Chemical imbalance
by Sharon Oosthoek
Two dominant and much discussed threats to the boreal forest are industrial interests and logging. Now another threat has surfaced. According to researchers from Queen’s and York universities, lakes in the forest are suffering from “aquatic osteoporosis” due to declining calcium levels.
Nearly all life forms need calcium, even tiny water fleas. Scientists have discovered that calcium levels are so low in some forest lakes that Daphnia, a species of water flea that is key to the food chain, is experiencing greatly lowered reproductive rates, jeopardizing both its own survival and that of the small fish that feed on it.
In a surprising twist, the dearth of calcium is linked to a decades-old environmental threat many people considered largely solved – acid rain. Scrubbers installed on industrial smokestacks starting in the late 1970s have helped decrease levels of sulphuric and nitric acid, the main ingredients in acid rain, allowing many lakes to regain their normal pH levels.
“This is an environmental story that’s been missed,” says Queen’s biology PhD student Adam Jeziorski, lead author of a study published in the journal Science in November. “Over the last 10, 20 years, acid rain has fallen out of the public eye. The pH level is recovering so lakes are becoming less acidic, but biological recovery, that is, plants and animals in the lakes, has been lagging.”
Because sulphuric and nitric acid are positively charged, as is calcium, the elements compete for negatively charged binding sites in the soil around the lakes. The result is that calcium leaches from the soil and drains into the water. For centuries, the soil slowly released calcium into the lakes. When the acid rain phenomenon was at its peak, an abundance of this element was released, leaving precious little calcium behind in the soil. To compound the problem, calcium is produced largely by mineral-rich rock breaking down over time and is therefore replaced very slowly.
The team looked at 200 years’ worth of sediment in three lakes: Plastic Lake near Dorset, Ontario, in the Muskoka region, Little Wiles Lake in Nova Scotia and Big Moose Lake in New York State. The researchers found that key invertebrate species were disappearing in the lakes with declining calcium levels, often starting in the 1970s. It was around the same time that the effects of acid rain on our ecosystems became apparent.
The researchers also combined existing data on 770 lakes, stretching from the Muskoka-Haliburton region to Kenora, and found a third of the lakes had calcium levels below 1.5 milligrams per litre, the threshold at which Daphnia can effectively reproduce. The levels in almost two-thirds of the lakes were at two milligrams per litre.
“It has really led to a whole slew of questions,” Jeziorski says. “It’s a jumping off point for new research: How is this affecting other species, the lake as a whole? What other changes in the lakes might we have missed?” Those levels, he adds, are much lower than levels were even 20 years ago and are likely to continue to drop.
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Wasp eats beetle
by Sharon Oosthoek
A wasp native to Ontario may soon be pressed into service as a lead investigator into potential infestations by emerald ash borers.
Trials that University of Guelph researchers conducted and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) partially funded show that Cerceris fumipennis can determine, in as little as half an hour after leaving its nest in search of prey, whether invasive beetles are in the area.
The traditional way of surveying – peering into treetops where the beetles congregate – is expensive, and spotting them can take days. The longer it takes, the more trees need to be felled, or inoculated, to stop the beetles’ spread – also expensive propositions.
The shiny green beetles, which in 2002 travelled from Asia to North America in packing materials, kill ash trees by destroying the water- and nutrient-conducting tissues under the bark. Two years ago, Steve Marshall, a professor of entomology with the University of Guelph, recruited Master’s student Philip Careless to see if the large, darkwinged wasps might function as an early warning system for an emerald ash borer infestation. The wasps do not kill beetles in sufficient numbers to control an infestation, but Marshall suspected that they might just “provide a natural and very low-cost approach to monitoring for emerald ash borers.”
Marshall’s earlier research at Rondeau Provincial Park confirmed that the wasp feeds on jewel beetles, including emerald ash borers. But no one had ever attempted to move wasp nests to areas at risk of beetle infestations to see whether they could be used as mobile surveillance units.
During the summers of 2007 and 2008, Careless used a backhoe to dig up earthen wasp nests in various parts of Ontario at night, when the females remain inside. He then drove them in a pickup truck to high-risk areas such as Windsor, where the first Ontario sightings of the beetles were confirmed in 2002.
