Thirty days hath September...

     Happy Leap Day, everyone! For those of you born on or fool enough to get married on this day (hi Mom, hi Dad), happy actual birthday/anniversary! Yes, this is one of those wonderful
years when we get an extra day of February. But why is that? Why, in our modern age, do we have a month that changes length every four years?

     As any elementary school student can tell you, we have Leap Year every four years. The reason it comes around every four years is that the solar year and the calendar year are off by a factor of about ¼ of a day. Hence, every four years, we’ve racked up an extra day. Julius Caesar,  of all people, came up with the idea of having an extra day every four years. Or, rather, Julius Caesar commissioned a bunch of scientists to come up with a solution. His frustration with the calendar then in existence is understandable - before we had a leap day, we had a leap month. And that leap month was not consistently applied. Caesar decided on an every four years automatic change to prevent the problems of his time - winter festivals were being celebrated in spring, as the mismatch between the solar year and the calendar year became more and more noticeable. The new, corrected, oh so modestly named Julian Calendar remained in effect until the sixteenth century. At that point, it was becoming evident that the solar year isn’t off by exactly a quarter of the day. It’s off by ¼ of a day minus 11 minutes. This seems trivial, but it adds up over the centuries. The new Gregorian calendar knocked off three leap years per century, and remains in effect today. Mostly. A fascinating combination of social and political differences throughout the world meant that it was well into the 20th century before every country was using the Gregorian calendar. The Julian calendar remains in effect for certain applications within astronomy, as astronomical time isn’t overly concerned with what Earth season matches up to what month.
    
      Calendars are one of those things that, the more you think about, the weirder they are. Theoretically, we mark the length of a year by how long it takes the Earth to complete an orbit of the sun. But how, exactly, do we do that? One way is to measure the time from equinox to equinox, or solstice to solstice. Pick a fixed point on the Earth (preferably not on the Equator), measure the length of a day, and measure how long it takes until you get another day of that exact same length. You should wind up with a measurement of 365.24 days. Alternately, you can measure the time it takes the Earth to move from perihelion (the closest point in it’s orbit to the Sun) back to perihelion. Thus, this measures one full circuit of the sun. But that gives you a measurement about 25 minutes longer than the equinox-equinox method. Wait, what?

    The equinox-based method measures the circuit of seasons on Earth, a cycle controlled partly by the tilt of the Earth’s axis. The perihelion method measures the actual orbit of the Earth around the Sun. The two cycles don’t quite line up, hence, the difference in a year length as calculated by either method. For most purposes on Earth, the seasonal equinox cycle is perfectly fine, and since most people and cultures strongly associate the calendar year with seasons, works better for day to day use. Time, after all, is relative.

    This isn’t even getting into the weirdnesses of the lunar year, or why we define day length the way we do, or, God help us all, daylight savings time (we’ll wait until that actually starts to get into it). Calendars seem immutable, but are really an array of fixes meant to more or less make time measured as we perceive it match up with time as it actually progresses. Imagine how much fun this is going to be when we colonize space

So much more than just peanuts

We’ve still got four days left in the month of February. February, as most US readers will know, has been officially designated AfricanAmerican History Month. Leaving aside the debate on whether or not 28 to 29 days is really enough to honor the contributions of one eighth of the American population, I’m going to use this opportunity to blather on about one of my favorite scientists of all time - George Washington Carver.

 For most of us, the name probably provokes an immediate association with peanuts, and justifiably so. One Carver publication was entitled “How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing it for Human Consumption”. Carver has even been called the inventor of peanut butter. None of this work was born out of some irrational devotion to the peanut. Carver devoted much of his life to improving the lot of small farmers in the southeastern United States. Centuries of cotton monoculture had left behind a legacy of sharecropping, exhausted soils and economic vulnerability. Carver promoted the cultivation of several legume crops, including peanuts, as a solution to the problem. Legumes are nitrogen fixers - switching a field from cotton to peanut production returns nutrients to depleted soils. While still a labor-intensive crop, every part of the peanut plant can be either used by the farmer or sold at market. Peanuts were not susceptible to the diseases and pests affecting cotton, including the devastating boll weevil.

  

But that’s just scratching the surface. Carver was a self-made scientist. Born into slavery in Missouri, he received some basic education from his former owner. For everything else, Carver was on his own. As a boy, he traveled to Kansas to complete his education. As Carver had to work to support himself, he was in his twenties before he finished high school. He was accepted to college in Kansas, but rejected for being black, and wound up attending college in Iowa. By the time he received a Masters from Iowa State University, he had become a well-respected botanist. Carver was recruited to run the Agriculture Department at the Tuskegee Institute. 

