August 6, 2010

SHARON OOSTHOEK

When William Baffin sailed past the entrance to a broad channel north of the island that now bears his name, little did the intrepid English navigator realize that it was the gateway to the very thing he was looking for: the fabled northwest passage to the riches of the Far East.

Four hundred years later, another European ship is headed for Lancaster Sound. It, too, is on a voyage of discovery, one designed to advance not only scientific knowledge but the cause of Canadian sovereignty.

The German research vessel Polarstern (Polar Star) has been enlisted by Natural Resources Canada (NRC) to conduct seismic testing of the Arctic seabed. Over the next two months, it will crisscross 5,500 kilometres, nearly 400 kilometres of it in the sound, collecting data and gaining a better understanding of what lies beneath the ocean floor.

At the same time, hundreds of kilometres to the west, Canadian scientists are working with counterparts from the United States on a similar mapping project. Two coast guard icebreakers, one from each nation, are exploring 21,000 square kilometres of the Beaufort Sea in a bid to settle once and for all where Alaska ends and the Northwest Territories begin.

And last week the flagship of Russia’s polar fleet, the Academician Feodorov, left port in Archangel to spend 100 days conducting geological and seismological studies between Siberia and the North Pole as part of Moscow’s drive to expand its territorial waters.

With just three years before the deadline set out by the United Nations Law of the Sea, the race to claim what lies below the ocean is clearly approaching the finish line.

Long a subject of heated debate, northern sovereignty has been especially touchy since the polar ice began to melt, making the Northwest Passage a potential conduit for international shipping. Which is why it was no laughing matter three years ago when the Academician Feodorov reached the North Pole and sent down a submersible carrying the deputy speaker of Russia’s parliament to plant a flag on the bottom.

Yet the fight for national supremacy isn’t why people who live in the path of the Polarstern went to court this week

SERENGETI OF THE ARCTIC

Lined with steep ice-covered mountains and deep fjords, Lancaster Sound lies between Baffin Island and Devon Island, covering 40,000 square kilometres, more than twice the area of Lake Ontario.

Seemingly desolate to the untrained eye, it is, in fact, home to an unusual abundance of wildlife. Extensive polynyas – stretches of open water surrounded by sea ice – make the area so creature-friendly that it has come to be known as the Arctic Serengeti, inhabited by most of the world’s narwhals and one-third of North America’s belugas, as well as massive bowhead whales, an array of seals (ringed, bearded and harp), walruses, thick-billed murres (cousins of the long-vanished great auk) and one of the highest densities of polar bears in Canada.

This natural bounty has long sustained the Inuit, who look at the $200 the Northern Store charges for a turkey no bigger than a soccer ball and worry about what impact the testing will have on their traditional source of food.

The Polarstern will drag air guns in its wake and measure what happens to the sound waves they blast out every 60 seconds. Hunters says all this noise is bound to drive off the animals, and this week, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, which represents residents of Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet, Clyde River, Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, petitioned the Nunavut Court of Justice to call the whole thing off.

The move has drawn support from a surprising source – environmentalists, who rarely see eye to eye with hunters, says Chris Debicki, who works in Iqaluit with Oceans North Canada, a branch of the U.S.-based Pew Environment Group. But they also oppose the testing, both in the short run and because of what it could lead to down the road: drilling for underwater petroleum and the prospect of a spill like the one that sent an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

If history is any indication, there is cause for concern. Four decades ago, a crew looking for gas on Melville Island, more than 400 kilometres west of Lancaster Sound, sparked a blowout that lasted 485 days – five times what it took to contain the gulf spill.

A year later, perhaps the largest blowout Canada has seen took place north of Melville on tiny King Christian Island. The gas ignited, fried the drilling rig and created an 85-metre-high column of flame that burned for three months and could be seen from the air hundreds of kilometres away.

Even so, in 1974, a company was given approval in principle to drill in Lancaster Sound, but the final go-ahead was delayed for three years and then the ruling rescinded due to environmental concerns.

NO THREAT AT ALL?

Now, the government insists that fears for the future of the sound are groundless, especially since last December, when Environment Minister Jim Prentice announced a $5-million study to determine whether it should become a national marine conservation area, which would effectively ban resource development.

