TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2010


KLMNO THE GREEN LANTERN


Achenblog 6washingtonpost.com/achenblog


Adapted from The Post’s Achenblog.


Oil spill: What success looks like Like most sensible Americans these days, I prefer to observe the Lower Marine Riser Package (LMRP) cap via the Enterprise ROV1 camera on BP’s Web site, which gives us the latest image showing oil leaking around the cap and into the gulf. But sometimes I look at Skandi ROV1 for a different angle. The caption tells us: “Daily oil collection will be maximized through maintaining a stable system. . . . Both production trains for processing oil at the surface are in operation. . . . We may leave some of the LMRP cap valves open to ensure system stability — one is currently closed.” They captured 420,000 gallons June 5 and 630,000 on


June 8. Unless I’ve lost my mind — and Vegas has that at even odds at the moment — they’re capturing most of the oil, which is the goal. So that’s success. This is what success looks like. It’s not exactly pretty, but I’ll take it, considering where we were a week ago in the wake of the top-kill failure. It’s obvious that BP wasn’t ready for a blowout and had, as its backup plan, prayer, supplemented by hands over eyes and nee-nee-nee-nee chittering in hopes of reality-blocking. The government regulators, meanwhile, didn’t regulate, and apparently are the folks teenagers should go to when they want permission to ride motorcycles without helmets and whatnot. So bad things happened. This crisis is going to go on for a long time. But you have to give props to the engineers who got the cap to work and to the ROV operators and the folks handling that explosive hydrocarbon geyser up on the surface ship. Keep going!


— Joel Achenbach SCIENCE SCAN


A rind is a terrible thing to waste


by Nina Shen Rastogi INTERNATIONAL WOW CO.


Josh Fox, left, exposes contaminated water in “Gasland.” NATURAL RESOURCES


All’s not well “GASLAND” (HBO) Thanks to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the risks of offshore drilling are clear. President Obama has touted natural gas as one alternative to oil and a key component of a “clean energy future.” But gas can have dangerous environmental conse- quences, too, according to the muckraking documentary “Gasland,” premiering on HBO June 21 at 9 p.m. Filmmaker Josh Fox stumbles onto the story when a company offers him $100,000 for the right to drill for gas on his land in Milan- ville, Pa. He turns down the offer after traveling to Dimock, Pa., where the process of “fracking” for gas had contaminat- ed the water supply. He meets a woman whose cats and horses are losing their hair; her neighbor says her water “sometimes bubbles and hisses when it comes out.”


RESEARCH TECHNIQUES


Fishing for answers “DO FISH FEEL PAIN?” (OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, $29.95) The answer to author Victoria Braithwaite’s title question — “Do fish feel pain?” — is yes. Braithwaite, a fish biologist, helped establish that with her 2003 study that discovered “pain receptors” in trout. In this general-audience book, she cites some disturbing experiments, such as one in which an Irish scientist wired the shells of hermit crab to shock the creatures’ abdomens. A quarter of the crustaceans chose to go naked outside their shells rather than endure the shocks — a dramatic decision because hermit crabs are extremely vulnerable to predators without their shells. Without turning the book into a vege- tarian diatribe, Braithwaite explores why fish don’t receive the same empathy from humans that other animals do.


— Rachel Saslow SCIENCE NEWS Tropical fish seems able to think ahead


One of the things that makes us human is an ability to think ahead when we interact with someone and adapt our behavior if we expect to encounter that person again. A tiny tropical fish also seems to have this ability, according to new research, behaving more cooperatively with fish it is likely to encounter more often and taking sneaky bites off those it doesn’t. The researchers said this was the first time non- humans had been shown to exhibit what economists term the “shadow of the future” behavior, in which people’s behav- ior changes depending on whether they are likely to meet again in the future. The researchers studied cleaner fish in French Polynesia, so called because they clean other species of fish by eating the parasites from their skin, mouth and gills. This is mutu- ally beneficial behavior, exchanging nutrition for cleansing. But the researchers found that every once in a while, a clean- er fish would take a nip of mucus from the skin of the other fish. That bite inflicts potential harm on the other fish be- cause mucus, while tasty, is also part of the client fish’s im- mune system. Here’s where things get interesting: Cleaner fish only took such bites — which were visible because the other fish jumped when bitten — when they were in distant parts of their home range and therefore were unlikely to re- encounter the fish involved. In areas where they often swim, and where re-encounters were more likely, the cleaner fish stuck to the more cooperative behavior of eating only the parasites.


