Area to become marine conservation area

By Sharon Oosthoek

Last summer was a stressful time to be the mayor of Grise Fiord, a tiny hamlet on Nunavut’s Ellesmere Island. Meeka Kiguktak was keeping tabs on a research vessel motoring to Lancaster Sound to conduct seismic testing. Kiguktak and others in Grise Fiord and nearby communities were worried that the federal government scientists aboard would discover oil and gas deposits, putting an end to a proposed marine conservation area for the sound, which is sandwiched between Baffin and Devon islands.

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GOT YOUR DOUBTS that a 225-gram can of bear spray could stop several hundred kilograms of charging muscle and fur?

Until recently, renowned Canadian bear expert Steve Herrero shared those doubts. But then he and colleague Thomas Smith, a wildlife scientist at Utah’s Brigham Young University, took a hard look at bear encounters in Alaska from 1985 to 2006 in which pepper spray was used.
Bear spray stopped aggressive ursids in 92 percent of cases, says Herrero, professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Calgary.

Preliminary results from an unpublished study by Smith and Herrero suggest that guns, on the other hand, were effective only about 67 percent of the time. Herrero cautions that variables such as gun type, ammunition and the shooter’s skill can all influence the outcome.

The problem with guns, says Herrero, is that when a bear is charging, it’s hard to think straight, much less shoot straight. “It’s infinitely easier to aim a can of bear spray,” he says. “It disperses into a cloud, and you can aim that cloud.”

It’s also infinitely better for the bear. “That’s very, very important,” says Herrero. “The effects, while totally immobilizing, are totally reversible.”
— Sharon Oosthoek

Plants in a farm filed in London, Ont., are getting an early taste of climate change in a unique experiment that promises to show how rising temperatures and pollution might affect temperate regions.

Using heat lamps and nitrogen applications, University of Western Ontario ecologist Hugh Henry is simulating the year 2050, when scientists expect temperature increases of 3C to 4C in the region and elevated nitrogen levels in the air and soil.

While similar experiments are underway in the Arctic, no one else is simulating such climate-change scenarios in temperate areas.

“Although we have shorter winters and expect less warming than in the Arctic,” says Henry, “the soils here remain close to freezing all winter. Even a small degree of warming could tip the system from frozen to thawed.”

The five-year experiment, launched in November 2006, has not yet yielded results, but Henry expects rising temperatures will mean less snow. “If you melt snow and it gets cold again, there’s nothing protecting the roots,” he says. “You can get lethal effects that way.”

And because plants – in this case, grasses, thistles and legumes – can absorb only so much nitrogen, the excess may run into rivers and lakes, predicts Henry, which could lead to increased toxic algal blooms.

-Sharon Oosthoek

A farm family in Vegreville, Alta, is turning cow patties into power with new biogass facility – the only one in the world to run on solid organic waste.
Opened in January, the Kotelko farm converts 100 tonnes of manure , or seven dump truck loads, every day into methane gas. The manure is mixed with water and then poured into two massive tanks, where naturally occurring anaerobic bacteria take over to digest the slurry and draw out methane. The gas is fed into a cogeneration plant that produces about one megawatt of electricity, enough to run the Kotelko feedlot and 700 households in Vegreville, roughly 100 kilometres east of Edmonton, and nearby Two Hills. Local Utility companies buy and distribute the power.
“All our lives, we’ve been turning money into poop,” says MIke Kotelko, the project’s director. “Now we hope we can turn poop into money.”
The liquid that is left over from the process can be used for irrigation, and the remaining manure has more than twice the nutrient concentration of raw manure, is odourless and is almost completely free of pathogens. The family plans to market this “superfertilizer.”
Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe, says the Kotelkos’ plant has implications beyond renewable energy: “It can help reduce the ecological hazards associated with manure management.”
“Digested manure has less biological risk to neighbours.”
And there is plenty of room for expansion: 100 tonnes of manure a day represents jsut 20 percent of what the 36,000-head feedlot produces. Next year, the Kotelkos aim to power more than 2,000 homes in the region. Meanwhile, other farmers, municipalities and zoos are sniffing around the operation to see whether they can adopt similar systems.
The federal government has shared the cost of the $8 million operation, but Kotelko notes that it’s not just about the money. “You need to find better ways to reduce you footprint and impact,” he says. “We have great respect for our environment. This is part of our broader vision about where agriculture can go.”

-by Sharon Oosthoek

A group of Canadian scientists is trying to confirm a fishy story that it hopes will renew Lake Ontario’s long-lost Atlantic salmon.
Researchers at the University of Guelph and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) suspect that the Atlantic salmon in the Argentinian headwaters in the Andes are of Canadian descent. If they can link the two populations’ DNA, they plan to restock some of Lake Ontario’s tributaries.
In the 1800s, salmon were so common in the lake that they were harvested with pitchforks. But after years of dam building and development that washed silt into their spawning grounds, the fish disappeared. The last Atlantic salmon reported caught in Lake Ontario was in 1898.
Yet sometime before that, says Guelph zoologist David Noakes, people brought salmon eggs to New England lakes to restore salmon populations. Researchers believe eggs from those fish were, in turn, used to introduce Atlantic salmon to South America in the early 1900s.
The trick to making the link is to get enough DNA from fish caught in Lake Ontario pre-1898. That’s why scientists are looking for Atlantic salmon mounted in the 1800s. So far, ROM researchers Allan Baker and Oliver Haddrath have been able to isolate only a partial DNA sequence from three of the six mounts in the museum’s collection. “It would be nice to get more samples,” says Haddrath.
“Basing it on three samples is a little dicey.
“Even a fin tip will do it,” says Noakes, confirming the link is important, since the more closely related the fish, the better chance the Andes salmon will have of thriving in Canada.
Haddrath says Lake Ontario is stocked with about 250,000 Atlantic salmon a year, but they don’t do well. “We don’t have a self-sustaining population.
“Lake Ontario Atlantic salmon were landlocked,” he adds. “They had thousands of years to adapt to local conditions. Their DNA might still have the genetic adaptations that will allow them to thrive.”
Altantic salmon flourish in Argentina’s Patagonia region, where some landlocked lakes and rivers are similar in structure, chemistry and habitat to Lake Ontario.
“The perfect ending to the perfect story,” says Noakes, “would be to find the link to Argentinian salmon so we can bring them back and have a huge celebration.”

-by Sharon Oosthoek