Estuarine Slime and fun with iMovie

For one of our projects we grow natural occurring benthic (def. bottom) algal communities on screens on a flume at the VIMS. Summertime yields reach 30g/m2/day dry weight of algae.  Our pumps push pulses of water down the flume, with no grazers, that stimulate maximum algal growth. Over the course of the 30 second decent over the flume the water column  nitrogen is reduced and dissolved oxygen is enhanced, which improves water quality. In essence, the algae "scrubs" out nutrient pollution.  Then the algae is harvested for biofuel research. Our flume technology has the highest bang for our buck of water treatment than any other available technology and ours is very low tech.

Anyhow, I wanted to post this only to share the beauty of the brown slime that you see growing on the rocks around your local rivers and bays.  If you put some of this slime of the estuary under a microscope you may find up to 60 different species. If you put some from the fresh part of the river you can find more than 200 species of algae.

Here are some examples:

The have silica shells (tests) that come in many shapes and sizes. See, brown slime is beautiful.

Here is a chain forming diatom called Berkeleya rutilans.  It produces brown filaments that you can see with the naked eye. Here's a closer look:

Some of them arrange themselves in a star like pattern like this Asterenollopsis.

The long one in the center of this picture is Navicula and just to the left you can see a centroid diatom.

If you're old enough to remember the folding rulers then you'll recognize the Pseudo-nitzchia in this video. Pseudo-nitzchia cells cooperate to move through the watercolumn using this folding ruler technique.  Pseudo-nitzchia is also produce domic acid that is responsible for the human illness of amnesic shellfish poisoning. Other diatoms are featured in the video as well as a wily polychaete dancing in a bucket called Glycera, that fishermen use for bait and that has a nice bite!

This is also my first time that I've created a video using iMovie.  I have a long way to go but I'd like to put many more iMovie creations in this blog in the near future.  The song is Girl from Beck.

There are also amphipod grazers that eat this stuff and I thought I'd share a few pics of these guys.  I could write many pages about the marine amphipod grazers but I won't at this point.  I'll only say that they are very important to underwater seagrass because the eat the algae that grows on the grass and they provide food for many fishes and other critters that live in the grassbeds.  Suffice it to say, we wouldn't have our important seagrasses without amphipods.

Also, I should go through my pics and get live ones. These were stored in alcohol and so they've lost much of their color.

Microprotopus

Dulichiella

Photovoltaic Cellphone Charger

I've got this solar panel that was being discarded as part of a dock light.  It's encased in acrylic. I've removed the light and battery that had expired and now I have this little PV that puts out about 5.7V DC in full sunlight.

So I was thinking, could I use this to charge my phone or camera when I'm on the water?  Could I cause my lithium battery device to explode?  The camera battery is rated at 3.7V.  Would I have to charge another battery first that I'd then charge the phone with?

So I checked the Google and found this person has a nice little unit. I guess I can just cannibalize a phone charger and solder it to leads on this little PV, and then I'll have a field charger for my phone. If I got some plugs, I could interchange other cameras and phones.

I welcome any feedback on this, especially if you think it's a bad idea. Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: This device failed to charge a cellphone.  More recently I purchased a Levin cellphone charger off of the shelf.  It's panel also doesn't charge the battery but I can plug it into a 110V wall outlet and then get 2 or 3 charges on my iPhone 6.

My mercury levels are safe!

I participated in VIMS graduate student, Xiaoyu Xu's study where she measured the mercury levels in various populations of humans, one of which was yours truly. I eat a lot of local fish including croaker, striped bass, flounder, eel, catfish, mackerel, bluefish, etc. I also occasionally eat fish of the world, such as tuna, salmon and eel at sushi and other restaurants.

 My mercury level: 0.6 ppm.

Parameters provided with results:
"According to WHO, there is no health effect for adults with hair mercury concentration up to 50 ppm. For pregnant women, any fetal effect will be impossible with hair mercury concentration below 14 ppm. The typical hair mercury concentrations in the U.S. population are often less than 1 ppm."

So I guess I'm good! This a 36 pound striped bass that I caught in December. I harvest 100 % of the meat from my fish. My favorite is the meat around the skull and bones. After filleting, I remove the guts and gills and then I slow cook the head and carcass. One this size yields about 2.5 pounds of the most beautiful lump white meat for delicious fish salads and fish cakes.  It's the best!  Oh, and then I'm left with some really cool skulls and bones.  I refuse to throw another carcass away.

The Time for the Renewable Energy Economy is Now!

The burning of fossil fuels over the course of the industrial revolution has accelerated climate change, causing the ice caps to melt, sea levels to rise, super-droughts, and super-storms.  But, the scariest impact discovered so far, in my humble opinion, is the increasing acidity of the oceans.  The CO2 that we've spewed into the atmosphere turns into carbonic acid in seawater which threatens small shelled organisms called pteropods that are important to the oceanic food web, not to mention oysters and coral reefs! Can you imagine a world without coral reefs? or oysters?

By threatening our natural world, our food, and our coasts, climate change also threatens our national security, says the CIA.

