Nile Delta fishery grows dramatically thanks to run-off of sewage, fertilizers

University of Rhode Island ^ | Jan. 19, 2008 | Unknown

[EggsAckley]

Can’t help but laugh heartily at this.

Practically the only reason I want to live a long life is so that I can still be here when all of the pseudo-science we’ve been subjected to gets exposed as the BS it is.

[gwilhelm56]

**And it's a major issue in the Chesapeake Bay and in the Gulf of Mexico, where run-off of fertilizers from the country's breadbasket into the Mississippi River has caused a dead zone in the Gulf.**

Hmmm... well, apparently you better RETHINK your .. FACT. Your RUNOFF SCARE is just as big a HOAX as GloBULL WARMING!! And another point.. Doubling the CO2 in our Atmosphere will not harm Humans and will quadruple crop yields. Methinks THOU DOST Protest too much!!

[JoeProBono]

Look a little weird but taste like chicken, so I hear.

[rockinqsranch]

“Practically the only reason I want to live a long life is so that I can still be here when all of the pseudo-science we’ve been subjected to gets exposed as the BS it is.”

EggsAckley!

[EggsAckley]

Heheheh.

[GOPJ]

Practically the only reason I want to live a long life is so that I can still be here when all of the pseudo-science we’ve been subjected to gets exposed as the BS it is.

That and seeing so many of the brain-dead liberal ideas discredited...

[decimon]

I think the Mississippi River dead zone is real. If someone would like to do something worthwhile then they might try to determine what is the difference between the Nile and Mississippi situations. Maybe the Mississippi runoff can be made beneficial.

[Lonely Bull]

A perfect day for bananafish.

[JerseyHighlander]

The difference is that birth control pills and hormone replacement therapy is not being consumed by the Egyptian Nile population.

Give Egypt a few years and the endocrine mimicking compounds will build up and the aquatic habitat will come crashing down, as stories of mutant wildlife take over the Egyptian media.

[JoeProBono]

[decimon]

...as stories of mutant wildlife take over the Egyptian media.

They're covering Gaza now.

[an amused spectator]

Had to look it up, but I knew it was a literary reference.

Great one!

[SunkenCiv]

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	Gods Graves Glyphs	Because of this: this expansion, which followed a collapse of the fishery after completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1965 ...it's a GGG topic. As we all no doubt know, Pharaoh Ramesses' temples at Abu Simbel were moved to higher ground as the waters of Lake Nasser rose. Because of this: These results have raised questions among many scientists about the value of anthropogenic sources of nutrients to ecosystems. "We're programmed in the West to think of nutrient enrichment of coastal systems as bad," Oczkowski said... "But the Egyptians don't think it's a bad thing. For them, it's producing tons of fish and feeding millions of hungry people. It's forcing us to reconsider whether we can say that nutrient inputs are always a bad thing." ...I thought it might be of some interest to the enviro-list keepers et al. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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[Pelham]

" 60 to 100 percent of the current fishery production is supported by nutrients from fertilizer and sewage"

These are not your high-class fish.

[gnarledmaw]

"These results have raised questions among many scientists about the value of anthropogenic sources of nutrients to ecosystems."

I doubt there has been even one question raised by any scientist qualified to discuss the topic. If she werent fishing for grants, she would go visit David A. Bengtson, Professor & Department Chairman of URI Department of Fisheries, Animal and Veterinary Sciences. He could arrange for her to sit in on any of the entry level undergraduate aquaculture courses. Here she would discover that for thousands of years people without a PhD have known and taken advantage of the understanding that clear water, often mistaken as being synonymous with clean water, is dead water and that blooming nutrient rich green water is productive water.

So now that Ive saved the country millions in grants for research, do you suppose anyone will mail me a PhD?

[BBell]

The Mississippi River dead zone is definitely real. For years we have been told it's caused by sewage,fertilizer, and chemical run off from industries. I don't know what to think now.

[decimon]

The Mississippi River dead zone is definitely real. For years we have been told it's caused by sewage,fertilizer, and chemical run off from industries. I don't know what to think now.

The amount of fertilizer or the type of fertilizer? Beats me. But I think it would be worthwhile to discover what is the difference. Maybe it's something other than sewage or fertilizer.

[cogitator]

bump

[cogitator]

For the sake of clarity, the Nile delta fishery suffered from the loss of natural nutrients when the Aswan High Dam created Lake Nasser. The eastern Mediterranean is strongly oligotrophic, meaning low nutrient concentrations and low primary productivity; most nutrients (natural or man-made) come from rivers, and they are very few rivers flowing into the eastern Med; check a couple of maps. The Jordan River doesn't even flow into the Med. The oligotrophic nature of the eastern Med is one reason that the Aegean is so famous for clear blue water.

So... the Egyptian farmers compensated (unknowingly) by heavily fertilzing their irrigated croplands, "replenishing": the Nile nutrients that had been reduced in the natural flow of the river by the lake. Thus, in this rare case, excess fertilization made up for a man-made deficit of nutrients. So yes, here it's a good thing.

In most other places, the natural nutrient content of the rivers has been just fine, and agricultural activities leading to excess fertilizer runoff (as well as increased stormwater runoff due to more impervious surfaces in coastal areas) cause eutrophication: too much primary productivity, leading to decreased dissolved oxygen levels when the dead organic matter gets converted (by the well-known process of "respiration", in this case caused by bacteria) into inorganic matter. Same things happen in bacterial respiration as human respiration: oxygen in, carbon dioxide out. Eutrophic waters have low oxygen concentrations (particularly near the bottom) and that's why you get "dead zones").

I hope that clears things up a bit.