If that is so, the hunters and environmentalists ask, why look for resources at all?

Mr. Prentice argues that by providing a better understanding of geology, the testing will “inform the creation” of a conservation area. Meanwhile, Leona Aglukkaq, who represents Nunavut in Parliament and is the federal minister responsible for the north, says that “the mapping of undersea geology is essential to making better decisions on land use and economic development.”

The territory’s chief geologist, Donald James confirms that testing is “part of the process” for a national park. “It’s called a mineral and energy resource assessment. It has to be done in the legislation.”

He says, “people don’t understand the process,” and “should a conservation area be formed, Lancaster Sound will be protected … regardless of the resource potential.”

Many Arctic residents don’t believe this. “When they find something, they will want to do the drilling or mining,” insists Meeka Kiguktak, mayor of Grise Fiord.

This week, although Inuit leaders had asked for a delay while the National Energy Board reviews the safety of offshore drilling, Indian and Northern Affairs auctioned off for $103-million exploration rights to 205,000 deep-water hectares in the Beaufort Sea.

The apparent haste worries people like Ms. Kiguktak: “I can’t imagine our whales and walruses floating on shore, coated with oil. Our elders always say money comes and goes, but if animals and birds go, they’re gone. For Inuit to survive up here, we’ve got to protect our environment.”

Experts in oil recovery say the cold and ice would make a cleanup far more difficult than in the Gulf of Mexico. News reports this week suggest companies facing a spill may need three years to drill a relief well.

And if the spill is significant, “there does not exist today technology that can recover oil from ice,” Ron Bowden of Vancouver-based Aqua-Guard Spill Response Inc. recently told a Senate committee. “You can’t lay boom on ice. You can’t recover oil from the surface because it’s hampered by the ice, or under the ice, so it’s quite a different scenario.”

Okalik Eegeesiak, president of the Qikiqtani Inuit Association, says that, given what is at stake, she is “bewildered” that Ottawa stuck with the seismic testing. “We were led to believe they would” cancel it or avoid Lancaster Sound.

So, it’s no surprise residents are joining forces with environmentalists, who she says are “starting to understand where we come from.” The feeling is mutual, adds Ron Elliott, the area’s member of Nunavut’s Legislature. “As someone … commented: ‘I think we’re starting to sound like Greenpeace.’ ”

TO DRILL OR NOT TO DRILL

Although exploration licences have been granted, no offshore drilling is being done in the Canadian Arctic, and Mr. James says no one knows whether there ever will be. The government and the NRC are “not in the oil and gas business,” he says. “But what we can do is say, … ‘Here are great areas that, in the future, we can direct exploration companies to test further.’ ”

In any event, he adds, “decisions are going be made with the very best geoscience tools and research data available. The work we’re doing right now is going to assist that.”

Residents can’t help but wonder how much say they will have. “A lot of times, it feels like David and Goliath here,” Mr. Elliott says. “And it seems Goliath is going to do what Goliath is going to do.”

In the Western Arctic, a verdict is much closer. Last week, Imperial Oil announced that it and its U.S. parent company, Exxon Mobil Corp., will take a 50-per-cent share in a venture to develop deep-water properties in the Beaufort Sea, where the stakes in the border dispute are high. The contested area may hold 1.7 billion cubic metres of gas and a billion cubic metres of oil.

The joint mapping mission should produce an agreement, but drilling is unlikely to begin until the NEB finishes the investigation it launched in the wake of the massive gulf spill – which is especially relevant, considering who has the other half of Imperial Oil’s big project: British Petroleum.

By Sharon Oosthoek

Assessing the impact of climate change on wildlife is tricky business. Any given year may be warmer or wetter than usual and still have nothing to do with climate change. That’s called weather.

Gambo, Newfoundland trapper Clarence Pritchett knows all about that. In his 35 years of trapping, he’s seen animals that have suffered through bad winters, and he’s seen the opposite.

This past winter was unusually temperate and animals such as otters and mink are now plump and healthy. “It’s not a pattern though,” says Pritchett. “We have good winters and bad winters. It changes drastically with the North Atlantic.”

But climate change is about patterns. Not seasonal or even yearly fluctuations, but long-term changes in temperature, precipitation, wind, and even ocean currents.