With a world population of 7 billion and growing, that is dependent on fossil fuels, we have the unprecedented opportunity to make a change for the better.  The option to make the switch to wind, water and solar (WWS) is now achievable and even inevitable.  The upfront costs may appear high for this energy revolution, but the cost of in-action is higher.
So how did I come to this conclusion?
Last fall, on NPR’s Science Friday, Ira Flatow interviewed Mark Z. Jacobson from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, at Stanford University about the feasibility of deriving half of our world energy from wind. The other half would be from solar and water. From subsequent reading of Jacobson’s work and others, I am convinced that we have the ability, the resources, and the moral imperative to begin our quest in earnest to switch our power generation from the burning of fossil fuels completely to these renewables. Experts, Mark A. Delucchi and Jacobson report in the journal of Energy Policy in 2011 (here-1 and here-2) that “the barriers to the complete conversion to WWS power worldwide are primarily social and political, not technological or even economic.”  
They calculated that we have more than enough wind and sun to provide power for all of our needs, including transportation.  They estimate that we have more than enough concrete, steel, copper and other raw materials to construct the required number of turbines. They also determined that we have plenty of silica and other materials to construct the photovoltaic (PV) panels required. 
Limitations
They did cite a few caveats to the plan. One is that we could be limited in the amount of silver available for electrical connections.  We may also have a challenge mining enough platinum for hydrogen fuel cells and lithium for lithium ion batteries but, they concluded, these are problems can be overcome with innovation of materials, mining and recycling.
The hardware needed
To be WWS energy reliant by 2030 Jacobson and Delucchi reported in their Energy Policy journal article that the overall equipment needed for the U.S. will be 590,000 wind turbines, 110,000 wave devices, 830 geothermal plants, 140 hydroelectric plants (we’re already 70% there), 7600 tidal turbines, 6200 solar PV plants, 7600 CSP plants, and here’s the whopper, 265 million roof PV systems.  This would be enough power for everything, including our transportation needs. Electric cars are about 5 times more efficient than gasoline. There's potentially a lot of business opportunity here.
Jacobson - the renewables myth buster
The benefits would far outweigh the costs, especially in time.  We would have clean energy that would be more reliable and dependable than oil and gas.   The notion that oil and gas are more reliable is a myth that is explained along with many other myths such as that wind turbines kill more birds than coal mining.  
Me personally
Using the solar calculator I discovered that I would need to spend about $30k to power up my home with solar here in Virginia and that’s after the $15k tax break that I would get on the year of installation.  So the price is high to get your house outfitted with solar panels but there is a break-even time point that varies from 15 to 20 years.  After that you’d be saving money on power indefinitely.  And if properly configured, technically and economically, one could even make money selling power back to the grid.  $30k is a lot of dough but it’s no more than a luxury automobile many people don’t mind paying for.  How about a luxury power system? It's also something that could probably be rolled into a home equity. Hopefully one of these days, I'll get there. I still have a lot of research in this area.  In fact, as I am up here on my soap box, I concede that I AM part of the problem. I'm hooked to the grid (coal) and I operate internal combustion engines daily.
My Dream Car
Speaking of the transportation sector, have you seen the Tesla, Model S? It will set you back $60 to $100000, but it’s a sweet American made ride that gets about 300 miles on one charge, has a super low center of gravity (providing superb handling), double the trunk space and it goes from 0-60 in 5.6 seconds! It's my dream car. For about a third of that price you can pick up a Chevy Volt or a Nissan, Leaf, although they’re not quite as nice as the Model S.  

Bring on the Jobs!
There is the potential to create many good jobs for our nation and stimulate the economy with WWS development. According to a study by Robert Pollin at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, for every million dollars spent in oil and gas we create about 4 jobs whereas for each million spent on wind and solar we create about 16.7 jobs.   

The new WWS energy economy is coming, the question is; how soon do we want to benefit from it?  According to Wikipedia, the U.S. is already producing about 3.3% of our electrical energy with wind, with Texas leading the charge followed by California.  

But we have much work to do to improve access to WWS. In the U.S. we pay a much higher price for rooftop PV solar installation than they pay in Germany ($6.21 vs. $3.42) thanks to taxes, paperwork, general bureaucracy and marketing.

In my home state of Virginia recently, large sections offshore have recently been opened to wind development, but it will be several years before we see the wind farms.

With our resources, we need to get going. I’d like to see local companies installing PV systems on homes. I’d like to see more industry re-allocated to turbine manufacture, installation and maintenance. Wouldn't this be a great roll for our local ship builders?

Let's git-r-done!
The question is not, can we afford to make this switch to renewables? It’s more like; can we afford not to make the switch? Since global climate change is a security threat to our nation, why not divert some of our huge military budget to fix it?   I don’t even care if the vastly wealthy military industry complex and the oil companies make the huge profits from WWS investments.   I’d just like to see the process begin.

We have the ability. We have the resources. We have the moral imperative.  We owe it to our children and grandchildren and to the planet. Let's grow our renewable energy economy today.