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Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times A crewman aboard the Aurora hoses pollock into the hold of the 191-foot trawler. Alaskan pollock is America's largest fishery.

DUTCH HARBOR, ALASKA --

The approach runs contrary to prevailing notions of cutthroat economic competition evident in, for example, "Deadliest Catch," the TV series about fishermen braving rough seas to catch as much crab as they can in just a few days. But a team of ecologists and economists say that sharing, rather than competing, can make fishing safer, preserve fish populations and even help stocks recover.

Photos: Dutch Harbor, Alaska

"It's good for the fish, it's good for the fishermen, but it's not so good for TV shows," said Steven D. Gaines, a marine ecologist at UC Santa Barbara.

The Alaskan king crab fishery switched over to "individual fishing quotas" several years ago, following the success stories of Alaskan halibut and pollock and other fisheries in New Zealand and Iceland -- where shares of the catch have been parceled out to existing fishermen, permitting them to fill their quotas in a more rational way.

Today, Gaines joins a pair of resource economists, who analyzed fisheries around the world, in publishing a study in the journal Science that shows how these quotas granted to individual fishermen or fishing cooperatives appear to be working.

The team studied more than 50 years of catch data from 11,135 fisheries worldwide that another team of scientists had compiled to show that nearly a third of the world's commercial fisheries have collapsed, including the cod fishery off New England and many bottom-dwelling rockfish fisheries off California.

Scientists predicted that if overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction continued unabated, all of the world's fisheries would collapse by 2048. A fishery is considered collapsed if catches fall to 10% of historic highs.

But the small fraction of those fisheries -- 121 to be exact -- that switched to individual quotas were only half as likely to collapse, according to the study led by Christopher Costello, a resource economist at UC Santa Barbara.

Costello said he was surprised to find that the data showed such clear support for a fundamental tenet of resource economics: A change in incentives can remove the motivation to out-compete someone else and switch to longer-term conservation.

He likens it to handing a milkshake to five kids with five straws. "The incentive is for the kids to slurp like hell even if they get a brain freeze," Costello said. "Contrast that to dividing the milkshake into five little cups. The kids can enjoy it as long as they want and get a higher payoff." That's exactly what we find in fisheries." Andy Rosenberg, a fisheries expert at the University of New Hampshire, cautioned that as promising as they may be, "it's not like catch shares solve all of the problems of fisheries management." He noted that New Zealand's orange roughy stocks nose-dived despite the switch to catch shares in the early '90s.

It remains crucial, he said, for governments to limit the total catch to keep stocks healthy enough to reproduce. And then there's the problem of fairly distributing the shares, or quotas. Inevitably, Rosenberg said, some fishermen will feel shortchanged and scream that the government "has stolen our heritage."

The study's authors acknowledge that catch shares are not a panacea. They note that such quotas don't have to be doled out to individual fishermen but can be allocated to fishing cooperatives or communities.

The study was funded, in part, by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, which donated $5 million to a multi-pronged effort to restore the rockfish and cod fisheries off the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington.

At its November meeting in San Diego, the Pacific Fishery Management Council is set to have a final vote on switching to an individual quota system. It's designed to follow congressional mandates for more of these quota systems to reduce the number of commercial boats on the water and the amount of "by-catch," fish caught and shoveled overboard dead because fishermen don't have permits to land them.

The Alaskan halibut fishery has become the poster child for how the system can work well. It has gone from a deadly race to fish over a few days to a leisurely quota system that has delivered a steady supply of fresh halibut to restaurants and seafood cases and given fishermen more money per pound of fish.

The switch has transformed Dutch Harbor, America's biggest seafood port, from a seasonal work camp to a year-round town with so many families it needs to build a second school, said Mayor Shirley Marquardt.

"This used to be a town on steroids," Marquardt said. Businesses would work to exhaustion for a few weeks a year, importing workers for the brief season.

Now catches of crab, halibut and pollock arrive on staggered schedules, resulting in less waste of fish, said Sinclair Wilt, who runs a processing plant here for Alyeska Seafoods Inc. The short-term jobs have evolved into longer-term employment.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, now the Republican vice presidential nominee, briefly worked in Alyeska's plant in 1987 at the end of her college years. "She was only here three weeks," Wilt said. "She knows hard work, and she's eligible for rehire if her current prospects don't work out."

