Hokule'a dreaming

Hokule'a is a quarter of the way to Palmyra, more or less, as this is written.

How many of the hundreds of former crew members went out to look at the stars since the departure and imagined what the crew was experiencing?

I did. Faced hema, found steering stars and put myself on board.

In the quiet night, riding the sweep, holding a star at a point in the rigging.

Keeping a backup steering star on the other side of the canoe, for when clouds obscured the first.

Feeling the wind.

Hearing whispered conversations, water moving against the hull, wind in the shrouds.

Bodies moving on deck in the moonlight, then disappearing into the lua, into their bunks, onto the aft trampolines.

Squalls rolling through, wet and cold.

But nobody on board would be anywhere else.

Nowhere else on Earth.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Energy suckers abound, in both senses of the term

There's a sucker born every minute*, and when it comes to energy, it seems the sucker is us.

Society has breathed a collective sigh of relief and stopped worrying too much about the likelihood of high oil prices returning.

We've forgotten that the disruptive oil price peak most associate with the gas lines of the 1970s, actually lasted for a decade, from the mid-70s to the mid-80s.

And we've forgotten that while the most recent peak occurred last summer, the steady ramp-up of oil prices to nearly $150 a barrel went on for half a decade. Some folks are acting as if they figure prices will stay low.

Hybrid car sales are down by a third or more, according to the site hybridcar.com. Of course, all car sales are down, so that may not be the best measure.

Gasoline sales continue to stay comparatively modest, but nobody thinks that's because we're into conservation for conservation's sake. It's because of the rotten economy, says the Energy Information Administration. The EIA figures energy use will begin its rebound in 2010, and prices will start up before that.

“Our current forecast assumes that a recovery in global economic activity begins sometime in the second half of 2009. If this timing assumption proves to be correct, then world oil prices should begin to rise gradually later this year,” the EIA says in its March 11, 2009, “This Week in Petroleum.”

And while President Obama is still talking about energy issues (here and here and here), they are flagging at the Hawai'i State Legislature, according to Blue Planet Foundation's Jeff Mikulina.

“Moving the needle on Hawaii’s oil dependency will not happen this session unless legislators make significant amendments to measures before them. For most lawmakers, ‘supporting clean energy’ is an easy sound bite, but voting for effective policy to get it done is hard,” he said.

Blue Planet's goal is to move the world off its fossil fuel addiction.

Mikulina reports that the Legislature, in the language of bills now moving through the assembly, has weakened its stance on energy independence, energy efficiency and state energy security.

Bills to prohibit new fossil fuel power plants (HB 1464 and SB 1671) have been backed down.
Measures died that would have set Hawai'i's own automobile efficiency standards and to set standards for energy efficiency in homes and offices.

Mikulina said he has hope for bills that would establish higher standards for renewable energy generation. Blue Planet supports an oil surcharge of $5 a barrel (42 gallons in a barrel), with the money to be used for clean energy and efficiency programs.

“Blue Planet believes the low oil price today presents a perfect opportunity to tap the source of our energy problem to fund our solutions—and create good, local, high-paying jobs in the process. The current version of the bill doesn’t specify the amount of the new barrel surcharge,” Blue Planet's statement said.

Blue Planet is pushing for a new version of SB 1173, which it feels should create a system in which you could pay for energy efficiency improvements on your home through your electrric bill.

“By eliminating the up-front cost of energy efficiency investments, on-bill financing is one of the most powerful tools to increase adoption of smart energy technologies (such as solar water heating, photovoltaic, and efficient appliances),” Blue Planet said.

*(The “sucker born every minute” line is often attributed to circus man P.T. Barnum, but apparently was actually the quote of a great hoaxter, David Hannum, who had New York's Cardiff Giant carved, and them claimed it was a petrified human. Barnum, too smooth to publicly use a line that would make his customers seem stupid, out-maneuvered Hannum and cleaned up on the Giant scam.)

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Ocean plants stun researchers with alternative body-building technique

You may prefer to have a house built of wood, but if there's no wood around, you can use concrete or steel.

Turns out phytoplankton have similar options available to them.

(Image: Ocean researchers deploy a Conductivity, Temperature, Depth rosette to conduct inquiries into conditions on the ocean. Credit: Lance A. Fujieki.)

In a bit of groundbreaking research, teams of researchers have found that when their favored cellular wall building blocks are unavailable, microscopic ocean plants can build their cell walls out of replacement compounds.

The teams are from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Southern California, University of Hawai'i, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, University of Southern Maine, and the Centre d’Océanologie de Marseille.

Cell membranes are generally known to be built of a range of compounds, with a phosphorus-based oil compound known as phospholipid prominent among them. And it has been assumed that except in very rare exceptions, you need phospholipids to make cell membranes.

But what is a bit of phytoplankton to do in ocean areas starved of phosphorus? The Sargasso Sea is such an area, and it turns out that phytoplankton like cyanobacteria grow just fine there.

Their trick? They manufacture their cell membranes out of other compounds, notably sulfur.

It's interesting news in a world of climate change, in part because there is evidence that phosphorus may be disappearing from surface waters in parts of the world—including around Hawai'i—due to reduced mixing of nutrient-rich deep water with nutrient-deprived surface water.

Phytoplankton produce much of the world's oxygen, and need to do that near the surface, where there's sunshine to fuel the production. They do lots of other useful things, including suck carbon dioxide out of the atmposphere, and serve as a basic feature of the oceanic food web—with impacts on fisheries, among other things.

