's Arctic Observing Network, which is meant to track and understand Arctic environmental change using an integrated suite of tools ranging from ocean buoys to satellites. ###The Arctic Observing Network was one of the foundation's primary research thrusts for the International Polar Year, which ended in late March. International Polar Year was a 24-month deployment by scientists from 60 countries to better understand the physical characteristics of the polar regions, their role as regulators of global climate and the nature of the changes occurring there as global temperatures rise. In the Arctic, scientists and Native communities also worked together not only to understand the changes themselves, but also the effects of change on subsistence lifestyles. Collaborators on the Davis Strait project also include Richard Moritz, Kate Stafford and Beth Curry, UW Applied Physics Laboratory; Brian Petrie, Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Halifax, Canada; and Kunuk Lennert and other scientists, Greenland Institute of Natural Resources. For more information: Lee, 206-685-7656, http://mail.niot.res.in/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-send.pl?sessionid=prince*mail.niot.res.in-session-0.504166916873128&folder=INBOX&page=1&sort=date&keyword=&searchtype=subject&action=composemessage&message_id=%3Cgt7c7m%2B4eia%40eGroups.com%3E&compose_caller=read&to=craig%40apl.washington.edu Sandra Hines, UW science writer, 206-543-2580, http://mail.niot.res.in/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-send.pl?sessionid=prince*mail.niot.res.in-session-0.504166916873128&folder=INBOX&page=1&sort=date&keyword=&searchtype=subject&action=composemessage&message_id=%3Cgt7c7m%2B4eia%40eGroups.com%3E&compose_caller=read&to=shines%40u.washington.edu Peter West, NSF public information officer, 703-292-7761, http://mail.niot.res.in/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-send.pl?sessionid=prince*mail.niot.res.in-session-0.504166916873128&folder=INBOX&page=1&sort=date&keyword=&searchtype=subject&action=composemessage&message_id=%3Cgt7c7m%2B4eia%40eGroups.com%3E&compose_caller=read&to=pwest%40nsf.gov Dena Headlee, NSF audio visual production specialist 703-292-7739, http://mail.niot.res.in/cgi-bin/openwebmail/openwebmail-send.pl?sessionid=prince*mail.niot.res.in-session-0.504166916873128&folder=INBOX&page=1&sort=date&keyword=&searchtype=subject&action=composemessage&message_id=%3Cgt7c7m%2B4eia%40eGroups.com%3E&compose_caller=read&to=dheadlee%40nsf.govA video news release about the seaglider containing sound bites from Lee is available for the news media. Contact Headlee.

Is The Dead Sea Dying? Levels Dropping At Alarming Rate

The water levels in the Dead Sea - the deepest point on Earth - are dropping at an alarming rate with serious environmental consequences, according to Shahrazad Abu Ghazleh and colleagues from the University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany.