A dairying system that is turning effluent into power and fertiliser in Canterbury is expected to revolutionise the way farmers treat cow muck.

Its investors have set up a pilot plant at a Landcorp Farming dairy farm in Eyrewell that is extracting methane and carbon dioxide from effluent with biodigester technology, and using it as fuel in a co-generation plant to make electricity.

The methane would otherwise have gone into the atmosphere and produced greenhouse gases.

The system also turns the effluent into a better fertiliser than what the cow drops on a paddock.

After being left in the heated digester for 20 days, nitrates in the effluent lose their polluting ability and are turned into ammonium nitrate, with acidity levels close to neutral.

STACY SQUIRES/The Press GOOD GAS: Ian Bywater, left, and Peter Stevens in front of the 'digestive tank' at the pilot biogas plant in Eyrewell where effluent is turned into power and fertiliser.

The patented technology was developed by Ian Bywater, manager of Natural Systems. It is about to be made commercially available.

Bywater said New Zealand dairy farms could be world leaders in producing stand-alone power generated from a waste product which removed greenhouse-gas emissions and produced better milk and fertiliser.

It was a revolutionary step for dealing with effluent on the farm, he said.

"We pride ourself on having a clean, green image, but it is severely tested by our major export industry. Adopting this as a standard for processing dairy-farm effluent would reap major international accolades."

Effluent is collected after milking and pumped into a tank where a biogas made up of 65 per cent methane and 35 per cent carbon dioxide is produced.

This mixture is used as a fuel for a diesel generator to generate power. Waste heat from the engine heats the digester plant, with electricity used on the farm and surplus power made available to the main grid.

Water is automatically frozen by the computer-controlled BioGenCool technology so milk can be cooled instantaneously.

This is much quicker than conventional sheds, which must cool milk to 7deg within three hours of milking to prevent bacteria building up.

Ice-cold water from an ice tank goes through a heat exchanger to rob the milk of its heat. Warm water from the process is returned to the ice bank to turn ice into cold water.

This also means that the milk can be stored longer and does not have to be collected as often.

"As far as we know, this is an unique system," said Bywater.

"You can find ice banks in dairies for rapid cooling of milk, although it may not be done automatically, and you will find biogas producing electricity on farms, but to my knowledge no-one has integrated the whole system."

Refinements to the demonstration plant built last year have been completed and it is ready for its first full season.

So far, the 750-head dairy herd produces 80 per cent of the power needed to run a generator, hot-water savings of $3000 and 15,000 fewer litres of water a day, as well as big savings in fertiliser costs.

To be self-sufficient in power, the effluent from about 1000 cows is needed.

A biogas unit and milk-cooling system might cost $300,000 for a 1000-cow farm.

The payback from effluent-generated power alone is expected to be 10 years, Bywater said.

The power benefits are at least tripled if the system is attached to a cow housing unit or feed-pad system and Natural Systems has linked with Spanwood Building Systems (SBS) to make this available.

SBS's managing director, Peter Stevens, said the downside of more effluent from housing cows was an advantage when bioplant processing was attached to a confinement system.

"When cows are put into housed-fed situations they will produce 20 per cent more milk, they are healthier and they will last 20 per cent longer."

Stevens plans to incorporate his patented laminated veneer lumber in housing sheds of up to 50m in span.

He has invested $800,000 over the last two years, the same amount Natural Systems has invested in research and development for its technology.

 The thin strips of 3mm pine laminated into 150mm thick, 1.2m wide spans are half the cost of steel.

The BioGenCool technology has attracted interest from Australia and the United Kingdom.

New Zealand is home to 2,065 native plants found nowhere else on Earth. They range from magnificent towering kauri trees to tiny flowers that form tightly packed mounds called vegetable sheep.

When Europeans began arriving in New Zealand, they brought with them alien plants — crops, garden plants and stowaway weeds. Today, 22,000 non-native plants grow in New Zealand. Most of them can survive only with the loving care of gardeners and farmers. But 2,069 have become naturalized: they have spread out across the islands on their own. There are more naturalized invasive plant species in New Zealand than native species.

It sounds like the makings of an ecological disaster: an epidemic of invasive species that wipes out the delicate native species in its path. But in a paper published in August in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dov Sax, an ecologist at Brown University, and Steven D. Gaines, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, point out that the invasion has not led to a mass extinction of native plants. The number of documented extinctions of native New Zealand plant species is a grand total of three.