The wasps reoriented themselves the next morning and then ventured out to find jewel beetles to bring back to feed their larvae. Many of those beetles were emerald ash borers.
On the basis of the speed of the fastest wasp observed – which flew 33.4 metres per minute – Careless was able to estimate how far a beetle infestation might have spread in any given area by calculating how long the wasp was gone from its nest. So, for example, a wasp that took 57 minutes to forage travelled just over 1,900 metres to catch the beetle and return to its nest. That meant that the beetle was caught within 950 metres of the nest site. Given that nests are spread out at regular intervals in a given area, estimating the extent of infestation and the trees that need to be cut down or inoculated become possible.
But before the wasps can be used as portable beetle detectives, Careless needs to figure out how to move the delicate nests without disturbing them. “The soil moves around a bit and, as [it] settles, the entrance to the [nest] tunnel can collapse,” says CFIA survey biologist Troy Kimoto. “Sometimes females will go back and dig it out; sometimes they’ll abandon it.” This summer, Careless will work with the CFIA to experiment with different ways to keep the females happy in their nests.
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Recycling waste
by Jim MacInnis
As is the case in so many sectors of the economy, the business of selling recycled material has an uncertain future as supply outstrips demand.
With the worldwide economic slump, the production of consumer goods has slowed dramatically, so the demand for recycled materials such as plastics and fibre used in packaging has also dropped. The value of paper and cardboard has fallen some 50 percent since the summer of 2008, while high-grade plastics have lost two-thirds of their resale price during the same period. The production slowdown in the auto industry is drastically affecting the prices of steel and aluminum. Companies and institutions that were once paid for their recyclables are now forced to shell out money to have these same goods carted away. Recycling operations, meanwhile, are either selling their products at rock-bottom prices and taking a loss, or stockpiling massive amounts of detritus in anticipation of a market rebound.
Wes Muir, director of communications with Waste Management Inc., notes that both options come with dire consequences. “Warehousing is a short-term solution, as storage only adds to overall costs,” says Muir. “And many recycled materials cannot be stored long-term. … Some fibrous items such as newspapers lose their value in just four to six months.”
More and more recycling depots are sending their stock to landfills, a worst-case scenario for conservationists and recyclers alike. Jo-Anne St. Godard, executive director of the Recycling Council of Ontario, is of two minds when it comes to the problem. “In the end, of course, the attitude has to be to reduce, reuse and recycle. But,” she hastens to add, “it is overconsumption that creates problems in the first place.” So while no one wants to see these recycling programs fail, says St. Godard, less consumption always means less waste.
Recycling operations, though, are now trying to salvage their business.
Louis Anagnostakos, co-founder of the Toronto-based Turtle Island Recycling Company, is astounded by the speed at which things went sour. “We’ve seen significant price declines in everything,” says Anagnostakos. “And it only took a month – this all essentially happened in October.”
Like many of his colleagues, Anagnostakos has had to let go most of his labour force. Turtle Island has halted its sorting operation, and Anagnostakos expects even a partial industry recovery to take at least a year.
However long it takes, the recovery of the recyclables market depends largely on the consumer. “The success of recycling programs depends not only on efficient collection and effective processing,” says Muir, “but also, ultimately, on the willingness of consumers to participate and buy products manufactured from recycled goods.”
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Kevin Shackleton
Ontario Nature board member and birding enthusiast seeks pledges for his 16th Baillie Birdathon!
Every May, thousands of bird watchers participate in or sponsor someone in the Baillie Birdathon, a nationwide, fundraising bird count that began in 1976 to support research and bird conservation.
A birdathon veteran, Ontario Nature’s Kevin Shackleton, along with his team, has raised the bar. “My goal is to see at least 100 species in a new area, Simcoe County, after 15 years of confining my team to York Region. I hope to raise over $9,000 to be split between Bird Studies Canada and Ontario Nature.”
Dedicated birders count all the bird species they see or hear during a 24- hour period within a prescribed area. Before the birdathon, individuals can sponsor participants like Kevin at a flat rate or on a per-species basis.
Participants can designate a conservation charity of their choice as the beneficiary of a percentage of the funds they collect.