The projected Dead Sea-Red Sea or Mediterranean-Dead Sea Channels therefore need a significant carrying capacity to re-fill the Dead Sea to its former level, in order to sustainably generate electricity and produce freshwater by desalinization. The study also shows that the drop in water levels is not the result of climate change; rather it is due to ever-increasing human water consumption in the area.
Normally, the water levels of closed lakes such as the Dead Sea reflect climatic conditions - they are the result of the balance between water running into the lake from the tributary area and direct precipitation, minus water evaporation. In the case of the Dead Sea, the change in water level is due to intensive human water consumption from the Jordan and Yarmouk Rivers for irrigation, as well as the use of Dead Sea water for the potash industry by both Israel and Jordan. Over the last 30 years, this water consumption has caused an accelerated decrease in water level (0.7 m/a), volume (0.47 km³/a) and surface area (4 km² /a), according to this study.
Abu Ghazleh and colleagues developed a model of the surface area and water volume of the Dead Sea and found that the lake has lost 14 km3 of water in the last 30 years. The receding water has left leveled sections on the lake's sides - erosional terraces - which the authors recorded precisely for the first time using Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) field surveys. They were able to date the terraces to specific years.
The authors point out that this rapid drop in the level of the Dead Sea has a number of detrimental consequences, including higher pumping costs for the factories using the Dead Sea to extract potash, salt and magnesium; an accelerated outflow of fresh water from surrounding underground water aquifers; receding shorelines making it difficult for tourists to access the water for medicinal purposes; and the creation of a treacherous landscape of sinkholes and mud as a result of the dissolution of buried salt which causes severe damage to roads and civil engineering structures.
To address the mounting stress on water resources in the Dead Sea basin and the environmental hazards caused by its lowering, the authors suggest that the diversion of Jordan water to the Mediterranean coast could be replaced by desalinization of seawater, causing the recession of the Dead Sea to be considerably slowed, and buying time to consider the long-term alternatives such as the Red Sea-Dead Sea Channel or the Mediterranean-Dead Sea Channel.
The authors conclude that either of these channels will require a carrying capacity of more than 0.9 km3 per year to slowly fill the lake back to its levels of 30 years ago and to ensure its long-term sustainability for energy production and desalinization to fresh water. Such a channel will also maintain tourism and potash industry on both sides of the Dead Sea.
Journal reference:
Abu Ghazleh et al. Water input requirements of the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea. Naturwissenschaften, 2009; DOI: 10.1007/s00114-009-0514-0
Adapted from materials provided by Springer Science+Business Media, via AlphaGalileo.

Anammox Bacteria Produce Nitrogen Gas In Oceans' Snackbar

Thirty to fifty percent of the global conversion of nutrients to nitrogen gas occurs in these areas. In ‘The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States (PNAS)’ of Tuesday 19 April, researchers from Bremen and Nijmegen state that this conversion is not carried out by denitrifying bacteria, as was believed for decades, but by anammox bacteria. Nitrogen compounds act as fertilizers and are the ecological basis for any lifeform on earth as these compounds limit the overall growth rate.

The researchers discovered this type of bacteria for the first time a few years ago in the oxygen poor Black Sea and now also in the open ocean. This discovery has major consequences for our understanding of the global nitrogen cycle. The Benguela current system leads to upwelling of nutrient-rich cold water off the coast of Namibia and acts as a kind of snackbar in the tropical ocean, which is visited by many animals including giant whales. The newly discovered anammox bacteria remove ammonium from the ocean, which as a result can not be taken up anymore by other organisms. Algae and cyanobacteria only partly succeed in fixing the released nitrogen gas to form new nutrients that can be fed into the nutrient cycle again.
In the article in PNAS, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology (Bremen, Germany) and the Institute of Water and Wetland Research (IWWR) of the Radboud University of Nijmegen show for the first time that anammox bacteria are present in the Atlantic ocean in oxygen poor waters at ~100 m depth. The number and activity of anammox bacteria present at this depth is sufficient to remove the ammonium that rises up from deeper waters and the seafloor. A unique combination of microbiological methods involving high resolution nutrient profiles, experiments with stable isotope labeled nutrients, depth profiles of unique membrane lipids (ladder molecules), fluorescence microscopy and DNA analyses of water samples was used to proof the abundance of anammox bacteria in the Atlantic Ocean. The discovery of anammox bacteria in the open ocean has major consequences for our understanding of the global nitrogen cycle. Models of global nitrogen budgets, which play an important role in long term climate predictions, will have to be revised. The discovered nitrogen loss has also consequences for the carbon cycle in marine ecosystems.Denitrification.The measurements refute the dominating theory that oceanic nitrogen loss results from the activity of bacteria that convert nitrate (via nitrite) with organic matter to nitrogen gas in the absence of oxygen (denitrification). In fact, the researchers recently discovered that anammox bacteria can use organic matter to convert nitrate into nitrite (much better than denitrifying bacteria). This new finding even increases the importance of anammox bacteria in the ocean. New speciesThe anammox bacteria discovered in the Atlantic Ocean are closely related to the bacterial species Scalindua sorokinii, which was recently discovered in the Black Sea (Kuypers et al., 2003 Nature 8 April). Like their relatives in the Black Sea, the Namibian anammox bacteria contain unique ladder molecules (Damsté et al., Nature 17 October 2002) in the membrane surrounding a special prokaryotic organel in which ammonium is converted to nitrogen gas. These ladder molecules are ether bound in the membrane. This property was believed to be restricted to the Archaea, the ‘ancient’ bacteria. Waste water treatmentThe anammox process, in which ammonium is oxidized with nitrite to nitrogen gas, is a promissing alternative to current methods of nutrient nitrogen removal from waste water. The running costs of a waste water treatment system using the anammox process are only 10% of the costs of current treatment systems using conventional methods. Additionaly, the anammox process could reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas CO2 during waste water treatment by 88%. Because of these advantages the first large scale waste water treatment system was recently installed in Rotterdam (The Netherlands).Title of publication and authors:Massive nitrogen loss from the Benguela upwelling system through anaerobic ammonium oxidation Marcel M.M. Kuypers*, Gaute Lavik*, Dagmar Wöbken*, Markus Schmid, Bernhard M. Fuchs*, Rudolf Amann*, Bo Barker Jørgensen* & Mike S.M. Jetten *Max-Planck-Institute for Marine Microbiology, Celsiusstraße 1, 28359 Bremen, Germany Department of Microbiology, IWWR Radboud University Nijmegen, Toernooiveld 1, 6525 ED Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Adapted from materials provided by Max Planck Society.