So a decade or more of unusually warm temperatures or lots of snow may signal climate change.

“In order to make that link, you have to have a long enough time series,” says Gary Stern, senior research scientist at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Winnipeg. “I would say 10-15 years of data on an annual basis … You have to monitor the biota (plants and animals) but you also have to the monitor the system that’s changing and try to link the two together, which is a difficult thing.”

Paul Wilson, a wildlife geneticists with Ontario’s Trent University, agrees that long-term patterns are key, and urges meticulous research to set baselines for comparison.

“I think we as scientists have to be careful we’re not jumping on the climate change bandwagon and trying to attribute everything we see to climate change,” says Wilson.

Other human-induced changes – fragmentation, pollution and introduced species – also make it hard to separate out what can and can’t be chalked up to climate change.

That’s why Jody Allair, a biologist with Bird Studies Canada, counsels caution.

‘Our scientists are finding it difficult to tease apart the variety of factors contributing to (bird) range shifts or to decipher an overall pattern,” says Allair.

Southern Yukon Tlingit elder Stanley James has also seen wildlife shifting ranges in the past few years, and like Allair, can’t say with certainty what is behind it.

“We’ve had polar bears coming down this way now, on the Dempster Highway. We have cougars coming in from the south. And then we’ve had muskox,” says James. All are unusual sightings near his home in Carcross.

“The animals know there is a change that is happening,” he says. “We used to have four feet of snow when I was on the trap line 60 years ago. Now you only have about 17 or 18 inches of snow.”

With these caveats in mind, we offer here a sampling of intriguing, and often troubling changes in the lives of Canada’s wild animals.

Health and Welfare:

Perhaps no animal has received more attention than the polar bear when it comes to climate change. It’s hard not to notice when one of the world’s largest mammals starts losing weight and having fewer cubs.

Scientists believe the declining health of populations in the Hudson Bay regions of Manitoba and Ontario is linked to the earlier break up of sea ice. Because polar bears hunt seals from the ice, and because seals are their main prey, less time spent on ice means less time fattening up before they are forced ashore for the summer.

Recently, scientists and local First Nations have noticed that spring ice break up in the Hudson Bay region is happening as much as three weeks earlier than it did in the 1970s. The fear is that if this trend continues, the health of polar bears will decline further, leading to a dramatic drop in numbers.

The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada already classifies polar bears as a species of special concern and is blunt in its assessment of the bear’s future:

“The species cannot persist without seasonal sea ice. Continuing decline in seasonal availability of sea ice makes it likely that a range contraction will occur in parts of the species range.”

Crossover appeal:

1995 was a very good year to be a southern flying squirrel in Ontario. In fact, it marked the start of a series of nine unusually warm winters that saw the rodent creep north into the range of their larger cousin, the northern flying squirrel. By 2003, they had shifted about 200 kilometres north.

While it was a big deal for the squirrels, the incursion wasn’t widely noticed by humans. The two species are closely-related and look much alike with their large dark eyes and the furry membrane between their front and rear legs that allows them to glide.

But someone was watching – wildlife geneticists at Trent University, and they wondered if the two species were crossbreeding and having hybrid babies.

When the researchers trapped flying squirrels and analyzed the DNA in their hair, they discovered that was exactly what was happening, says Paul Wilson a wildlife geneticist at Trent.

Wilson says it is likely the first report of hybridization following the expansion of a species’ range due to modern climate change.

While an unusually cold winter in 2004 beat back southern squirrels by about 240 kilometres, they have nearly regained that territory over the past six years.

But is such hybridization good or bad?

“When you’re dealing with hybrids, one of the concerns is do the hybrids replace the parents at some point? We don’t know yet how viable the hybrids are in terms of reproducing with each other, “says Wilson.

Neither species is currently considered at-risk in Ontario, but the northern flying squirrel is endangered in Pennsylvania, where hybrids have also been found.

Yet such hybrids may turn out to be Mother Nature’s insurance policy. That is, the more diverse a species’ genes, the better it can survive changes in temperature and precipitation.

“One could look at these hybrids as a creative reshuffling of the genetic material for a changing landscape,” says Wilson. “I mean climate change isn’t going to go away … maybe these hybrids are emerging as the most adapted flying squirrel for the changing landscape and climate.”