Exotic species receive lots of attention and create lots of worry. Some scientists consider biological invasions among the top two or three forces driving species into extinction. But Dr. Sax, Dr. Gaines and several other researchers argue that attitudes about exotic species are too simplistic. While some invasions are indeed devastating, they often do not set off extinctions. They can even spur the evolution of new diversity.

“I hate the ‘exotics are evil’ bit, because it’s so unscientific,” Dr. Sax said.

Multimedia Graphic The Spread of Exotic Species Graphic The Diversity of Plant Species

Dr. Sax and his colleagues are at odds with many other experts on invasive species. Their critics argue that the speed with which species are being moved around the planet, combined with other kinds of stress on the environment, is having a major impact.

There is little doubt that some invasive species have driven native species extinct. But Dr. Sax argues that they are far more likely to be predators than competitors.

In their new paper, Dr. Sax and Dr. Gaines analyze all of the documented extinctions of vertebrates that have been linked to invasive species. Four-fifths of those extinctions were because of introduced predators like foxes, cats and rats. The Nile perch was introduced into Lake Victoria in 1954 for food. It then began wiping out native fish by eating them.

“If you can eat something, you can eat it everywhere it lives,” Dr. Sax said.

But Dr. Sax and Dr. Gaines argue that competition from exotic species shows little sign of causing extinctions. This finding is at odds with traditional concepts of ecology, Dr. Sax said. Ecosystems have often been seen as having a certain number of niches that species can occupy. Once an ecosystem’s niches are full, new species can take them over only if old species become extinct.

But as real ecosystems take on exotic species, they do not show any sign of being saturated, Dr. Sax said. In their paper, Dr. Sax and Dr. Gaines analyze the rise of exotic species on six islands and island chains. Invasive plants have become naturalized at a steady pace over the last two centuries, with no sign of slowing down. In fact, the total diversity of these islands has doubled.

Fish also show this pattern, said James Brown of the University of New Mexico. He said that whenever he visits a river where exotic fish have been introduced, “I ask, ‘Have you seen any extinctions of the natives?’ ” “The first response you get is, ‘Not yet,’ as if the extinction of the natives is an inevitable consequence. There’s this article of faith that the net effect is negative.”

Dr. Brown does not think that faith is warranted. In Hawaii, for example, 40 new species of freshwater fish have become established, and the 5 native species are still present. Dr. Brown and his colleagues acknowledge that invasive species can push native species out of much of their original habitat. But they argue that native species are not becoming extinct, because they compete better than the invasive species in certain refuges.

These scientists also point out that exotics can actually spur the evolution of new diversity. A North American plant called saltmarsh cordgrass was introduced into England in the 19th century, where it interbred with the native small cordgrass. Their hybrid offspring could not reproduce with either original species, producing a new species called common cordgrass.

Long before humans moved plants around, many plants hybridized into new species by this process. “Something like a third of the plant species you see around you formed that way,” Dr. Sax said.

Biological invasions also set off bursts of natural selection. House sparrows, for example, have moved to North America from Europe and have spread across the whole continent. “Natural selection will start to change them,” Dr. Sax said. “If you give that process enough time, they will become new species.”

“The natives themselves are also likely to adapt,” Dr. Sax added. Some of the fastest rates of evolution ever documented have taken place in native species adapting to exotics. Some populations of soapberry bugs in Florida, for example, have shifted from feeding on a native plant, the balloon vine, to the goldenrain tree, introduced from Asia by landscapers in the 1950s. In five decades, the smaller goldenrain seeds have driven the evolution of smaller mouthparts in the bugs, along with a host of other changes.

In Australia, the introduction of cane toads in the 1930s has also spurred evolution in native animals. “Now that you have cane toads in Australia, there’s a strong advantage for snakes that can eat them,” said Mark Vellend, of the University of British Columbia. Cane toads are protected by powerful toxins in their skin that can kill predators that try to eat them. But in parts of the country where the toads now live, black snakes are resistant to the toxins in their skin. In the parts where the toad has yet to reach, the snakes are still vulnerable.

