After discussion elsewhere, it seems useful to start a new forum post for 2025.
Here is my initial contribution:
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There’s an article in The Times today saying that the decline in Blackbird populations is due to a mosquito borne virus. They think that the population will eventually stabilize at about 40% of its current level. It doesn’t say whether other thrush species are affected. But it sounds similar to the theory, for which there seems to be quite a bit of evidence, that House Sparrows are declining because of mosquito-borne avian malaria.
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Also infects (rarely) humans.
That virus sounds worrying.
For a bit of light relief A single gene orchestrates androgen variation underlying male mating morphs in ruffs | Science Unfortunately the light relief stops quickly as the paper is not public access but suspect a more public version may appear somewhere in an article about this article. Basically the paper explains why you see such different Ruff males if you have ever seen them displaying.
That’s your idea of ‘light relief’! It’s over my head, I’m afraid!
Tackling Phosphogeddon.
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The aim, getting the phosphates back on farmland (from where they leach into our waterways); does this suggest that agri practices use more phosphate fertiliser than necessary? Why else is there excess to run off?
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EDIT: currently tarrifs are in the news. However, reading more on the subject, it seems USA regularly adjusts Tariffs responding to pressure from companies & industry. As USA is down to 1% of its own phosphate, then it’s going to need to import for the forseeable future.
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In the case of the River Wye the web tells me that 73% of phosphate in the river comes from runoff from animal manure (a lot comes from intensive chicken farming) and 22% from sewage treatment.
This is very interesting, years ago we sampled ouse washes for phosphates with the hope of restablishing species rich grassland which needs relatively low phosphate levels. However the levels there are massively high due to agricultural runoff and there looked like no way to get them down despite me suggesting mining the area and dumping the material on agricultual land so the washes did not fill up with silt and overflow and the farmers got fertilizer. The idea was not taken up.
Basically paper says Ruff males come in various different types which look very different from each other, the paper says this is caused just by one gene which is rather unusual.
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Could you tell whether the phosphates were from agriculture or sewage? Removing phosphate from sewage requires an extra stage from the norm (not that the norm seems to be very normal these days) and isn’t often used as far as I know. Norfolk Broads is one area where is was employed. I think you end up with a lot of iron phosphate to get rid of.
Only 31P is stable so there isn’t the possibility of using isotope ratios to identify sources. (As in using the proportions of 13C and 15N in tooth collagen to infer diet.)
The alternative would be to use co-occuring chemicals to estimate the relative proportion from the sources. Apparently boron (used in laundry detergents) can used as tracer for sewage effluent.
And I remember CCW staff discussing whether cobalt could be used to tell whether a farmer has been spreading inorganic fertiliser where he shouldn’t have. It is apparently a contaminant of NPK but I don’t know which component it comes in with.
Sometimes cobalt is deliberately added as a micronutrient (needed for vitamin B12 synthesis in soil bacteria and rhizobacteria) to NPK fertilisers, sometimes specifically, and sometimes as rock flour. Otherwise, phosphate is often obtained from phosphate rock, which is impure apatite; apatite can contain a wide variety of metal ions as impurities, including cobalt. On the other hand cobalt is less easily incorporated into apatite crystals than many other ions; it doesn’t take a high concentration before the cobalt separates as cobalt oxide (Co3O4).
I also find that boron is added to fertilizers as a micronutrient (sugar beets in particular appreciate boron supplementation), which would complicate using boron as a tracer for sewage effluent.
I think most of the P came from agricultural runoff given how much is applied to the catchment, from hazy memory the levels of P there were higher than any of the other river systems we tested. However this was not the focus of the work so did not look into that aspect. One of the interesting issues is that the area between the two rivers is filling up whereas the areas outside the Ouse washes is getting lower so even digging out the material and spreading it on the fields may have some benefit (flood control etc) not only for the fertilizing aspect. On the downside there may be other contaminants in this material that farmers may not want.
A rare bit of Seaweed News
Help a Toad across the Road.
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the Traffic Restriction Order
Charlcombe Lane, Bath | Bath and North East Somerset Council
I’d don’t imagine this road gets much traffic in normal conditions, but there are a dozen or two houses along it, plus a church. You can identify quite a bit of the flora along the road from Google Street Map. (Usually Street Map has just not enough details to be confident in species identification.)
I can identify the common lichen, Xanthoria parietina on a house roof, but no others. St Mary’s church & churchyard will probably have plenty of lichen interest, unless they have a ‘clean the gravestones’ policy.
One of those west country lanes where you hope you don’t meet another vehicle.
Bad news in the French press, maybe not reported elsewhere.
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