Sea otters are charismatic, and played a major role in Monterrey Bay (CA) recovery. Well-known story? Here is an amuse bouche about them and their riverine cousins: On California's river otters: ‘The cutest vicious devils you’ll ever see’ So, yeah, give 'em some space. They go for your eyes
EO Wilson, a great environmental scientist has passed: Actually waited a bit to post here, hoping that some hearty obituary would appear. 'Tis not the season, people are otherwise occupied. Heck, even E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation » E.O. Wilson still shows how to reach him directly. He made a couple of TED talks E.O. Wilson | Speaker | TED I'll be watching for hearty obits, to post them later. He was the real deal.
As a teenager, always enjoying diving around Avila Beach, there were abalone aplenty - almost every Rock we would encounter while scuba diving. The sea otter was believed to be extinct. Once theu made a comeback? & Eating around 25 lb of lobster or abalone on a regular basis?? Yeah no more dives for you or me. .
OK, this is gon na be a tough sell. With sea otters removed, a different condition arises, favoring + abalone + lobster and + filter-feeding molluscs. Can be seen as benefits. With sea otters re established, sea kelp returns and a diversity of fish and whales return, which could also be seen as benefits. Humans (who run everything) may see either ecosystem condition as better. Not my call. But Monterrey Bay ecosystem has been famously restored by allowing return of sea otters. It's more complicated because fishing there also moved to sustainable (not kill everything) procedures. == I consult with Chinese mariculturalists who want to grow abalone because they are a big money thing here. We have not found a way to grow them in tanks. Turns out that ecosystems are complicated.
A long, long time ago, I had some abalone in California ... it was so tough and the flavor too subtle. I prefer squid or octopus. Bob Wilson
I do miss the abundance of Abalone, however after you run your fingers through a fur coat made exclusively of sea otter, I understand why the apparel was so popular many many decades ago. They say history often repeats itself. .
I knew a guy who did abalone hunting (is that the right term to use?) It used to be in California that you could hunt for them while snorkling, but not scuba diving, as a way of reducing the amount of overhunting. I think the all abalone are off limits at the moment. He used a crowbar-thing specially built for prying abalone off the rocks. He said that you had to do it slowly and carefully. If you didn't, the abalone would tighten up its muscles and the resulting meat would be really tough. Maybe you had an abalone that was handled too roughly.
I don't know if this has been linked before https://poweroutage.us/ But it is updated frequently and for example is showing how current* mid-Atlantic snow recovery of the electroweb is going.
We had a brief, ~5 second, outage Monday night during the snow storm. It took another 15 minutes to get cable-modem service back and Internet. Regardless, nothing to shout about. Driving around today, large numbers of broken tree limbs and a few smaller trees blown over. We have two limbs in the front yard and another pair in the back. Regardless, easy summer we trimmed every limb over the house and service line. Otherwise, the big white being replaced by the big mud. Bob Wilson
Rare ice storms are nature's arborists. Tree trimmers I mean. Spell check advises me to change that to tsarists, but that alters the meaning. When a tree stops making apical buds in a branch, branch is no longer a functional part. Becomes fungal food, but not in their ideal environment. Non ideal environment for wind-energy delivery also. So it just hangs there until rare wind comes, or until an ice storm triples its weight.
You need a wood-fired, emergency power generator: chipper to make scrap limbs and wood into dry feedstock high temperature burner for Sterling engine modern power generator and electronics inverter The operational scenario is you help collect storm damaged tree stuff. You feed it to the chipper and air dry for the future. Next power outage, burn it for the hot source of the generator-Stirling engine. The rest is a sophomore engineering test. Bob Wilson
Likely already happening to some degree. Instead of an emergency generator, the fuel goes to a biomass plant already feeding the grid.
The collection is already going on. You can't leave it blocking roads or on power lines. Some of it becomes mulch or compost, but biomass power plants are a thing, and we have giant chippers that can eat entire trees to fuel them.