Dr. Brown argues that huge negative effects of invasions are not documented in the fossil record, either. “You see over and over and over again that this is never the case,” he said. Species have invaded new habitats when passageways between oceans have opened up or when continents have collided.

“The overall pattern almost always is that there’s some net increase in diversity,” Dr. Brown said. “That seems to be because these communities of species don’t completely fill all the niches. The exotics can fit in there.”

In a recent paper in the journal Science, Peter Roopnarine of the California Academy of Sciences and Geerat Vermeij of the University of California, Davis, looked at the history of invasions among species of mollusks, a group that includes mussels, clams and whelks. About 3.5 million years ago, the mollusks of the North Pacific staged a major invasion of the North Atlantic. Before then, the Arctic Ocean had created a barrier, because the mussels could not survive in the dark, nutrient-poor water under the ice.

A period of global warming made the Arctic less forbidding. Yet the migration did not lead to a significant drop in the diversity of the Atlantic native mussels. Instead, the Atlantic’s diversity rose. Along with the extra exotic species, new species may have arisen through hybridization.

The Arctic Ocean is now warming again, this time because of human activity. Computer projections indicate it will become ice-free at least part of the year by 2050. Dr. Roopnarine and Dr. Vermeij predicted that today’s mollusks would make the same transoceanic journey they did 3.5 million years ago. They also expect the invasion to increase, rather than decrease, diversity.

But critics, including Anthony Ricciardi of McGill University in Montreal, argue that today’s biological invasions are fundamentally different from those of the past.

“What’s happening now is a major form of global change,” Dr. Ricciardi said. “Invasions and extinctions have always been around, but under human influence species are being transported faster than ever before and to remote areas they could never reach. You couldn’t get 35 European mammals in New Zealand by natural mechanisms. They couldn’t jump from one end of the world to another by themselves.”

It is estimated that humans move 7,000 species a day. In the process, species are being thrown together in combinations that have never been seen before. “We’re seeing the assembly of new food webs,” said Phil Cassey of the University of Birmingham in England. Those new combinations may allow biological invasions to drive species extinct in unexpected ways.

Botulism, for example, is killing tens of thousands of birds around the Great Lakes. Studies indicate that two invasive species triggered the outbreak. The quagga mussel, introduced from Ukraine, filters the water for food, making it clearer. The sunlight that penetrates the lakes allows algae to bloom, and dead algae trigger an explosion of oxygen-consuming bacteria. As the oxygen level drops, the botulism-causing bacteria can multiply. The quagga mussels take up the bacteria, and they in turn are eaten by another invasive species: a fish known as the round goby. When birds eat round gobies, they become infected and die.

“If you pour on more species, you don’t just increase the probability that one is going to arrive that’s going to have a high impact,” Dr. Ricciardi said. “You also get the possibility of some species that triggers a change in the rules of existence.”

Dr. Ricciardi argues that biological invasions are different today for another reason: they are occurring as humans are putting other kinds of stress on ecosystems. “Invasions will interact with climate change and habitat loss,” he said. “. We’re going to see some unanticipated synergies.”

Both sides agree, however, that decisions about invasive species should be based on more than just a tally of positive and negative effects on diversity. Invasive weeds can make it harder to raise crops and graze livestock, for example. The Asian long-horned beetle is infesting forests across the United States and is expected to harm millions of acres of hardwood trees. Zebra mussels have clogged water supply systems in the Midwestern United States. Exotic species can also harm humans’ health. “West Nile virus, influenza — these things are invasions,” Dr. Ricciardi said.

On the other hand, some invasive species are quite important. In the United States, many crops are pollinated by honeybees originally introduced from Europe.

“It’s not that this is all good or all bad, and I’m not sure science should be the arbiter,” Dr. Brown said. “Placing values on these things is the job of society as a whole.”