“Our results provide the first evidence supporting the no- tion that animals may have the ability to flexibly adjust levels of cooperation with individual partners to account for future payoffs,” the researchers wrote in the journal Current Biolo- gy. The fish “appears to respond to ‘the Shadow of the Future’ in the same way as humans, by increasing cooperation in sit- uations which have a great probability of future repeated in- teractions.” “The results suggest that, like humans, cleaner fish are able to take account of the future rather than just the imme- diate consequences of their actions,” said Jenny Oates, a PhD student in the Zoology Department of University of Cam- bridge, who did the research along with colleagues from the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland.


— Margaret Shapiro In Cambodia, a bumper crop of rare crocs


Conservationists in Cambodia are celebrating the hatching of a clutch of eggs from one of the world’s most critically endan- gered animals. Thirteen baby Sia- mese crocodiles recently crawled out of their shells in a remote part of southwestern Cambodia, following a weeks-long vigil by researchers who found them in the jungle. Experts believe as few as 250 Siamese crocodiles are left in the wild, almost all of them in Cam- bodia but with a few spread among Laos, Burma, Indonesia, Vietnam and possibly Thailand. The crocodile has suffered a mas- sive decline over the past century because of high demand for its soft skin. Commercial breeders also brought them to stock farms where they crossed them with larger types of crocodile, produc- ing hybrids that further reduced numbers of the pure Siamese. In 1992 it was declared “effectively extinct in the wild” before being rediscovered in a remote area of


Han, discovered the squawking baby crocodiles when he went to recover an automated camera from the site. “When I first saw the baby crocodiles, they stayed and swam together near the near site,” he said. “They were looking for their mother,” which even- tually returned. The reptiles are being kept in a


FAUNA AND FLORA INTERNATIONAL VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS


This Siamese crocodile, which lives in a remote section of Cambodia, is part of a species that has greatly declined over the past century.


Cambodia eight years later. The nest, with 22 eggs inside, was discovered in the isolated Areng Valley. Volunteers from Fauna and Flora International, a United Kingdom-based organiza- tion for which conservation of this once-abundant species is a key program, removed 15 of the eggs to a safe site and incubated them in a compost heap to repli-


cate the original nest. They left seven behind because they ap- peared to be unfertilized. In early June the crocodiles be- gan calling from inside the shells, a sure sign they were about to hatch. Within hours 10 emerged — and a further surprise was in store. Three of the eggs left be- hind at the original nest also hatched. A field coordinator, Sam


water-filled pen in a local village in the jungle-covered mountain range. The indigenous Chouerng people who live there revere croc- odiles and consider it taboo to harm them. It’s likely they’ll be looked after for a year before be- ing released into the wild. But the euphoria is tempered by hard- edged reality. This part of the Areng Valley has been earmarked for a major hydropower project. The conservation group is look- ing for areas of similar habitat for when the time comes to release the juveniles.


Siamese crocodiles take 15 years to reach sexual maturity. — Associated Press


I’ve heard that Americans waste 40 percent of their food. Could that possibly be true? That’s five eggs from every dozen! Determining how much food we waste every day can be tricky, but the calculation matters a great deal. Squandered calories mean that the resources used in produc- ing and shipping a foodstuff — re- sources such as fresh water and fossil fuels — are wasted. In addi- tion, edible matter that has been tossed and left to rot in landfills tends to generate methane, a pow- erful greenhouse gas. So we really ought to know what percentage of our food output gets dumped into the trash. The problem is, there just hasn’t been much research into this question. The 40 percent figure that you mentioned comes from a 2009 re- port that was one of the first peer- reviewed papers in years that tried to assess food waste on a national level. That statistic is not a meas- ure of how much food individual Americans throw out — such as 40 cents’ worth out of every dollar spent, or five eggs from every doz- en. Instead, it refers to the amount of food lost all along the supply chain, including damaged pro- duce from supermarkets, losses at processing plants, uneaten restau- rant entrees, and food that goes bad during transportation. To make that calculation, re- searchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kid- ney Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, began by tal- lying up how much food, ex- pressed in calories, per person — was available for human con- sumption in the United States in 2003. Then they estimated how many calories the average person ate that year. The difference be- tween the two figures — roughly 1,400 calories per person, or about 38 percent of the original supply


MICHAEL SLOAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


— represents the amount of food energy lost in the farm-to-fork journey. The NIH team further conclud-


ed that per-person food waste has increased significantly since the 1970s, from about 30 percent of available calories to 40 percent. But since the study is a top-down, holistic snapshot, it doesn’t tell us anything about where the waste happens — or, to speak directly to your question, how much is due to overzealous grocery shoppers or recalcitrant children who fail to clean their plates. Another widely cited set of sta- tistics sheds light on the con- sumer end of the issue — though it, too, needs a bit of context. In 1997, researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture esti- mated that, in 1995, 91 billion pounds of food — or about 26 per- cent of all the edible food avail- able for human consumption — went missing in the nation’s food- service establishments and home kitchens. (By comparison, a rela- tively tiny amount — just 5.4 bil- lion pounds — was lost by su- permarkets, convenience stores and other retailers.) The big ca- veat with these numbers is that the USDA’s calculations were based on a limited number of studies from the 1970s; even in 1997, the figures were intended to be only preliminary estimates. The USDA is updating its un- derlying calculations, so hopeful- ly we’ll have some new statistics in the not-too-distant future.