  The Tuskegee Institute ran one of the best known land-grant programs then open to African-American students (for the record, Tuskegee University still offers excellent instruction, to students of all colors). At Tuskegee, Carver was the embodiment of the land grant ideal. He applied the latest scientific techniques to the problems of small farmers. Over his career, Carver authored 44 technical bulletins on subjects ranging from the finer points of sweet potato farming to suggested programs of gardening and nature education for rural schools. In order to better reach the small farmers of the South, Carver designed a portable demonstration laboratory and took it on the road. Carver sought to encourage dialogue between farmers and agricultural scientists, by soliciting soil and water samples from farmers, and offering classes to farmers - a forerunner of the soil testing services and practical classes offered to today’s farmers through the Cooperative Extension program.

 

Carver was more than a practical farmer, however. Over his career he accumulated a slew of awards, including being one of the few Americans named to the British Royal Academy of Sciences. Carver became a household name in the United States after testifying before Congress as an expert on peanut production. After his testimony, he became a widely sought-after lecturer throughout the country. At a time of de jure segregation in the South, de facto segregation in the North, and a general attitude throughout the United States that African-Americans were inherently stupid, George Washington Carver had become an acknowledged expert. As such, he helped to legitimize the technical work of the Tuskegee Institute, attracting funding and support from prominent Americans. Not only did Carver achieve his immediate goal of improving the lot of the poor farmer, but he whittled away at existing stereotypes, and helped pave the way for the generations of African-American scientists and engineers who came after him.

Our crippling dependence on fossil...water?

   One of the many arguments made against the Keystone XL pipeline is that said pipeline will be transporting crude oil over the Ogallala Aquifer. In my home region, the humid eastern United States, much of our water comes from surface water - while individual rural homes may have wells, municipal water typically comes out of rivers or reservoirs. In the arid central and western United States, however, groundwater is the primary source of water for human use. Hence the concern over a crude oil pipeline crossing a major groundwater source. Crude oil, as anyone can tell you, is nasty stuff, and is as much as 1% by volume BTEX compounds. BTEX compounds are a family of volatile chemicals with irritant, neurotoxic and carcinogenic properties, and tend to persist in the environment. Much of the opposition to the pipeline has crystallized around potential of crude oil and BTEX leaking from the pipeline and seeping into one of the world’s largest groundwater systems. 

   So, clearly, we want to keep benzene, toluene, ethylene, xylene and other things ending in “-ene” out of the water supply. But is this the only threat to the Ogallala? Probably not. The aquifer underlies the Great Plains, the so-called breadbasket of the United States. In our industrialized age, intensive agriculture is typically coupled with intensive pesticide application and fertilizer runoff, and the Great Plains are no exception. Like all aquifers, the Ogallala receives some “recharge” water. Precipitation falls on the land, and some of that precipitation works it was down into the groundwater. As the water filters through soil and rock, it tends to pick up dissolved solutes.In the absence of human influence, groundwater may contain elevated levels of calcium, magnesium, iron, salt, chloride, sulfur...even arsenic. Human activities can introduce a range of agricultural contaminants. A recent USGS assessment of the Ogallala Aquifer found elevated concentrations of nitrates, pesticides and arsenic throughout the aquifer. To any Great Plains readers, don’t panic, the concentrations are still well below anything dangerous, but they are still higher than they should be (zero). 

   

    All right, so the Ogallala is facing water quality threats. Anything else? Most certainly yes. The Ogallala, like most aquifers, is fossil water. Some new water enters every year, but most of the water present has been in the ground for thousands of years. The water demands of the intensive irrigation that fuels much of our agricultural productivity in the United States are much higher than the recharge rate. Consequently, the aquifer is being drawn down in many areas. The decline in water levels is not uniform throughout the region, but has been enough to provoke concern among local users, and draw attention to the importance of water conservation measures.

 

   The Ogallala isn’t the only strained aquifer out there. Much of the world is dependent on fossil water. Fossil water is in many ways similar to fossil fuels. In much the same way that the discovery of energy-dense fossil fuels freed humans from the constraints of low energy wood burning or early current-turbine power, the discovery of fossil water freed humans from reliance on seasonally unreliable surface water. Again, similar to fossil fuels, the sudden availability of such a large source of a previously difficult to obtain necessity fueled excessive, seemingly wasteful behavior. Take Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is an arid country with the great fortune of being on top of both huge fossil fuel and fossil water resources. In the last several decades, a rising population, a rising standard of living (due largely to the fossil fuels) and such seemingly quixotic national programs as attempting the development of a domestic dairy cow industry have combined to greatly stress the abundant groundwater reserves. Conservation measures are now being implemented, but a good deal of water has already been wasted. Compare this to the popularity of the Hummer, and other vehicles of its ilk.