The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.
~Dennis Gabor, Innovations: Scientific, Technological and Social, 1970

According to UK and U.S. researchers, it should be possible to fight the global warming effects associated with an increase of dioxide levels by using autonomous cloud-seeding ships to spray salt water into the air. This project would require the deployment of a worldwide fleet of 1,500 unmanned ships to cool the Earth even if the level of carbon dioxide doubled. These 300-tonne ships ‘would be powered by the wind, but would not use conventional sails. Instead they would be fitted with a number of 20 m-high, 2.5 m-diameter cylinders known as Flettner rotors. The researchers estimate that such ships would cost between £1m and £2m each. This translates to a US$2.65 to 5.3 billion total cost for the ships only. Even if this project has its merits, who will finance it? The scientists don’t answer this question. But read more…

If they’re built one day, these cloud-seeding ships will use the concept of the rotor ship developed by German engineer Anton Flettner, which is based “on the Magnus effect where a spinning body in a moving airstream experiences a force perpendicular to the direction of the airstream.” (Credit: Wikipedia) Flettner built two sea-going ships. The first one, shown above, initially named Buckau, then renamed Baden-Baden crossed the Atlantic in 1926. Here is a larger version of this vintage image. (Credit: Wikipedia)

You can see above a conceptual Flettner spray vessel. “The wind would be blowing from the reader’s right-hand side, the rotor spin would be clockwise seen from above and rotor thrust to the left. Vessels can also report sea and air temperatures, humidity, solar input, the direction and velocities of winds and currents, atmospheric pressure, visibility, cloud cover, plankton count, aerosol count, salinity, radio reception and could even rescue yachtsmen in distress.” (Credits: John Latham et al. for the caption, John MacNeill for the picture).

This project has been led by Professor John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Latham worked with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh led by Professor Stephen Salter. You can see another picture of these conceptual cloud-seeding ships on page 3 of a paper presented by Slater in October 2005, “Beyond carbon: consideration of albedo control technologies to mitigate climate change” (PDF format, 6 pages, 653 KB).

Now, let’s discover the Latham proposal. It “involves increasing the reflectivity, or “albedo”, of clouds lying about 1 km above the ocean’s surface. The idea relies on the “Twomey effect”, which says that increasing the concentration of water droplets within a cloud raises the overall surface area of the droplets and thereby enhances the cloud’s albedo. By spraying fine droplets of sea water into the air, the small particles of salt within each droplet act as new centres of condensation when they reach the clouds above, leading to a greater concentration of water droplets within each cloud.”

And here is another quote from the PhysicsWorld.com about these future cloud-seeding rotor ships. “These rotors would be easier to operate remotely than sails and would also serve as the conduits for the upward spray, with the spray consisting of droplets 0.8 µm in diameter generated by passing sea water through micro nozzles. The power for the spray and the cylinder rotation would be provided by oversized propellers operating as turbines. The immediate effect of seeding clouds in this way would be a local cooling of the sea surface, and as such the technique could be targeted at coral reefs, diminishing polar ice sheets or other vulnerable regions. However, the great thermal heat capacity of the ocean and the currents within it mean that these initial effects would eventually spread across the globe.”

This research work has been published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (PTRS) under the title “Sea-going hardware for the cloud albedo method of reversing global warming” on August 29, 2008. Here is a quote from the abstract. “The present paper describes in outline the rationale and underlying engineering hardware that may bring the strategy from concept to operation. Wind-driven spray vessels will sail back and forth perpendicular to the local prevailing wind and release micron-sized drops of seawater into the turbulent boundary layer beneath marine stratocumulus clouds. The combination of wind and vessel movements will treat a large area of sky. When residues left after drop evaporation reach cloud level they will provide many new cloud condensation nuclei giving more but smaller drops and so will increase the cloud albedo to reflect solar energy back out to space.”

Here is a second excerpt describing the ships. “The vessels will drag turbines resembling oversized propellers through the water to provide the means for generating electrical energy. Some will be used for rotor spin, but most will be used to create spray by pumping 30kgs^-1 of carefully filtered water through banks of filters and then to micro-nozzles with piezoelectric excitation to vary drop diameter. The rotors offer a convenient housing for spray nozzles with fan assistance to help initial dispersion. The ratio of solar energy reflected by a drop at the top of a cloud to the energy needed to make the surface area of the nucleus on which it has grown is many orders of magnitude and so the spray quantities needed to achieve sufficient global cooling are technically feasible.”

Here is a link to the full text of this paper (PDF format, 18 pages, 1.75 MB). This article was included in a special issue of the PTRS journal named “Geoscale engineering to avert dangerous climate change” which carried another article co-authored by Latham, “Global temperature stabilization via controlled albedo enhancement of low-level maritime clouds.”

Sources: Edwin Cartlidge, PhysicsWorld.com, September 4, 2008; and various websites