Study: Deforestation Depletes Fish Stocks 69
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes Adding to the well-known fish-killing effects deforestation has in increasing turbidity and temperature in streams, a study published in Nature Communications, (abstract, PDF access), demonstrates deforestation causes a depletion of nutrients in associated lake aquatic ecosystems and, as a consequence, impacted fish stocks. Lead author Andrew Tanentzap is quoted as saying, 'We found fish that had almost 70% of their biomass made from carbon that came from trees and leaves instead of aquatic food chain sources.' This has troubling implications, as 'It's estimated that freshwater fishes make up more than 6% of the world's annual animal protein supplies for humans ...' Additionally, this may have significance in regard to anadromous species, such as salmon, which help power ocean ecosystems. The BBC offers more approachable coverage.
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Chemistry isn't your strong suit, is it....
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salmon eat in the oceans and go die in freshwater streams where their nitrogen and other nutrients supplies the trees.
Have you ever been outside?
With a few exceptions (eg, the mangrove forests which are ecologically important) MOST trees live outside the river or stream. Water has this tendency to flow downhill, so stuff in the dirt (bits of trees, bits of critters, critter poop, rocks, etc) flows down into the water. For a typical pelagic salmon, most of it's biomass is accumulated in the ocean, then the salmon moves into freshwater to spawn and die. When it dies, the decomposition takes place entirely in the water or
Re:this has nothing to do with salmon (Score:5, Insightful)
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WE have a 10,000 acre tree farm around here and it is full of animals. In fact 90% of Michigan is a Tree farm as it was stripped of trees 200-300 years ago and was replanted, and then harvested, and replanted. huge swaths of the state are perfectly planted rows of pine trees and there is gobs of animals and bugs in them. So many that Freaking bears are now a common sight, and I saw wild coyotes for the first time in my life.
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OLD trees? none. Michigan was literally stripped back in the 1600-1800's of all trees, I think up near Lake superior there is a park that has one of the trees that are older than 300 years old left standing. Idiot teenagers carve their names into it's bark.
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Re:this has nothing to do with salmon (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:this has nothing to do with salmon (Score:4, Informative)
This has actually been studied and when the salmon die they supply a surprising amount of nutrients not only to the streams but to the surrounding forest. As was pointed out by the two other replies to you the dead salmon get eaten by bears, racoons, otters and other critters that then do what a bear does in the surrounding forest. Here's what looks to be a lesson plan on the subject: Fish as Fertilizer: The Impacts of Salmon on Forest Ecosystems [PDF] [buffalo.edu]
No problemo (Score:3)
We'll switch to plant protein supplies, thus solving the problem once and for all.
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ONCE AND FOR ALL [imgur.com]
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Fish, and plankton, and sea greens, and protein from the sea!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiyPqbyHXIg&t=2m5s [youtube.com]
Sorry, this is apropos of nothing, but it just... popped in there.
Who would have thought? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who would have thought that destroying an ecosystem would have more than one bad effect?
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Re:Who would have thought? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who would have thought that destroying an ecosystem would have more than one bad effect?
More to the point, this is hardly a recent revelation.
People in my part of the U.S. were fighting deforestation (this is a logging region), based on studies that said it caused turbidity in streams, causing among other things nutrification and drastically reducing oxygen, which in turn killed the local aquatic life (which is a major sporting industry in this part of the U.S.).
And that was when I was, like, 12 years old. Which was a l-o-n-g time ago.
I'm not saying this paper didn't show something valid. But the suggestion made by OP, that this is all some kind of new revelation, is just a few decades late. Likely there was some fine point in the paper that reinforced what we already knew. But AFAIK, OP says nothing new at all.
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Sure, we knew for a long time that deforestation caused damage to the local aquatic life via several mechanisms. I guess now they claim to have discovered another mechanism, a loss of nutrients (ie, leaves and sticks and fruits and forest insects etc get replaced by erosion-related nutrients). This seems like it would be obvious, although it's not exactly easy to verify.