A member of the West Humber Naturalists, Kevin is a keen birder and will be well prepared for the upcoming challenge. “In the week before the birdathon, I will do some scouting to find species that might be on our route. I also listen to CDs of birdsong in my car in the month leading up to the event, as over half of the birds we seek can more rapidly and often more easily be identified by song.”
The Baillie Birdathon is a great way to fundraise for conservation, have fun and learn about our feathered friends.
To sponsor Kevin, visit the Ontario Nature website at www.ontarionature.org and click on “Sponsor Kevin.” Kevin’s participant number is 2508.
To find out how you can join the Baillie Birdathon on behalf of Ontario Nature and Bird Studies Canada, visit the organization’s Baillie Birdathon page at www.bsc-eoc.org/support/birdathon.
Will Kevin meet his goal? We’ll let you know in the next issue of ON Nature.
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Up in smoke
by Conor Mihell
Over a mere 10-year period, Vale Inco’s Copper Cliff smelter has showered Sudbury with a staggering 674 tonnes of carcinogenic nickel particulates – the equivalent of about 850 pickup truck loads. Now the mining giant is asking for relief from new Ontario Ministry of the Environment (MOE) regulations for air quality, which come into effect in February 2010. Inco claims it will not be able to afford to install the required emissions-monitoring equipment at its Copper Cliff smelter to meet the MOE’s start date; instead, the company has applied for an alternative standard of emissions that allows for levels that are more than seven times higher than the one in the new provincial regulation.
In 2005, the MOE replaced airquality regulations dating back to the 1960s with a new monitoring and pollutant-dispersal modelling system that is based “on the protection of health and environment,” says Cathy Grant, an MOE engineering specialist. She says previous legislation created implementation headaches because it bundled airquality science with technological and economic concerns. Under the new Air Pollution–Local Air Quality regulations, which fall under the umbrella of the Environmental Protection Act, “science is separated from implementation,” says Grant.
Inco, however, intends to take advantage of an implementation feasibility clause that allows industry to propose temporary, site-specific alternatives to the provincial standards. The company is asking for a nickel soil concentration threshold of 15 micrograms per cubic metre; the new provincial regulation specifies a threshold of two micrograms per cubic metre. Currently, the request for exemption is posted on the Ontario Environmental Bill of Rights website, and public comment on it is to close on April 10. Grant insists that if any alternatives are accepted, they will be “time-limited approvals with the expectation of continuous improvement.”
According to Brennain Lloyd, the coordinator of Northwatch, a coalition of northern Ontario environmental organizations, the proposed emissions “holiday” could become yet another example of Inco bending regulations. Worse, Inco is now contradicting its own commitments. In the Sudbury Soils Study, an Incofunded, multi-year assessment of the impacts of mining in the Sudbury area that was released last spring, Lloyd says Inco pledged to meet provincial laws. Now, “they’re asking to continue a history of getting away with not meeting provincial regulations,” says Lloyd. “The soil study was a good place to start, but I’m afraid it’s being forgotten.”
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Green as gold
By Amber Cowie
Established in 2005, the Ontario Greenbelt that surrounds the province’s Golden Horseshoe is 728,400 hectares of protected lands, watersheds and communities. The environmental benefits of the Greenbelt are many and, as recent studies confirm, so are the economic and social benefits.
In September 2008, the David Suzuki Foundation released a detailed report, Ontario’s Wealth, Canada’s Future: Appreciating the Value of the Greenbelt’s Eco-Services. The report states that the Greenbelt contributes $2.6 billion worth of nonmarket ecological services, such as clean water, arable land and species habitat, to the province each year, an average value of $3,487 per hectare.
“The Greenbelt is a world-class feature of Ontario’s landscape that offers economic and environmental benefits to communities,” says Sarah Dopp, Ontario Greenbelt Alliance Coordinator. “It is the Government of Ontario’s ecological footprint.”
