Jennifer Foster Online

WOOHOO!

Deadliest Catch Season 5 airs April 14, 2009 at 9PM, according to Capt. Phil Harris’ MySpace page. I can’t wait to see if Capt. Phil is back after suffering a pulmonary embolism last season. The show wouldn’t be the same without him. I can’t explain why this show is so awesome, but it is. There’s something about seeing real people dealing with crazy conditions that is fascinating. If you haven’t seen it and think the idea of watching people fish for crab sounds boring, keep an open mind and give it a try. I’ve only met one person who has seen it and not liked it. It’s not every day that you get to see guys working in 14 degree weather with 33 degree water washing over them after having three hours of sleep, and doing it without getting killed by the 800 pound crab pots they are manhandling.

There was a really cool article called Magic Forest: Poplars Purifying the Planet in the January 2009 issue of Discover magazine that discussed an experimental method for extracting chlorinated solvents used in atomic experiments from contaminated groundwater. The extraordinary part of the article is that the scientists involved in the experiment are using trees to do this rather than some expensive water cleansing process. The experimental setup is 4 acres of 900 trees (poplars and willows – both water loving types) which are planted in rows above the contaminated aquifer. They are placed in pits lined with plastic, which forces their roots to tunnel downwards for water. The really cool part is this: “The roots lift the contaminated water into the tree trunks, where transport tissues conduct it on up to the branches and leaves. From there, as droplets transpire through the leaf pores, the water evaporates and sunlight breaks down the dissolved solvent molecules, rendering them harmless”. Pretty cool stuff.

One of the upsides to this method is that when the water changes course the trees are better able to deal with it than a statically placed mechanical pump is. According to the article, in summer each tree can pump up to 26 gallons per day. Also, they apparently don’t keep any residue from this process, so when the tree dies it can be re-used as mulch.

They are also using this method in Nebraska to control a plume of carbon tetrachloride, as well as control excess nitrates (a by-product of fertilizers which pollutes waterways, causing lots of algae to grow – a problem that also sadly exists in my reef tank) in the soil.

This sounds like a good way to control those toxins that can be handled this way. I like that it supposedly has no bad side effects. We’ll have to see if this is a feasible method that can be used other places as well.

My husband and I discovered a new hobby today – geocaching. For those who haven’t heard of it, geocaching is basically a treasure hunt performed with a GPS unit. Geocachers hide a container with various items inside it in a specific location, note down the coordinates from their GPS unit and then post the location online. Other geocachers then try to find this hidden cache. Containers can be various sizes, anywhere from tiny nano containers to large waterproof containers. They can be different shapes as well, boxes, stones like a hide-a-key, or cylinders – anything and everything you can think of that can hold something inside.

Caches usually contain a log book so those who find them can write their names and the date they found the cache, as well as any comments they may have. The general Golden Rule is if you take something out of the cache you should replace it with an item of equal or greater value. Some caches have disposable cameras so you can take a picture of yourself finding the cache. Caches may also have a series of questions or riddles you can only solve by finding the cache, as a way of proving that you were really there.

There are varying levels of difficulty on a scale of 1 to 5 for both difficulty of terrain and difficulty of finding the cache. In order to get started all one has to do is go to http://www.geocaching.com/ and set up a free account to get the GPS coordinates of as many caches as one could want. So far there are over 700,000 caches all over the world, so it’s a bit overwhelming at first.

Since Mark and I are planning to go to Arizona soon and do a little hiking while we are there, we decided to buy a new GPS unit. The one we ended up buying is the Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. So far it seems to work pretty well, though it took a little while to get used to it, and of course the basic maps it comes with sucked. Once we paid tons of money to upgrade to a better map package it seems much more useful, and the size (about the size of my palm) is easy to carry just about anywhere. I haven’t stopped playing with it since we got it. Today was our first opportunity to actually see it in action though. We figured we should try it out here at home to get used to how it works while we still know where we are – sensible, right? So we picked an easy-to-get-to cache along the Erie Canal path and went and checked it out. It was pretty well hidden and we had a little trouble reading our GPS to know where to look. I actually found the cache just by looking around and thinking of where I would hide something if it were me. The cache we found had the expected log book in it as well as a number of key chains, a few magnets, a coaster and some other items. Of special note were the two Travel Bugs in the cache.

Travel Bugs are basically tags with a unique code printed on them, which geocachers attach to some item, a key chain or whatever, and then put it in a cache. Other geocachers then remove it and put it in a different cache, moving it around from place to place. You can then follow its progress around the world. Some Travel Bugs have goals of a location their owners would like them to reach. We ended up taking one of the Travel Bugs in the cache today, which was attached to a pencil sharpener with a cowboy figure on it. It was put there by a person from Quebec who was here last week for a Geocaching maze event. Our Travel Bug’s goal (found on a website by looking up the number on the tag) is to go further west, so we plan to bring him out to Arizona with us when we go. We put an item of our own in the cache in exchange and replaced it in its hiding spot. The other Travel Bug in the cache had actually just come from Tombstone, Arizona the previous week. Small world, eh? As I said, it’s fun to find these things and track where they’ve been, and besides, it gets you out of the house. Today was cold but nice and sunny, so a decent day for being outside discovering a previously unexplored area.

I saw this article today on Yahoo news. It’s about Macquarie Island, which is located southeast of Tasmania. The article talks about how Macquarie is a World Heritage site because it is a breeding ground for many species of birds, particularly endangered ones. Apparently there was a large population of feral cats which were feeding on the birds, so they were “removed” in 1995. However, there was also a large rabbit population, and surprise, surprise, without any predators the rabbits bred like…well, rabbits, and ate all the vegetation which provides cover for the birds.

So now the environmentalists are all enjoying the opportunity to say I told you so. I’d like to say that I’m not one of them, but apparently I am, because it seems obvious to me that if you leave a bunch of rabbits on an island with no predators, they’re going to breed and eat. According to the article, the powers that be were aware of this at the time but felt that the cats were causing so much damage that it was more important to get them off right away and not worry about the rabbits. Ok, but that was 13 years ago. What has taken so long? And what’s the plan now? The article says “plans to eradicate both rabbits as well as rats and mice from the island will begin in 2010. Helicopters using global positioning systems will drop poisonous bait that targets all three pests. Later, teams will shoot, fumigate and trap the remaining rabbits”.

My question is, are they SURE that this poisonous bait will only affect the targeted species? I’d hate to see this latest effort cause even more problems. This is similar to a show I saw a few years ago about how all there haven’t been gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park in something like 70 years, which people thought was a good thing. They found out though that once the wolves were gone the elk population exploded, which caused another set of problems. I believe the efforts to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone are ongoing despite their downgrade from endangered to threatened status.

On the plus side, they do mention that the grey petrel has successfully bred on Macquarie for the first time in a hundred years. For those who want to read the full article it can be found at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090113/ap_on_re_au_an/as_australia_rabbit_infestation.