The Warring States of NPF - A Revolution in Evolution

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A Revolution in Evolution

A Primeval Tide of Toxins
Runoff from modern life is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms. This 'rise of slime,' as one scientist calls it, is killing larger species and sickening people.
By Kenneth R. Weiss, Times Staff Writer
July 30, 2006

Quote:

MORETON BAY, AUSTRALIA -- The fireweed began each spring as tufts of hairy growth and spread across the seafloor fast enough to cover a football field in an hour.

When fishermen touched it, their skin broke out in searing welts. Their lips blistered and peeled. Their eyes burned and swelled shut. Water that splashed from their nets spread the inflammation to their legs and torsos.

"It comes up like little boils," said Randolph Van Dyk, a fisherman whose powerful legs are pocked with scars. "At nighttime, you can feel them burning. I tried everything to get rid of them. Nothing worked."

As the weed blanketed miles of the bay over the last decade, it stained fishing nets a dark purple and left them coated with a powdery residue. When fishermen tried to shake it off the webbing, their throats constricted and they gasped for air.

After one man bit a fishing line in two, his mouth and tongue swelled so badly that he couldn't eat solid food for a week. Others made an even more painful mistake, neglecting to wash the residue from their hands before relieving themselves over the sides of their boats.

For a time, embarrassment kept them from talking publicly about their condition. When they finally did speak up, authorities dismissed their complaints � until a bucket of the hairy weed made it to the University of Queensland's marine botany lab.

Samples placed in a drying oven gave off fumes so strong that professors and students ran out of the building and into the street, choking and coughing.

Scientist Judith O'Neil put a tiny sample under a microscope and peered at the long black filaments. Consulting a botanical reference, she identified the weed as a strain of cyanobacteria, an ancestor of modern-day bacteria and algae that flourished 2.7 billion years ago.

O'Neil, a biological oceanographer, was familiar with these ancient life forms, but had never seen this particular kind before. What was it doing in Moreton Bay? Why was it so toxic? Why was it growing so fast?

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The venomous weed, known to scientists as Lyngbya majuscula, has appeared in at least a dozen other places around the globe. It is one of many symptoms of a virulent pox on the world's oceans.

In many places � the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway � some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.

Jeremy B.C. Jackson, a marine ecologist and paleontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, says we are witnessing "the rise of slime."

For many years, it was assumed that the oceans were too vast for humanity to damage in any lasting way. "Man marks the Earth with ruin," wrote the 19th century poet Lord Byron. "His control stops with the shore."

Even in modern times, when oil spills, chemical discharges and other industrial accidents heightened awareness of man's capacity to injure sea life, the damage was often regarded as temporary.

But over time, the accumulation of environmental pressures has altered the basic chemistry of the seas.

The causes are varied, but collectively they have made the ocean more hospitable to primitive organisms by putting too much food into the water.

Industrial society is overdosing the oceans with basic nutrients � the nitrogen, carbon, iron and phosphorous compounds that curl out of smokestacks and tailpipes, wash into the sea from fertilized lawns and cropland, seep out of septic tanks and gush from sewer pipes.

Modern industry and agriculture produce more fixed nitrogen � fertilizer, essentially � than all natural processes on land. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide, produced by burning fossil fuels, enter the ocean every day.

These pollutants feed excessive growth of harmful algae and bacteria.

At the same time, overfishing and destruction of wetlands have diminished the competing sea life and natural buffers that once held the microbes and weeds in check.

The story goes on from there.

I find it fascinating that we're actually dragging the world back down to the level of primordial stew.

This whole thing is actually quite well known in these parts of the world. Syanobacteria are quite common in the Baltic Sea so they have been studied a lot here. Often during the summer there are vast masses of syanobacteria. Some of them are poisonous and some of them are not.

It's just as the article says. Basic nutrients that get to the sea from fossil fuels, fertilizers and other waste from for example fish tanks at first seems like a good things. Life flourishes as there is more food for all species. But the syanobacteria just grow faster than they are eaten until they reach a point where they have used all of the oxygen in the lower levels of the sea and they rise up to the surface. There they litterally cloud the sea below them from getting any sun light and oxygen. As all the oxygen of the bottom is used out certain bacteria that produce sulphides start to thrive and make the bottom inhabitable for other species. At the same time they stirr up the bottom causing the realese of phosphites in to the water which then again speeds up the growth of the syanobacteria. Syanobacteria has the advantage that the bacteria can take their nitrogen straight from the air as opposed to consumers. This all then leads to vast masses of syanobacteria which, as mentioned, can very well be poisonous.

If any of that made any sense to you then good. If not, I apologize. Knowing this stuff is my forte. Writing it to a perfectly understandable form while trying to traduce most of it from finnish isn't.

Wouldn't a degradation of things to a primordial stew of icky blechyness basically cause life to restart overall?

Who knows. Maybe? Personally I don't think we're there yet. And it's not that easy getting there.

But the problems is serious enough to be considered and done something about. Seriosly.

It sounds like one of those devices that are designed specifically to destroy man. I mean, it seems to have horrible side effects by touching it and breathing it, and it grows rapidly. If I were to make a worst-case-scenario guess, I'd say that, unless this situation is checked, it may quickly spread throughout the oceans, killing many wildlife and harming many humans, and become "a normal thing" for our future generations to deal with. That thought alone scares me. I'm just wondering if we can ever stop this thing from happening.

It kinda reminds me of that incident where a bunch of fish had mercury in them, I think it was in the Pacific Ocean.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ArlanKels

Wouldn't a degradation of things to a primordial stew of icky blechyness basically cause life to restart overall?

I think the answer would be like "sure maybe, if you've got a couple of billion years to wait around."

Quote:

It kinda reminds me of that incident where a bunch of fish had mercury in them, I think it was in the Pacific Ocean.

Japan suffered most from that at one point in the past. Not too long ago. But that's different.

They could just stop dumping their mercury in to the sea, which they did. With this problem we are talking about now, it's not that simple even though the answer to the problem is the same.

So, we officially broke the ocean.

Would a ban on pollution do anything at this point? It looks like the damage has been done. Even a best case scenario, where we all immediately stop dumping our crap into the ocean, it's not like the weed will stop growing. And it looks like it's too toxic for us to safely harvest out of the ocean manually. It looks like it's just going to be a problem for other generations to avoid, since I doubt there's going to be any way to get rid of it.

I think the fastest (not best) way is to find something that kills the bacteria and spread that throughout the ocean. This is FAR from the best.

Probably the best thing we could do is reverse the process by making conditions favorable for advanced life and harmful for the basic life.

Then again... maybe this is just how evolution will have to work now? We ended this branch of evolution, so another one is forming from the trunk of the tree.

choking off its food source would definitely help as it would slow the growth of the stuff. then, whatever has been eating the stuff will get a chance to play a little catch-up. convincing people to stop dumping stuff in the ocean is the hard part.

and as far as this being 'bizzaro evolution' it really doesn't seem like it to me. the chemicals didn't devolve a bunch of modern bacteria, it promoted the growth of a really old one. it'd be like if we were dumping something in rivers that promoted freakish crocodile reproduction rates.