The Greenbelt’s value goes well beyond the bottom line. Ontario Nature’s new booklet series – developed in partnership with the Ontario College of Family Physicians – showcases the positive social and recreational aspects of the area. The series includes Greenbelt Naturally, a review of ecological services provided by the Greenbelt (e.g., water runoff, trapping of air pollution, keeping soils healthy); Getting Active in the Greenbelt, a guide to the many trails, parks and bike paths in the Greenbelt that help people keep active; Good Things Grow Here, a detailed description of fresh local foods grown within the Greenbelt and a resource guide to purchase these goods; and Healthy Perspectives, a report on how green spaces within the Greenbelt play a key role in promoting positive mental health for southern Ontarians.
To learn more, read Ontario’s Wealth on the David Suzuki Foundation website (www.davidsuzuki.org) and the Greenbelt for Health series on Ontario Nature’s Your Greenbelt Your Health website (www.greenbeltforhealth.ca).
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The last road trip
by Jim MacInnis
The largest piece of refuse you will probably ever throw away is your car. Every year, half a million vehicles are taken off Ontario roads as a result of age or collision damage and sent to auto dismantlers. In most cases, 75 percent of a car’s parts can be recycled; the remainder (mostly plastics, but can also contain mercury and liquid freon from air conditioners) ends up in a landfill. Because no single agency is responsible for monitoring end-of-life vehicle (ELV) dismantling practices in Ontario, it is impossible to determine how much hazardous material from rusting auto parts is released into the air or seeps into the ground and waterways.
Says Steve Fletcher, executive director of the Ontario Automotive Recyclers Association (OARA), “When you consider the numbers – 500,000 cars times five tires, one battery, two or three mercury switches, litres of various toxic fluids – it’s overwhelming to think of the potential environmental impact of handing over cars to auto dismantlers that simply strip what they want and throw the rest in a crusher.”
The OARA and its 135 member organizations, which make up only a fraction of the thousands of selfdescribed auto dismantlers in Ontario, adhere to a strict code of conduct regarding the treatment of ELVs and reuse or recycle every possible component of a vehicle. “By reusing salvageable parts,” says Fletcher, “you’re providing the customer with a good part for half the price and avoiding having to exploit resources to build the part again from scratch.”
OARA members are attempting to give an industry associated with junkyard landscapes, guard dogs and cigar-smoking toughs a green makeover. David Gold owns and operates Standard Auto Wreckers with his father, Ken. Gold thinks that the environmental impact of ELVs could be lessened considerably by creating an industry standard that all auto dismantlers would have to follow. “The treatment of hazardous fluids throughout much of the industry is an abomination. We use a state-of-theart fluid separation device that drains all fluids from the car so that they can be reused.” Gold, whose company provides customers with a certificate to show that their car has been recycled in full, knows that until legislation is passed regarding the treatment of ELVs, responsibility falls on the public to take a cradle-to-the-grave approach to owning a car. “We’re around, but because our overhead is higher [due to the fluid separation equipment and processes] we can’t always pay what junkyards can for ELVs. We need people to think with their heads instead of their wallets.”
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Killer bees
by Jim MacInnis
Nearly one-third of the food we eat is a result of pollination by insects, so the widespread disappearance of wild bee populations has been triggering alarm bells around the world. Concern for the insect’s demise has been heightened further because scientists have been unable to determine the cause of its decline. A recent University of Toronto study, however, has provided some possible answers, suggesting that an intestinal parasite common in bees raised commercially is at least partly to blame.
Researchers studied Crithidia bombi, an often fatal parasite that can be passed between bees through feces and foraging on contaminated flowers. C. bombi has ravaged Europe’s bumblebees and was introduced to North America in the 1970s. The authors of the study, Michael C. Otterstatter and James D. Thomson, examined nine sites in southern Ontario over the course of two years and discovered that up to 75 percent of bees in wild colonies adjacent to industrial greenhouses known to contain infected commercial bees had contracted C. bombi. (Because commercial bee populations are provided a constant source of sugar-rich nectar, they are less affected by the parasite than wild bees are. Wild bees must continually forage for nectar and are usually on the brink of starvation. Their weakened condition makes them more susceptible to the parasite’s ill effects.)
Conversely, the prevalence of infection appears to decline the greater the distance between a colony and a greenhouse. The intensity of infection – measured by the number of pathogen cells in an infected bee’s gut tract – also declines with distance.