Impact Of Climate Warming On Fish

International consensus on the reality of climate change is now apparent: global warming is ascribable in large part to human activities. It is causing rapid deterioration of the environment and is increasing the threat to biodiversity. However, the mechanisms of its impact are still poorly known, particularly in the aquatic environment.

At Cemagref, two researchers, who have been analysing the freshwater fish community over the two last decades, have observed profound changes that are more intense and long-lasting than predicted.
Global warming, whose impacts have been demonstrated since the 1980s and 1990s, influences the functioning of the world’s ecosystems as well as the structure and the diversity of animal and plant communities. The GIEC’s (International group of experts on global warming) latest report in September 2007 states that the global temperature should increase by 1.4–5.8°C between now and the year 2100. This phenomenon is an added pressure on the environment that will become increasingly intense over time and should be taken into account in planning sustainable resource and ecosystem management. However, its impact and the possible influence of the effects of other non-climate factors still remain difficult to determine.
Towards reduced stream biodiversity?
Two Cemagref researchers, Martin Daufresne and Philippe Boet, have studied the effects of this phenomenon on aquatic environments and particularly on the fish communities residing in French streams. Changes in the number, size and representativeness of fished species have been observed for approximately 20 years. Fishermen believe that the fish caught today are no longer the same as before. New species living in warm or Southern waters, such as spirlin and the common bitterling, are gradually replacing the traditionally fished species.
With a large-scale analysis, combining data collected on several streams and several sites for 15–25 years, these researchers have shown a substantial impact of global warming on the structure of fish communities. It appears that the proportion of South-living and warm-water fish in French rivers has increased from 20% and 40%, respectively, to 50% between 1979 and 2004. Whereas large numbers of these small fish tend to become predominant within the communities, large fish, more sensitive to the temperature increase, tend to disappear little by little. However, this change is accompanied by a global drop in biodiversity. The large number of fish observed is distributed within an increasingly limited number of species.
Distinguishing the impacts of global warming from those of other factors
In large rivers, fish can also be subjected to non-climatic factors such as water development programmes, dams or nuclear power stations, which may influence the vast changes identified within aquatic communities. According to the data collected at this scale, the impact from these sources appears to be quite low on the trends observed. On the other hand, since dams act as natural barriers, they hinder the Southern species in their migration towards the North. In a context of increasing climate warming, the lack of a fish flow from the South, as has been observed on these sites, could be harmful to the current process of species renewal and subsequently intensify the threat weighing on the biodiversity of large rivers. Current research on a finer, individual scale, continues in a partnership with EDF (French electricity company) in order to better assess the real impacts of these developments on fish and most particularly their physiology. In the long run, this research has shown itself to be a requirement for a better understanding of these slowly progressing phenomena.
Adapted from materials provided by Cemagref.