 

   This isn’t to say that aquifers are all bad. Huge quantities of potable water are still present underground in many regions of the world, and careful use of that water can improve living standards for many who still suffer from drought, parasitic contamination, and the other vagaries of surface water. Just remember, however inexhaustible they may seem, aquifers are vulnerable to human use and misuse. In much the same way that we are slowly learning to live within the limits of fossil fuels, and take advantage of the research permitted by a high level of industrialization to develop alternatives, perhaps we can develop a sustainable groundwater-use strategy out of our current exploitation of the resource.

Consider the Jellyfish

      A couple weeks ago, I was wandering around a beach in Georgia, when I found this. At first I thought it was a piece of trash, then I realized that it was some sort of jellyfish. But what kind of jellyfish was I looking at? My visual experience with these noble invertebrates was limited to the odd translucent blobs that wash up on Long Island beaches by the score in summer, and to pulsating, unearthly aquarium specimens. This was clearly neither option. So, I did what all wired twenty-somethings would do. I whipped out my digital camera and took a picture. Hey, at least I didn’t attempt to use a smartphone app to ID it then and there, right?

     Later on, I began to explore the internet to put a name to my specimen. It was, I thought, quite well preserved, and I was confident I would soon find an identical picture. No such luck. It was only on a third scrolling through of a website on the marine fauna of the Carolinas that I found this image.

 

      Turns out my well preserved specimen was more of a well-preserved fragment, one that did no justice to the elegance of the cannonball jellyfish. According to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, the cannonball jellyfish, Stomolophus meleagris, is found throughout the Atlantic and Pacific, and is particularly common on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the southeastern United States. They can get up to ten inches in size, and are the main prey of leatherback sea turtles. Variations in the cannonball jellyfish population may even exert some control on the population size of leatherbacks. Cannonball jellyfish also serve as a food source for humans, although the aforementioned influence on an endangered sea turtle species necessitates regulation of the fishery. Not bad for a lump of protoplasm, eh?

      This is only scratching the surface. The reams of information I found from a simple “cannonball jellyfish” keyword search suggest that we, as a culture, may need to rethink our attitudes towards the cnidarian phylum. What are your immediate associations with the word “jellyfish”? I’m going to guess they run something like “stinging, slimy, stinging, phosphorecent, stinging, tentacles, stinging”. True, jellyfish sting. Most jellyfish produce toxins, although with many jellyfish, the toxin produced is extremely mild and no more painful for a human to encounter than, say, vinegar. This is not to say that you should immediately go and cuddle the first jellyfish you see, of course, as some of the ones that have an extremely nasty sting look exactly like the ones that do not.

     And this brings us to the sheer diversity of jellyfish out there. Jellyfish have been around for over 500 million years. They were likely one of the first complex organisms to evolve, and one of the first free-swimming organisms to exist. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of species occupy environments in every ocean, ranging from shallow estuaries to deep sea vents. Individuals range in size from centimeters-long Australian specimens to tens of meters-long Lion’s Mane jellyfish. Some jellyfish are even found inland, in freshwater rivers and lakes. Far from unthinking blobs of plasma, jellyfish have been found to exhibit neuron arrangements which may perform a function similar to the vertebrate brain and spinal column assemblage. Jellyfish use chemical signaling to distinguish members of the same species from potentially aggressive predatory jellyfish. Some jellyfish have eye organs - the box jellyfish has 24 eyes, spaced in such a way as to give it a 360 view of its surroundings.

     I could go on and on about jellyfish. About the delicate tracery of the moon jellyfish, or the rich colors of the Pacific sea nettle. About the dramatic patterning of the purple-striped jellyfish, or the delicate structure of the white-spotted jellyfish. Jellyfish are best experienced in aquariums, as they contain up to 95% water content and quickly deflate out of water. Those icky blobs washing up on beaches worldwide are just a shadow of the magnificent creatures that have roamed our oceans for eons, and will likely roam our oceans for eons more. Jellyfish remind us of the often hidden nature of biodiversity, and the wonders that may be lurking just under the surface of what we can see.

Welcome to my mind

Hi, there! If you're reading this, you've stumbled upon the fascinating (I hope) world of Delusions of Grandeur. This is the place where I, a Masters student in ecology, blather on at great length about topics in science, policy, philosophy and all kinds of other things that I (and likely no one else) find interesting. Here in the wilds of the internet, I shall pretend to expertise I lack, and indulge in the delusion that I am an expert in...well, anything. Mostly, I'm going to talk about stuff I think is cool. Read along if you dare.