Pollution problems:

Levels of PCBs, DDT and mercury are rising in burbot in the MacKenzie River near Fort Good Hope, NWT, and scientists say climate change is the most likely culprit.

In a study published earlier this year, researchers found the level of PCBs in the fish rose by up to six times between the mid-1990s and 2008. Levels of DDT increased by three times, and mercury by 1.6 times over the same period.

It was not what scientists expected – PCBs and DDT have been banned since the mid-80s and their levels in the environment have gone down. Mercury levels have stayed fairly steady. By rights, the levels of such contaminants in burbot should not be increasing.

“It completely took us by surprise,” says Gary Stern, senior research scientist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Winnipeg, and lead author of the study.

So what happened? Stern and his colleagues say the answer is climate change.

Increased northern temperatures means the time during which ice covers local lakes and waterways is much shorter than it used to be. Less ice cover means more sunlight penetrating into the water, allowing more algae to grow.

Because PCBs, DDT and mercury have an affinity for carbon, and algae is carbon-based, they gravitate to these tiny aquatic plants.

“Think of algae as a sponge that soaks up mercury, PCBs and DDT dissolved in the water, that are floating there not doing anything. The algae make the contaminants more bioavailable,” says Stern.

Tiny aquatic animals called zooplankton eat the contaminant-soaked algae.  Smaller fish eat the zooplankton, which in turn are eaten buy the burbot. People then eat the burbot. Each step up the food chain, the contaminant load increases.

While Stern says the levels are still below what Health Canada considers safe to eat, he worries about the future.

“Based on the trend were seeing here, by 2015, if levels continue to go up, the levels of mercury could rise to a level where Health Canada will have to intervene,” he says.

Flawed thaw:

Peary caribou numbers have plummeted by nearly three-quarters over the last three generations and experts say a changed freeze-thaw pattern in Canada’s north is to blame.

This small subspecies of caribou lives in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, where they eat ground vegetation. But more frequent thawing and freezing is coating the ground with a layer of ice, cutting off caribou from their main food source.

Many animals have quite simply starved to death and the future looks equally bleak.

“Because of the continuing decline and expected changes in long-term weather patterns, this subspecies is at imminent risk of extinction,” according to a report from the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, which lists the Peary caribou as endangered.

Some scientists now worry other sub species of caribou, for example those in northwest British Columbia, will soon have the same problem.

B. C. ecologist Jim Pojar recently studied the potential impacts of climate change in the region on behalf of the Taku River Tlingit First Nation and the province.

Pojar says that over the past 20 years or so, he’s seen more frequent episodes of thawing and freezing in that area.

“The crusted snow and caribou story has been playing out for a long time and depends on locality and winter weather in any given year. Climate warming increases the frequency of winter thaw-freeze events,” says Pojar, a former provincial forester and retired executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.

Francois Paulette, Dene elder and former chief of Smith’s Landing First Nation, NWT, says unusual spring and fall rains have crusted the snow in his region too, making it harder for local caribou to feed.

And he says more frequent forest fires have wiped out local caribou feeding grounds, making those that remain inaccessible. “The caribou don’t like going through burned areas to get to food,” he says.

While he suspects a connection between climate change and more frequent fires, he’d like to see some solid research on that. “They key word is monitoring. You need baselines,” he says.

Ice issues:

A nearly 20-year study of seabirds in northern Hudson Bay shows a troubling mis-match between when chicks are born and when food is most abundant.

Every spring between 1988 and 2007, scientists with the National Wildlife Research Centre have been recording when thick-billed murres on Coats Island lay their eggs. They’ve also been keeping track of when half of the bay’s winter sea ice has receded – an important date because it triggers a pulse in marine life on which the birds depend to feed their chicks.

The researchers have discovered that the date at which half the area’s winter sea ice is gone has advanced by an average of 17 days. But the date on which the murres lay their eggs has advanced by only five days.

“The change in timing of ice clearance is creating a mismatch with the timing of breeding so that the chicks are being fed after the date of optimal food availability,” says senior research scientist Anthony Gaston.

Gaston and his colleagues have recorded a general decline in the chicks’ growth rate during the same period.