Otterstatter and Thomson suspect that infected commercial bees escape from their “workplaces” through vents and pollinate flowers that bees from nearby wild colonies visit. Infected wild bees return to their hive, where the infection can spread through the colony.
The researchers found that, during three months of initial contact between segregated populations, commercial bees infected up to 20 percent of wild bumblebees within two kilometres of the greenhouse. After this three-month period, however, the parasite explodes in the population, infecting anywhere from 35 to 100 percent of the members of the colony. This “travelling wave of disease” moves away from the greenhouse at the speed of two kilometres a week.
The authors suggest that minor modifications to greenhouses could eliminate infection. Even a measure as simple as putting mesh screens in the venting systems would keep nearby colonies safe, not to mention save greenhouse operations the cost of losing countless expensive commercial pollinators.
“My hope,” says Otterstatter, “is that these findings will motivate improved management of domestic bees through, for example, greater attention to their parasite loads and their overlap with wild species.”
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My Turn
Jeff Howard: water keeper
As told to Jim MacInnis
My whole life I’ve watched the water. I love solid ground – I hike, ski and even race mountain bikes in the summer – but I live near Big Bay Point in Innisfil, which juts sharply out into Lake Simcoe, so it’s the water to which I’m drawn.
In September I put the finishing touches on a streammonitoring project I started when I was 15 (I’m 17 now). I wanted to see what effects farms and communities have on freshwater streams, and also to determine which pollutants are flowing into Lake Simcoe. For two years I headed out to Sandy Cove Creek every couple of days to collect data about species in the stream – if you know what’s living where, you can determine the health of the waterway. For instance, if you find caddisflies, that probably means the stream is healthy, whereas the presence of sowbugs probably means the opposite. Finding the insects is the fun part. Every 40 metres I set up a small station with a special net and then did what’s called a “kick and sweep,” which you do by standing in one area and literally trying to kick up as much sediment as you can. Then you count the insects and record your data. I concluded that the stream was really healthy.
Good-news stories can take a bit of work. When I was 14, I was taking pictures of loons around the Tiffin boat launch in Barrie and I spotted one that was in pretty bad shape. It was entangled in fishing line and had lures caught in its mouth. I tracked down a wildlife rehabilitation technician from the Midland branch of the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (OSPCA), and a group of us went into the water at night armed with flashlights, nets and cameras. We were able to retrieve the loon and took it to the OSPCA where it was X-rayed. I was worried that it might have ingested a lead sinker, which is a little weight that fishermen use on their lines, and practically a death sentence for birds. Thankfully it was given a clean bill of health, and we released it by the lake the same night.
I’m a member of a handful of conservation groups, including the Six Mile Lake Conservationists Club, Kids for Turtles Environmental Education, Canadian Wildlife Federation (CWF) and Brereton Field Naturalists Club (BFNC), through which I started the Get the Lead Out program. It was the loon that gave me the idea. With the help of my family and BFNC, I set up a booth where local fishermen could come and exchange their lead sinkers for safer tackle. I’ve done it for two years and it’s been a huge success.
I think most people really like the idea of fishing responsibly. In June 2007 the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority (LSRCA) presented me with the Youth Education Award for the Get the Lead Out program. It was the coolest thing. And it didn’t stop there. In 2008 CWF presented me with the Youth Conservation Achievement Award for the bird rescues and Get the Lead Out, and I received the LSRCA Water Conservation Award for my streammonitoring work – and all of this was for stuff I would have done anyway.
Eventually I’d like to get a job with a group like LRSCA or maybe Fisheries and Oceans Canada. But I don’t know where I’ll end up. I only just got my driver’s licence.
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- According to IT research nonprofit organization CANARIE Inc., the Internet is the fastest growing source of CO2 emissions worldwide.
- The information on the Internet is stored in massive data centres that house hundreds of servers, which run 24 hours a day and require enormous amounts of energy.
- According to one study, the carbon footprint of the computers that run the Internet will be larger than that of the airline industry by 2020.
- Google is developing zero-carbon data centres that would be located on barges 11 kilometres offshore. These water-based data centres would be powered and cooled entirely by captured wave energy.
- Emissions produced as a result of the Internet doubled between 2002 and 2006. In 2005, 1 percent of the world’s electricity was attributed to data centres.
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