The Green Lantern is a weekly


environmental column from Slate. Read previous columns at www.slate.com/greenlantern.


So how much of the food we bring home ends up getting thrown out?


One researcher has written


that American households toss about 14 percent of the food they purchase, but the Lantern hasn’t been able to determine how that figure was reached. In the United Kingdom, the government-fund- ed nonprofit WRAP has conduct- ed extensive studies on the topic. In a 2009 report, the group con- cluded that British families throw out 22 percent of the food and beverages they buy to eat at home — just over 13 pounds per house- hold every week. A full two-thirds of that is what WRAP calls “avoid- able waste” — i.e., things that were, at some point, fully edible. A little more than two pounds per home is “unavoidable waste” (stuff such as apple cores and egg- shells) and another kilogram is “possibly avoidable” (things that some people eat but others don’t, including bread crusts and potato skins). Personally, the Lantern has al-


ways had a hard time keeping her food waste in check. Like many green foodies, she loves nothing more than spending a Sunday af- ternoon strolling the farmers


market: Ramps! Fiddlehead ferns! I’ll learn how to cook ’em all! But during the week, she’s too exhausted to cook what she bought, so some of that lovely produce goes bad before the Lan- tern figures out what to do with it. You can compost most uneaten food, which is preferable to throwing it in the trash or down the disposal, but reducing waste in the first place is the best option of all. Whether you’re at the farm- ers market or the Wal-Mart, buy- ing in bulk often makes economic and environmental sense. But that 20-pack of chicken legs doesn’t seem like such a good idea when half of it gets freezer burn and has to be chucked. So what’s the best way to keep a fully stocked, varied fridge and pantry without creating lots of unnecessary waste? That’s where you come in, dear readers. This week, we’re turning the green advice column inside out: How do you avoid refrigera- tor rot and pantry putrefaction? How do you plan your grocery shopping and cooking to mini- mize waste? Share your tips and tricks by sending them to the Lan- tern at ask.the.lantern@gmail.com. We’ll print the best responses in an upcoming column.


Is there an environmental quandary that’s been keeping you up at night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com. The Green Lantern thanks Jonathan Bloom of wastedfood.com for his assistance with this week’s column.


Science


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LETTERS WHERE TO WRITE: health-science@washpost.com, The Washington Post, Health and Science, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071


To pull or not to pull


“Getting smarter about wisdom teeth” [June 1] was my story about 25 years ago, except that I was in my early 20s and the decision was all mine. I did get X-rays and learned, like the author’s daughter, that I had two upper wisdom teeth above the gumline. But unlike her, I decided not to have them re- moved. For all I knew, we could all one day go to the grave togeth- er, a happy woman and her teeth. Fast-forward to 2009, when I


am 47. Shockingly, one of the two teeth had broken surface and was slowly coming in. It was coming in straight, and there was room for it until one unfortunate week- end in the fall when pain set in. After a really unpleasant week-


end, the verdict was in: The tooth was infected and it had to come out. An oral surgeon did the quick, $500 procedure, the most unpleasant part of which was the an- esthetic needle jammed into the infected tissue —and the insensitive as- sistant who blithely ig- nored my wince of pain and the unbidden tear rolling down my face to robotically recite instructions at me.


Once the tooth was removed, the pain, aided by ibuprofen, was not long-lasting. A boring, soft di- et was in order for a while, but a little creativity kept me afloat. Following instructions is para- mount to avoid complications. The most notable aftereffect was that the hole left behind tended to be something of a magnet for


food particles, but that has slowly improved as the tissue healed. COLETTE ZANIN Greenbelt


Cage-free chickens


In “Which is greener, the chick- en or the egg?” [June 1], I must point out that I did not see even a passing reference to a major rea-


son for choosing cage-free eggs: the welfare of helpless animals. A concern for the planet is, for many people, linked to a concern for the non-human creatures on it and a sense that the greatest goal is not merely greater human com- fort.


MAUDEMCGOVERN Rockville


ALCOHOLISM RUINS LIVES...


...and not just the alcoholic’s. If you or someone you know needs help, here’s an option: The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism conducts research studies into alcohol and its effects. Qualifi ed subjects who participate in research will receive in-patient treatment at no charge. For information, please call


301-496-1993 Deaf or hard of hearing?


Use your state relay service to call.


National Institutes of Health Dept. of Health & Human Services


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