Writing in the journal, The Condor, last year, they point the finger at climate change: “Our results support the idea that mismatching of avian breeding cycles with peaks in food abundance is an important consequence of global climate change.”

Wasp Detectives

by Sharon Oosthoek

A tiny black-winged wasp is about to become a detective in the case of the emerald ash borer, a beetle that has killed millions of ash trees in Canada and the United States.    The shiny green beetles hitched a ride from Asia about 10 years ago, hidden in wood packing materials for products shipped to North American stores. It’s the beetle baby that kills trees — larvae feed under the bark and destroy the system that transports food and water to a tree.

Luckily, researchers at Ontario’s University of Guelph found that a native wasp, Cerceris fumipennis, can detect beetle-infested areas. The wasp leaves its nest in search of prey and in as little as half an hour knows if beetles are present. That’s good news because the faster we find the emerald ash borers, the faster we can stop them. Fewer trees will have to be cut down or injected with expensive pesticides to stop the beetles’ spread.

“It’s like the wasp is Sherlock Holmes and we’re his assistant Watson,” says bug expert Philip Careless, who was a master’s student at the University of Guelph when he helped figure out the wasps make good investigators. “You have a partner — which happens to be a wasp — that is awesome at finding where these pests are that are moving into our neighborhoods to eat our trees.”

Careless, who is now a bug expert with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, says the wasp is good at finding the beetle because it’s one of its favorite meals. Mother wasps bring the beetles back to the nest to feed their larvae. Careless knows this because he visited places known to have emerald ash borers, and then he looked for wasp nests on the nearby ground.

After the mother wasps left their nests to hunt, he put clear plastic cups over the nest entrances. When a mother returned and found her nest blocked, Careless grabbed her groceries. He found — you guessed it — emerald ash borers.

Unfortunately, the wasps kill too few emerald ash borers to stop them from spreading. That’s where humans come in. Forest managers in the U.S. are now training volunteers, including scouts and guides, to watch nests and tell them when the wasps bring back emerald ash borers. In Canada, Careless and his team will spend this summer finding out where the nests are and next year volunteers can take over.

Want to volunteer, but you’re afraid of a wasp sting? No worries. “These wasps have a stinger, but they don’t use it in defense. They use it to paralyze prey,” Careless says.  “We grab them all the time when we steal their groceries and they never sting us.” Beetles, beware.

by Sharon Oosthoek

Go outside and play. It’s a rare child who hasn’t heard those words, and now there’s another reason to heed them – better eyesight. Australian and Singaporean researchers have found the more time kids spend outdoors, the less likely they are to be nearsighted.

 From 2003 to 2005, researchers with Australia’s University of Sydney gave more than 2,000 12-year-olds eye exams, and then asked them and their parents how much time they spent outside.

 The average was 2.39 hours a day, but the children who exceeded that were less likely to be myopic compared to those who didn’t, regardless of confounding factors such as their parents’ myopia. Researchers at the National University of Singapore, who conducted a similar study of more than 1,200 teens in 2006, came to the same conclusion.

 So what’s going on? Do kids who spend more time outside spend less time straining their eyes reading or playing video games? No, say researchers. In fact, “close work” had little effect on eyesight.

 Light may be the answer.  According to the Australian researchers, “Light intensities are typically higher outdoors than indoors, and pupils will be more constricted outdoors. This would result in a greater depth of field and less image blur.”

 The findings come at a time when myopia among children appears to be on the rise: in the West, one in three kids is nearsighted and in some highly urbanized East Asian regions, it exceeds 80 per cent.

May 20, 2010

A computer-generated representation of a strand of DNA.

Scientists have created the first cell controlled by a human-made genome — a step closer to artificial life that is drawing both praise and warnings of potential dire consequences.

A team from the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., announced on Thursday it had created a synthetic bacterial genome that is a copy of an existing genome. The scientists then transplanted the synthetic genome into a different bacterium cell to create what they call a synthetic cell, although technically only its genome is synthetic.

The new genome then “booted up” the recipient bacterium’s cell in much the same way that a computer’s operating system makes the computer work.

The scientists say the eventual goal is to build new organisms that act in ways that differ from what nature intended, such as custom-made bacteria designed for biofuel production or environmental cleanup.