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Fresh Water vs. Ocean Water Fish (Score:1)
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Are you making up shit?
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WHO Nutrition study: Section on worldwide consumption of seafood [who.int]
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"It's estimated that freshwater fishes make up more than 6% of the world's annual animal protein supplies for humans - and the major and often only source of animal protein for low income families across Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines.
This comes from the Fine Article - where does your data come from?
While we've only studied boreal regions, these results are likely to bear out globally.
Now, this is where they go a little hyperbolic. Maybe yes, maybe no.... But lets not get all wound up about this until you've done a bit more work. Much of the deforestation in the world is in Africa and South America, both very different ecosystems from the boreal region.
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"It's estimated that freshwater fishes make up more than 6% of the world's annual animal protein supplies for humans - and the major and often only source of animal protein for low income families across Bangladesh, Indonesia and the Philippines.
This comes from the Fine Article - where does your data come from?
http://www.thefishsite.com/art... [thefishsite.com]
Total protein consumption per capita is 78g. Total fish consumption is around 5.5g which gives around 7%. This is for both marine and inland. Then, looking at
http://www.greenfacts.org/en/f... [greenfacts.org]
we can get around 41:102 ration between inland:marine, which would mean around 2% of total protein comes from freshwater fish and 5% from marine.
Now it is your turn to provide some sources outside FA proving 6% for freshwater fish. Articles I have quoted above are from 5-10 years ago -
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Good thing we use less paper now (Score:3, Insightful)
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Good thing we use less paper now
Who's we?
As best I can ascertain, paper usage in the US and Europe has reduced over the last few years, but globally it's still increasing.
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Less reason to cut down trees. I still know some people at work who print emails before reading them though, what is wrong with these people? I try to be a good example and casually mention how I avoid using paper in various ways when describing my tasks to others as well as in meetings, but it doesn't seem to make an impression...
More reason to use Hemp as a paper source. Annually renewable.
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Your printer paper usage does not contribute to deforestation, because the paper comes from tree farms (regularly replanted).
Your co-workers probably print emails to reduce eyestrain while reading them. Some people suffer from this more than others.
If you are interested in encouraging noble causes, there are better ones to champion than this.
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Less reason to cut down trees.
More to the point, less reason to plant trees. When there's no money in felling trees, trees get felled or burned anyway to make room for agriculture.
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Fortuitously forest grows pretty darn fast; if you are not picky about what specie of tree you get. Much more of the USA is forested than say 100 years ago, and lots of that is just from nature reclaiming land not deliberate planting by humans.
As people stopped cutting wood as a primary fuel source for heating and cooking and as agriculture has consolidated and moved toward more efficient land use lots has grown back.
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Probably that work has crap monitors. It was very common here at the office until we replaced everyone's monitor with a 2K resolution 24" monitor. The email printing stopped overnight.
If your employer was not a bunch of cheap fools and bought quality IT equipment for people to use, they would not have to resort to printing hings they cant read well on a screen.
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How? (Score:2)
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There are 2 stable isotopes of carbon 12C and 13C. Carbon 14 has too short a half life to be significant in this case. The lighter 12C carbon atom is preferred by photosynthesis so biomass has less 13C than there is in general on the Earth. Since fossil fuels have a mostly biological origin the CO2 emissions from them have less 13C than purely geologic sources like volcanic emissions. It's not all that difficult to measure those things.
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Are you serious? You design some sort of wonderful device that can help hundreds of millions of people, that cost 2900,- to design, and you (a) could not find any party such as oxfam interested in sponsoring this and (b) you hope that the public will somehow start donating money to you based on vague promises and some sort of manual with everything interesting XXX'd out.
I have to say, specifying development costs in CHF gives it some air of credibility, I guess NGN would have been a bit too obvious?
If you a
More sqwauking (Score:2)
from the chicken littles.
undo mod (Score:1)