Environmental Scientists Use Fish Behavior To Monitor Water Quality

Researchers are using bluegills to detect industrial and agricultural spills in water supplies। Changes in the environment cause the fishes' behavior and breathing patterns to change. Electrodes are placed inside the tanks that contain the fish and water from a nearby water supply, and they set off an alarm if conditions inside the tank change.

Do you know where your water comes from? Tap water comes from many different sources. Before it gets to the faucet, tater treatment plants clean up water from lakes, rivers and reservoirs, but it can still get contaminated by industrial and agricultural spills.
Lt. Col. Matt Schofield, an environmental scientist at the U.S. Army Center for Environmental Health Research in Fort Detrick, Md., says, "Everybody drinks water, and the question of whether or not there's a contaminant or a toxic substance in the water is very real."
According to U.S. Army Center for Environmental Health Research biologist Tom Shedd, when there are changes in water quality, there are changes in fish behavior.
Now to help make sure your water is safe, environmental scientists are using something that lives in the water to monitor it closely -- fish! In a new early warning system called IAC 1090 or the "intelligent Aquatic BioMonitoring System," bluegills are signal of toxins in our water.
Eight fish sit in chambers submersed in water from a nearby water supply. If pollutants are present, the fish will change their breathing patterns. Electrodes in each chamber monitor any changes. If six fish are stressed, an alarm goes off.
Shedd says at that moment they don't necessarily know what is the contaminant or the stressor to the fishes, but you know that it's there. The fish have reacted to two farming spills. Officials were able to prevent any toxins from getting into drinking water.
To protect the fish, each fish is replaced with a newer, younger fish after spending three weeks monitoring water supplies. The system, originally developed by the Army for the Army, is now available commercially to cities and towns and is currently being used in New York, San Francisco, and Washington.
"The fish system is a common sense, logical way to monitor for water quality," Shedd says, helping to keep their water -- and yours -- safe.

Firefly fish for pollution monitoring

Schools of glowing fish could become a tool for monitoring water quality. The US government's National Institute of Environmental Health Services (NIEHS) has been funding research into fish that glow like a firefly when exposed to polluted water.Fireflies light up when an enzyme in their stomach called luciferase oxidises luciferin. The NIEHS hopes to insert luciferase-producing genes from fireflies into the eggs of zebrafish. Other genes would then be injected into the zebrafish making them sensitive to a particular pollutant. This could make the fish generate luciferase in the presence of mercury, for example.The genetically modified fish could then be dangled in a cage into water at risk of pollution. After half an hour they could be removed and dunked into a solution containing luciferin. If they start to glow, it means the water is polluted. The brightness of their glow could even reveal just how bad the pollution is. And the fish should survive the process for re-use later.

An US patent was claimed for this work and the abstract is as follows

The present invention provides methods and systems that uses transgenic zebrafish with an easily assessable reporter gene under the control of pollutant-inducible DNA response elements. Transgenic zebrafish, carrying pollution-inducible response elements, are placed in the water to be tested, and the contaminants become bioconcentrated (generally 1,000- to 40,000-fold, relative to the water) in the tissues of the fish thereby activating specific response elements, which up-regulate the LUC reporter gene. Fish are then removed from the test water and placed immediately in a luminometer cuvette and incubated with luciferin. Luciferin is rapidly taken up into the tissues of the fish, oxidized by luciferase, and light is produced. The luminescence is proportional to the environmental concentration of the pollutant (to which the fish had been exposed), which drives the expression of the LUC gene by means of the various DNA motifs. The luminescence is quantitated in the luminometer. In each response element-containing construct, a specific class of polluting chemicals, allowing for differential identification of pollutants in a complex mixture activates the expression of the LUC gene. This assay does not require killing the fish and allows for repeated analysis of the same site with the same fish. The sensitivity of the system can be manipulated by varying the sequence of the response element.

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