Full article

May 3, 2010

Restoring a species to its native habitat is usually considered a good thing, but an unusual study reconstructing historic bald eagle diets is raising flags over their reintroduction off the California coast.

Attempts to bring back the United States’ iconic bird to the Channel Islands could put at risk populations of recovering seabirds and the threatened island fox, according to research published in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A bald eagle nesting on California's Channel Islands in 2008. (Peter Sharpe/Institute for Wildlife Studies)

Just like people, lawns can get tired and worn out. Heavy shade, high traffic areas, compacted soil and recurring pest infestations such as grubs can thin even the lushest turf.

One way to bring your lawn back to life is by over seeding. Because grass seeds need warmth and moisture to germinate, the best time to do this is mid to late spring or late August. Avoid the high temperatures and relative dryness of full summer. To do this you can hire a lawn care company to prepare your lawn and apply the seed, or you can do it yourself.

Reap what you sow

If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, the first step is to buy the highest quality disease-resistant seed from a garden centre with a good reputation, giving you the best chance for success. Make sure it’s not last year’s seed, which will have a lower germination rate.

Pay attention to seed bag labels, which will tell you if you’re buying the right grass blend for the area you intend to reseed. Some seed mixtures do better in shade, others in full sun. Still others are especially adapted to dry or moist conditions.

The most common mixtures include Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass. Garden experts recommend staying away from mixtures that include a lot of quick-germinating annual ryegrass seed because one good harsh winter will kill the grass.

Laying the groundwork

Before you start sowing, be sure to properly prepare your lawn. The first step is to remove the old turf with a trowel or shovel, marking out the area you need to replace. Next, break up the soil underneath and enrich with organic material (such as rich compost or well-rotted manure) and level it with a rake.

Now you’re ready to sprinkle your carefully-chosen grass seed across the area according to the package directions. Be sure to apply a topdressing layer of soil overtop of the new seeds to maximize moisture retention. Soil cover will also keep seeds from being blown away and protect them from hungry birds.

Over the next few weeks you’ll want to make sure the newly seeded patches stay moist. If Mother Nature takes care of this chore for you, all the better. If not, get out the sprinkler or garden hose to keep your lawn evenly moist, but not soggy.

Once the grass germinates, let it grow to about 10 centimetres before cutting it.

The Globe and Mail,  Saturday March 13, 2010

by Sharon Oosthoek

Like a fickle god, phosphorus gives life and takes it away. If too much leaches into lakes and streams, algal blooms suck oxygen from the water and choke off life.

But if too little exists, we are all in trouble: Phosphorus is a dwindling, and non-renewable, component of agricultural fertilizers, essential to growing food for Earth’s burgeoning population, says the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a Winnipeg-based environmental think tank, which recently released a report on phosphorus spills in Manitoba’s waterways.

(The problem in Lake Winnipeg is so severe that the green-blue algae can be seen from space.)

In a race against time – some experts cite 30 years, some 100, until the resource runs out – scientists are scrambling to recapture phosphorus. “So, we convert a problem into a product,” says Fred Koch, a researcher at the University of British Columbia.

Mr. Koch is a research associate of Don Mavinic, a UBC civil engineer who has designed a system that removes phosphorus from liquid sewage at wastewater-treatment plants and turns it into slow-release fertilizer pellets.

Their system capitalizes on the fact that humans expel about three million tonnes of valuable phosphorus a year, which, along with fertilizer runoff, often ends up in local waterways. “We prevent the pollution and we ship fertilizer into a marketplace that will literally be starving for phosphorus,” Mr. Koch says.

“Clean phosphorus reserves are rapidly being depleted and there are no new reserves being found by the mining sector,” Mr. Mavinic says.

While there is scientific debate over when we will see a shortage, researchers at the University of Technology in Australia and Linköping University in Sweden say we may have mined all the easily accessible, high-quality phosphate rock in as few as 30 years. By then, the United Nations estimates, there will be two billion more of us, clamouring to be fed. The implications are daunting. While there are alternatives to other finite resources such as oil in the form of renewable energy, there are no current substitutes for phosphorus.

Mr. Koch’s and Mr. Mavinic’s system of two-storey metal cone reactors was designed to deal with struvite, a byproduct of biological wastewater treatment that clogs pipes and valves and must be regularly removed at great cost. Struvite is a concrete-like substance made up of phosphate, magnesium and ammonium.

The invention takes struvite from the wastewater in its soluble state, before it can harden on pipe walls. The soluble struvite is then forced into giant metal cones, where it mixes until it hardens and forms phosphorus-based fertilizer pellets.

Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, the Vancouver-based company created to commercialize the invention, built cone reactors at an Edmonton wastewater-treatment plant in 2007 – the first large-scale demonstration of the technology. Last summer, the first commercial system came online in Portland, Ore.

Oregon farmers are buying the pellets, and say they are happy to find high-quality fertilizer at a time when supplies are becoming uncertain and prices volatile.

Ostara estimates there are 200 plants across North America, and several hundred in Europe and the rest of the world, that are candidates for the technology. Two new struvite reactors are coming online early this year – one in Chesapeake Bay, Va., the other in York, Pa.

While there are a limited number of struvite-recovery operations in other countries – Japan leads the way – most have so far yielded pellets of uneven quality, Mr. Koch says.

Meanwhile, Ostara says its technology has passed performance tests in industrial wastewater-treatments plants, including corn-ethanol production plants. And Mr. Mavinic is now working with colleagues at UBC’s Dairy Education and Research Centre on retrieving phosphorus from cow manure, which is an even richer source of this essential element.

“Globally, we have no choice but to implement phosphorus removal and recovery from wastewater-treatment plants. Otherwise, we cannot grow enough food to feed all those people, or raise cows and hogs,” Mr. Mavinic says.

by Sharon Oosthoek

Invasive earthworms alter nutrients on which northern hardwood trees and plants depend.

It sounds like a bad Hollywood film, but truth can be stranger than fiction.

While gardeners love to see earthworms in their soil and eco-conscious apartment dwellers rely on them to compost food waste, what most people don’t know is that the vast majority of worms in Ontario are in fact invasive.  Furthermore, scientists recently discovered that the earthworms’ ability to decompose organic matter makes them a growing threat to our hardwood forests, including Canada’s iconic maple trees.

The vast majority of the approximately two dozen species of worms we see today arrived with European settlers more than two centuries ago in ships’ ballast and agricultural products.  (Before that, only two species of worms were in Ontario.)

But the very trait that makes them the darling of gardeners everywhere also makes them a menace in Ontario’s hardwood forests. European worms are much better than native species at munching through leaf litter.  In doing so, they alter the structure of phosphorous and nitrogen – nutrients on which northern hardwood trees and plants depend – such that they are no longer bound up with organic matter and they leach away with the rain.

A 2008 study of northern Minnesota hardwood forests found significantly smaller growth rings in maple trees from forests with European earthworms compared to worm-free forests. “Our research would apply to the hardwoods of southern Quebec and Ontario’s maple forests,” said University of Minnesota forest ecologist Lee Frelich, who worked on the study.

While European worms have been here for more than two centuries,  according to Frelich it takes roughly 1,000 years for a hardwood forest to adapt to such drastic change.  And as the climate warms, these worms are thriving farther and farther north.

While worms move five to 10 metres a year on their own, their wide dispersal is believed to be mostly due to fishermen transferring bait from one lake to another. In 2008, Trent University graduate student Stacy Gan found European earthworms on Akimiski Island in James Bay; their eggs probably arrived  in soil on the runners of float planes carrying goose hunters. Before that, worms had not been found farther north than Moosonee.

January 13, 2010

by Sharon Oosthoek

The green line south of Port-au-Prince shows the fault line where the 7.0-magnitude quake was centred. The epicentre was 10 kilometres beneath the surface. (U.S. Geological Survey)

Tuesday’s earthquake in Haiti was especially destructive because its epicentre was close to a major city and its hypocentre, or focal point, was close to the Earth’s surface, says a Canadian seismologist familiar with the area.

Natural Resources Canada seismologist John Cassidy says the 7.0 quake — centred just 15 kilometres southwest of the capital of Port-au-Prince — happened roughly 10 kilometres below ground.

“If the earthquake had happened further below, it would have lost its energy as it moved up,” he says.

When Seattle was hit with an earthquake measuring 6.8 in 2001, the damage was much less severe because it happened 60 kilometres below ground.

Full article