“Phosphorus is still measurable but is disappearing from the surface waters (near Hawai'i) at an alarming rate. One prediction from this initial study is that the phytoplankton in Hawaiian waters are likely to become more like those in the Sargasso Sea over time as phosphorus supplies dwindle further,” the University of Hawai'i said in a news release.

What's not clear is what effects such a change would have on all the ocean processes and species that are associated in some way with phytoplankton.

It's also not clear whether other forms of life have the same flexibility in building their cell membranes that phytoplankton have.

“To date, the ability to synthesize substitute lipids appears to be restricted to the phytoplankton; heterotrophic bacteria and other organisms must have a different strategy for survival, or none at all,” the University of Hawai'i release said.

Two Hawai'i researchers, Michael Rappé and David Karl of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology and UH’s new Center for Microbial Oceanography, are co-authors of the new research, published in the March 5, 2009, issue of the journal Nature.

The paper is “Phytoplankton in the ocean use non-phosphorus lipids in response to phosphorus scarcity,” by Benjamin A. S. Van Mooy, Helen F. Fredricks, Byron E. Pedler, Sonya T. Dyhrman, Karl, Michal Koblíek, Michael W. Lomas, Tracy J. Mincer, Lisa R. Moore, Thierry Moutin, Rappé and Eric A. Webb.

The University of Hawai'i School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology release is here.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Corals 4,000 years old can tell environmental tales

If you go where you've never gone before, what are the chances you'll see what you've never seen before?

Pretty good.

That's why, while fascinating, it's not a shock that a recent series of dives in mile-deep water off the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands turned up some bizarre-looking new marine life.

(Images: Above, a new genus and species of orange bamboo coral found 5,745 feet down. It is 4 to 5 feet tall. Credit: Hawaii Deep-Sea Coral Expedition 2007/NOAA . Image below is the Pisces V submersible. Credit: NOAA.)

More information and photos in the official NOAA press release here.

Among the discoveries of a 2007 NOAA-funded mission in the depths of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument are seven new corals, never before described by scientists. And the mission found more signs of life that haven't yet been fully studied,

The coral discoveries are interesting not only for the intrinsic interest in finding new forms of life, but also because they can tell a story about conditions and long-term changes in conditions in the deep ocean.

“Deep-sea bamboo corals also produce growth rings much as trees do, and can provide a much-needed view of how deep ocean conditions change through time,” said Richard Spinrad, NOAA’s assistant administrator for Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. “These corals may be among the first marine organisms to be affected by ocean acidification.”

Some of the corals, still alive, may be 4,000 years old—that's nearly as old as the oldest of the reputed oldest living things on Earth, the bristlecone pines.

The research team, which included University of Hawai'i scientist Christopher Kelley and NOAA researcher Frank Parrish, sought to predict where dense deep coral colonies could be found and studied growth rates of corals. Among their finds, atop a seamount, was a field of dead coral, of a species not previously found in Hawai'i, and which may have died hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The research was conducted in party by the Hawai'i Undersea Research Laboratory, sponsored by NOAA and the University of Hawaii, with the Pisces V submersible. It worked at depths nearly a mile deep.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate

Incredible shape-shifting corals, and how they make conservation tough

You can neither tell a book by its cover, nor a coral head by its appearance.

The coral, in fact, might be the stranger of the two, according to research by a team of University of Hawai'i scientists.

Not only can two corals look very different but be essentially the same genetically. But very similar-looking corals can also be very different genetically.

(Image: These two corals from Maui, Porites lobata (yellow) and Porites compressa (bluish-purple), look very different in both color and form, but genetically they are nearly the same. Is one a hybrid or is this coral just very susceptible to different forms? That's not clear. Credit: Zac Forsman.)

The team, Zac H. Forsman and Robert J. Toonen of the Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology, Daniel J. Barnis of the Zoology Department and Cynthia L. Hunter of the Biology Department, wrote “Shape-shifting corals: Molecular markers show morphology is evolutionarily plastic in Porites,” which appeared in the Biomed Central open access journal Evolutionary Biology. The press release is here.

Corals are now generally identified by their appearance, but the new paper suggests that's not nearly good enough. They expanded standard genetic testing into new areas to try to better understand the corals.

With Porites lutea, which has been treated as a single species, the researchers found that genetically, it could be broken up into at least three distinct genetic groups that the authors say are “deeply genetically divergent.

In other cases, they found that different-looking corals with, say, a branching appearance or a mounding appearance, were almost impossible to tell apart at the genetic level—like the two species pictured above.

In part, this means that some corals that you'd expect to be quite distinct may actually be capable of interbreeding. And some species may just be real shape-shifters, inherently capable of taking different looks.

That has a number of impacts.

One is that you might have assumed a unique-looking coral in a given environment was endemic or unique to that locale. But in fact, it might simply be just another a natural form of that coral.

And other corals, which might look the same in different locations, might actually represent unique adaptations.

“This ‘coral species problem’ is an impediment to understanding the evolution and biodiversity of this important and threatened group of organisms,” the authors write.

In a challenging environmental age, in which coral reefs are threatened by warming oceans, by rising waters, by pollution, by alien species invasions and more, this makes it all the more difficult to develop strategies to protect the corals.

Indeed, until you can accurately tell one coral from another, or identify siblings, your reef could be experiencing change or losing things without you knowing it.

In the words of the scientists: “Species definitions based solely on evolutionarily labile, polymorphic, or phenotypically plastic traits are likely to be misleading and confound attempts to identify, understand, and conserve coral biodiversity or to recognize its loss.”

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate