MPA Madness: Beginnings on the South Coast for Marine Protection Areas

I know, I know, yet another CityBeat piece from me. But this one goes pretty directly to what Miriam and I want to do with this blog, which is talk about science and technology and how it applies to the world (along with pointing out some silliness along the way). This week I published a piece introducing readers to the Marine Life Protection Act, a law requiring the California Fish and Game Commission to draw a map of protected areas up and down the California coast. As you might imagine, that tends to be a controversial process. Here in southern California, the process is only just beginning, and the players are marshaling their forces.  I plan to cover how the MPAs are drawn as the committees meet as best I can. I realize that not all readers will be interested in that stuff, and that’s fine. All of the posts related to the MPAs be slugged  “MPA Madness”. If you see that phrase, and you’re not interested, skip the post.

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One more try

Will state marine protections save Children’s Pool for pinnipeds?

By Eric Wolff

If the seals of La Jolla could follow the news, they’d be packing their extra fish into cardboard boxes about now and checking craigslist for a nice rental rock in Monterey or Santa Barbara. They would know that, by now, the courts have spoken, and their fate is practically sealed: The city has already hired a consultant to do the environmental study on the effects of dredging and cleaning the sand in Children’s Pool.
For more than a decade, harbor seals have had full use of the beach at Children’s Pool for birthing and raising their pups from May to December. Federal and local laws protected them from human interference, and a seawall protected them from stormy waters. People took to strolling out on the wall just to stare at them, and before long they were a tourist attraction.
However, Ellen Browning Scripps’ purpose in building the seawall in 1931 was to create a safe haven for juvenile humans, not seals. When the seals took up residence, their excrement fouled sand and surf. Animal feces tends to create an unhealthy environment for children. In 2004, some San Diegans took the city to court to compel them to dredge and clean the sand, a move that would simultaneously make it less habitable for seals and safer for the kids. In 2005, a judge agreed with them, and in June of this year, an appeals court agreed with the judge. The seals’ days in La Jolla are numbered, and that number is 548.
Then again, the seals have some extremely dedicated defenders, people committed to preserving Children’s Pool as a seal maternity ward. The Friends of the La Jolla Seals, having been beaten up and down the judicial system, realized they have another option: Thet think they can take advantage of a 1999 law only now being implemented that will create a series of marine parks and preserves up and down the California coast.

Click here to read the rest of this story.

 

Michelle von Emster: A death without a shark

Imagine being single, and meeting a nice person at a bar. The chat goes well, you take her home. You flirt, you fool around, you talk, you have a great time. You want another date, so you call her. She doesn’t call back. Then watching the news two days later, you see she was killed by a shark. Everyone says she was eaten by a shark: the police, the media, the medical examiner, everyone. But then a reporter starts talking to shark experts and raises some serious questions about what happened. And 14 years later  you look into the case and realize that maybe she hadn’t been eaten by a shark after all. All of this happened to a colleague of mine, Ed Decker. The beginning of his piece in this week’s CityBeat is reprinted below.

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Open and shut

Revisiting the mysterious death of Michelle von Emster

By Edwin Decker

I just got off the phone with Ralph Collier of the International Shark Committee and am utterly blown away. My knees are weak. My brain is in a haze. And now I’m looking at the blank screen that will become this column thinking, Where on Earth do I begin?

In 1994, a “friend” of mine was killed by a “shark” in the waters off Ocean Beach. I put quotes around the word “friend” because Michelle von Emster wasn’t a friend-friend, nor was she a girlfriend. She was a young woman whom I fancied for several months, whom I eventually asked out on a date and who accepted.

We went out to Winston’s, a bar in Ocean Beach, watched bands and drank liquor. At about midnight, we left the bar, bought some beer and cigarettes, returned to my pad and sat on the couch, where we talked and flirted all night. At one point, she let me take off her shirt so I could see the large butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder blade, after which we kissed and fondled each other until well past dawn.

I was crazy about Michelle and was looking forward to seeing her again, and again, and again. But less than 48 hours later, Michelle went skinny-dipping off Sunset Cliffs and was attacked and killed by a “shark.”

I put the word “shark” in quotes because now (thanks in part to phone my conversation with Collier) I don’t believe that’s what killed her.

Click Here to read the rest of the story.

 

Breaking: High prices more persuasive than insistent nagging

For years, environmentalists have employed what might best be called the Nudge Model of persuasion. The conversation went like this:

Enviro: C’mon guys! Global warming! Stop driving those big cars. Pleaaaaaaase? C’Mon.”

American: Uh, right. Look, could you get that clipboard out of my face? I have people coming over, and I need to set the table with my plastic plates, take a 30-minute shower, and crank up the  air conditioner.

[Gets into Dodge Durango. Revs engine for Indy 500 effect, and screeches out of parking lot].

Enviro: But… but… C’MON!

Now, though, with gas prices over $4 a gallon, and with $5 and $6 well in sight, well! Now we’re seeing some changes  (quotes below taken from the articles linked):

• “Car Buyers Downsize, spend big on options“, NYT, 7/17/08, “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mr. Smith said. “You don’t have too many people saying, ‘It has to be white with a power package and it has to have Michelin tires.’ Instead it’s, ‘What do you have and can I get it by the end of the month? Just get me out of my Tahoe.’”

• “With Gas Over $4, Cities Explore Whether It’s Smart to Be Dense“, WSJ, 7/7/08, “Expensive oil is going to transform the American culture as radically as cheap oil did,” predicts David Mogavero, a Sacramento-based architect and smart-growth proponent.”

• “Wal-Mart goes local“, Clean Tech Group, 7/2/08, “Through better logistics planning, better packing of trucks and local sourcing, the company expects to save millions of “food miles” each year, which it said is the distance food travels from farm to fork.”

• “Field Poll finds high gas prices change Californians habits, views“, Press-Enterprise, 7/17/08, “We do no weekend driving — we don’t go out,” said Charley Stillwagon, a truck driver and single father of five from Rancho Cucamonga. “If we feel like a movie, we rent one.”

• “Gas Prices Drive  Students to Online Courses“, Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/8/08, “It’s getting to the point of either gas or class,” says Robbie K. Melton, associate vice chancellor for the Tennessee Board of Regents.”

Not that any of it’s at all surprising that people respond more quickly to money than moral arguments. But with the policy question of how best to address CO2 emissions and water conservation still raging, environmentalists would do well to think about how economic tools can best alter behavior, rather than imply moralizing. Al Gore has done his work for us,  raising awareness on the issue. Now we have to fix it.

 

The wonders of biomimicry, and how the San Diego Zoo will use them to save the world

On occasion, my paid work for CityBeat overlaps with sujects that may be of interest to Oyster’s Garter readers. Last week I wrote about a new initiative being brought forward by the San Diego Zoo to tap its deep knowledge of animal behavior and ecology to help companies solve industrial problems in a greener way, and maybe make a few bucks for the zoo.  I’ll copy the first several paragraphs for you below, and then link to the whole story for those with further interest.

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Copycat, and they’re fine with that

The wings of butterflies in the genus Morpho, resident in Central and South America, produce astonishing colors: spectacular iridescent blues, bright yellows in intricate patterns, greens and reds. The Morpho are all the more astonishing because they achieve these chromatic fireworks without any pigment at all. Their wings are made of tiny scales that reflect light in layers, creating the effects we see. While he was at MIT in 1994, then-undergraduate Mark Miles studied the butterfly, and he began to wonder if he could produce the same effect using hundreds of tiny mirrors. He soon founded a company, Iridigm Display Systems, to develop the concept. In 2004, Qualcomm bought Iridigm to use the mirror technology in its mobile devices, since the system uses half the energy of traditional screens. The technology, known as Mirasol, can be found in a few devices just now hitting the market. All because of a butterfly.

Here’s another one: The lotus plant never gets dirty. Rain water falls on it, but thanks to a series of tiny bumps on its leaves, the water runs off, carrying with it dirt particles that landed on the plant. A German company called StoCorp created Lotusan, a building coating that uses the same kind of tiny, water-shedding bumps. Buildings clad in Lotusan actually get cleaner every time it rains. Some 400,000 European buildings already wear it.

