111–118 of 118 posts
I wasn't aware of how much more carbon can be trapped or ethanol produced with these plants. Also interesting that beneficial nutrients from fish mainly come from plants as well.
Actually fish do not produce Omega-3 at all, all of it comes from algae or phytoplankton that fish consumes.
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Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity. Sure, medicine and law are widely taught. Those same two groups work to ensure that it's very difficult to acquire and apply that knowledge. Getting into med school is difficult and expensive, with a license to practice even more so.
I'm not indicating whether I agree or disagree, but: the stakes are high with both. Bad lawyer can doom a client for the rest of his life. Bad doctor can take life. I expect compsci to become more difficult as our stakes continue to increase, and we are already getting there with Ashley Madison/USG level PII disclosures and mass surveillance engineering, for example. Some life or death fields within our own are alrea…
My colleague is working towards becoming a licensed engineer in software. I'm learning a lot about formal methods from him in order to build more reliable software, faster.
If we really were software engineers then there would be a state of the art and if you employed any practices short of that you'd be liable for damages your software causes. And you'd probably go out of business pretty fast.
It's a great idea, the issue is scalability. To have an aquatic farm that touches the bottom, you could only use the ocean area with depths between 20 and 200 feet. Higher than that, and you have surface turbulence. Lower than that, and there is not enough light for lots of plants or fish. That narrow range of depths is a small sliver along our coasts. An area the size of Washington state, as mentioned in the article…
See depth charts on http://www.doggerbank.nl/index-old.htm
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Oysters and kelp are already everywhere. The sea has currents that transport everything that is in the sea everywhere. Stuff grows when it reaches a suitable climate.
Oysters were once so common in New York Harbour that they're on our flag.
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My biggest concern is that along with the nitrogen and phosphate runoff come pesticides and other less savory compounds that then bio-accumulate in the farmed shellfish.
I live in Connecticut, Long Island sound is like my back yard, the waters are green from too much Nitrogen which blooms algae. All plants need Nitrogen to grow, there is a surplus for various reasons in the sound, that surplus needs to come down and this idea is great. I'm curious whats worse, pesticides directly applied, or the possibility of pesticides in run off?
The basic idea is that as you move up the food chain the concentration of toxins gets higher. So a plant might have a relatively low level of toxin absorbed even if it was directly applied, but a shellfish that consumed algae that were exposed to the toxin downstream from the farm might have a considerably higher level.
I don't know a whole lot about the details in this specific case, but that's my concern.
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Oysters were once so common in New York Harbour that they're on our flag.
What? The state flag or the city flag? I just double checked and I don't see what you're talking about.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_New_York_City [1] http://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/06/01/history-half-shell-inter...
We need open source resources on how to build and maintain farms like this. Unfortunately these guys are not sharing yet, at least I couldn't find any detailed information. I'd love to try this myself, but as a complete novice i'd need a lot basic information - like what species to grow, how to get seeds and plant them, etc.
If you or anyone else is seriously interested, leave your email and I'll shoot you a note. My buddy has started commercially farming oysters and other seafood the last few years. The info is not widely available, but you can find it if you look. Many existing farmers (at least half) are fully willing to share knowledge with each other, give you a tour, etc. The fact is they are more in competition with traditional oy…
Aqua-farming shellfish is the closest thing to free protein we're going to get. My folks are involved with farming mussels in New Zealand. The farms are in a river mouth, putting the nitrogen and phosphate runoff from farms to good use. The phytoplankton they eat is replenished 500m down-current from the mussels. There's one major risk - the 'spat' - the baby mussels used to start a vertical mussel line - are harvest…
I visited a farm in British Columbia about ten years ago that was raising bivalves (geoducks I think) and they'd worked out how to raise them all the way from fertilization through all the microscopic stages. In retrospect, they probably had to do that because clams aren't polite enough to attach to something, en masse, that you can collect on the beach.