Neat, huh? OK, one more: In Australia, a company called BioPower wanted to design a new kind of wave-electricity generator. Traditional generators are harmful to sea life and not very efficient. BioPower looked to the tuna’s fin to capture horizontal wave motion and the sea fan (an invertebrate marine animal) to capture vertical wave motion, and they mimic the roots of kelp to anchor their device to the sea floor by mimicking the root system of kelp. By copying nature, they’re installing hundreds of small wave-motion generators that will hopefully bother the aquatic life a lot less.

“Nature has already done all the research and development for us,” said Dayna Baumeister to an audience on a warm June night at the San Diego Zoo. “And it’s all sustainable. There’s no waste in nature.”

Baumeister co-founded the Biomimicry Guild, a Montana-based nonprofit dedicated to helping companies find solutions to problems by copying nature. The zoo was hosting Baumeister to raise awareness of the idea of biomimicry, the notion that nature can provide answers to many of our most pressing problems, and do it in a sustainable way. The zoo is in the process of establishing a biomimicry unit, which would connect educational institutions and companies with the zoo’s vast collection of plants and animals, along with the zoos expertise. It’s early yet, but zoo chief financial officer Paula Brock sees biomimicry as both a way to help the world move toward a greener future and bring a different kind of green into the zoo’s coffers.

—- Go here for the rest of the story.

 

The Managed World: Can you run a power line through a state park if it’s carrying clean electricity?

There is no place on earth, no matter how remote, untouched by humans. We are mighty: we can trawl the deep, explore the South Pole, and fish every single island in the South Pacific. But as every young nerdling knows, with great power comes great responsibility. “The Managed World” series in the Oyster’s Garter explores the hard choices that come from a human-dominated world.

Southern California would seem like the ideal place for solar and wind power. It’s sunny almost half the days of the year, and the deserts get their fair share of wind. In California, most of the people live densely packed along the coast, while the interior is either desert or farmland.  The price of solar on the residential scale (i.e. on the roofs of those densely built buildings and houses) is still too high to be economically feasible (though the price is dropping every day, it seems) but economics of scale make large solar plants feasible.

For SoCal, that means putting up big renewable energy farms out in places like Riverside and Imperial Counties – especially Imperial County, which has a tiny population and tons of empty land. Even though the the U.S.  Bureau of Land Management recently put a halt to all new solar projects, enough are already underway to substantially shift Southern California’s power generation to renewable sources (There’s a state mandate to get up to 20% by 2010). Unfortunately, there’s this pesky problem: Getting the electricity from hither to yon, known more specifically as Imperial County and San Diego County.

First, you’ve got these big ole mountains in the way. Well, not big so much as dramatic. The topography of the land east of San Diego made it impossible to build a railroad from San Diego eastward for a hundred years, and even now there’s no highway that runs straight east (locals might think of I-8, but in fact it bends far to the south, almost to the Mexican border). The same problems that made it hard to build a railroad or highway make it difficult to build a high voltage transmission line from the up-and-coming renewable plants (and the already existing Sempra-owned natural gas plants, in Arizona) to San Diego.

 

In other news…

Octopied building by *FilthyLuker on deviantART

From Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets - Rick MacPherson live-blogs the Coral 11th International Coral Reef Symposium. Especially check out his entry on communication between journalists and scientists. (Not every scientist is lucky enough to have a live-in journalist that dispenses communication advice AND makes waffles.)

From the Beagle Project Blog - why is it so hard to raise funds for something as kickass as rebuilding the Beagle? Appropriately contrite, I just bought this fetching t-shirt.

From Echinoblog - is the TARDIS design inspired by the sea urchin? Why must Chris torment me by making me love the Doctor EVEN MORE?! I looooove yooooou David Tennant!!!!xoxoxoxoxo *ahem* Dr. Mah’s evidence indeed suggests a TARDIS-Echinoidea correlation.

From A Blog Around the Clock - BioRap!

 

Carnival of the Blue #14

Aieee, the Oyster’s Garter has been taken over by technology! All this car and mileage stuff, and not a bit of biology to be seen. That’s because I’m teaching a three-week course in invertebrate zoology to high school students. It’s a ton of fun but also a ton of work - I’ve been completely swamped by collecting critters, making handouts, and teaching students how to smash snails with hammers proper dissection technique. (If any of my students are reading this, hi!)

My posting is going to be light for the next two weeks, but Eric is going to take up some of the slack with his techno-nerd agenda. In the meantime, enjoy this month’s Carnival of the Blue, up at The Blue Economy.

 

iPhone price cut, schmice cut, they getcha with the monthly plan

The safety razor is a classic example of business marketing: Sell people the handle cheap, and they’ll keep coming back for the pricey blades. Thanks to a series of posts over at Apple Insider, we can see that’s exactly what AT&T is doing to the iPhone. Sure, the the hotter-then-hot iPhone price has been dropped to a wallet-pleasing $199. But even as they lowered the price of the handset, they raised the price of calling plans. Now an iPhone calling plan with unlimited data costs $70 a month, and they took away the free 200 text messages (I’m not a text messager, but I’m told that they’re all the rage with the whippersnapper set), which costs an extra 5 bucks.

So that’s $15 a month more per month than it was with the first generation iPhone, plus you have to pay a $36 upgrade fee. Given the mandatory 2-year contract, that means the plan costs $396 more then it used to own an iPhone ($276 if you think text messaging is unhealthy). So the savings from the 8GB iPhone price cut from $399 to $199? Poof, they’re gone.

 

No more pipetting late at night

This piece of biotech marketing gone wonderfully, wonderfully right, comes to us by way of Oyster’s Garter pal Taod.

 

Mpg or gpm?

A maxim in business says that you get what you measure. If that’s true, then the way we measure things becomes crucially important (which will hardly surprise Molluscovites, I’m sure), like, say, fuel efficiency. A recently published study from Duke University highlights the fallacy of mpg. Instead of measuring the number of miles we get per gallon, we should measure the number of gallons we need to travel a set distance. When you work out the numbers, you get some unexpected results. I considered the two upgrades proposed in the paper: From an SUV to a station wagon, and from an econobox to a hybrid. I used what my auto insurer considers a normal year of driving, 12,000 miles, and a fuel price of $4.50 per gallon.

Make and Model	Mileage	Gallons per 12,000 miles	Savings from upgrade at $4.50 per gallon
Dodge Durango	15 mpg	800 gallons
Toyota Wagon	25	480	$1,440
Honda Civic	30	400
Toyota Prius	50	240	$720

Even though the upgrade from the SUV to the wagon only improves mileage by 10 mpg, it actually saves 320 gallons of fuel. Despite a 20 mpg improvement, the upgrade from the Civic to the Prius saves only 160 gallons per year.

The point of this analysis is not to say we shouldn’t all be driving high fuel efficiency cars, because we should, but it is to say that it’s far more important to get all those behemoths off the road than it is for all us latte-drinking, tree-hugging liberals to swap our Civic for hybrids, no matter how much we really, really want to. Getting SUV drivers into hybrid SUVs or smaller wagons will make a far bigger difference to the good earth. Which is why, even though I think it’s criminal that the price for raising CAFE standards was the jettisoning of tax breaks for solar power and wind power, Congress actually did something pretty meaningful. Raising the minimum mileage will have the heaviest impact on the worst offenders.

I also liked this new way of measuring because it finally explains why I’m having trouble calculating at what price of gas will the added cost of a new hybrid break even with a new Civic.  I keep getting numbers that seem too high ($7 a gallon, or even $8, depending on which assumptions I use. I hope to have a whole post on this in the future). Now I see why: the marginal improvement of the Prius from the Civic just isn’t that great, at least not at today’s prices. Over the course of 10 years, the savings would be worth $7,200. But if I had a Durango (which I don’t!), and I went to the Toyota Wagon, I’d save $14,400 at today’s gas prices.

Of course fuel efficiency isn’t everything. Slate’s Green Lantern column just did an excellent cradle-to-grave analysis of the energy costs of buying a used Civic versus buying a new Prius and figured out that it was still more energy efficient to buy the new Prius. Now if I can just find that $21,500 I buried out in the yard for a special occasion…