News items from Eutrophication News

MIT Sea Grant-funded researcher, Matt Charette, is addressing the degradation of coastal waters in New England.

It has been dubbed “Big Chicken”: the revolution in how poultry is raised and processed. Chicken that once came from small, family farm operations is now produced by networks of huge chicken-growing complexes and sprawling processing plants.

Ahmedabad: The Comptroller and Auditor General of India has raised serious concerns over the high levels of pollution in Gujarat’s rivers and lakes.

BERKELEY — University of California, Berkeley, chemists have found a smoking gun proving that increased fertilizer use over the past 50 years is responsible for a dramatic rise in atmospheric nitrous oxide, which is a major greenhouse gas contributing to global climate change.

As long as Iowa farmers lead the nation in corn production, they will be among the leading contributors of nitrogen fertilizer to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

The arrival of stronger winds near the coastal town of Lamberts Bay is expected to help lift a wave of toxic red tide which has seen tons of West Coast lobster stranded after a walkout from the sea.

DAGUPAN CITY, March 30 (PIA) -- The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) announced that shellfish from Wawa in Bani town are now free from Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) or red tide but no clearance has yet been given for other infected areas.

More than 2-tons of West Coast Rock Lobster (WCRL) have been collected by officials from the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) and 100 recruits from the South African Navy during 11am and 5pm after a walkout was reported in Eland’s Bay at around 10h30 this morning. These walkouts, a direct consequence of low oxygen waters as a result of the toxic red tide on the West Coast, follows on the washout of around 2-tons of WCRL 20-km’s north of Lambert’s Bay on Tuesday evening.

PAQUERA, Puntarenas – On Monday, the ferry leaving Paquera, on the east side of the Nicoya Peninsula, labored across the Gulf of Nicoya toward Puntarenas, churning through ocean waters that switched from deep aquamarine colors to scabby, ochre-red splotches.Since early February, the gulf, and beaches and islands surrounding it, have been in the throes of one of the worst blooms of red tide in recent years.

CORPUS CHRISTI — Biologists at the Center for Coastal Studies at Texas A&M; University-Corpus Christi confirmed a brown tide algal bloom in the Upper Laguna Madre on Thursday.

LOS ANGELES -- Federal and local officials have agreed to a strict new pollution reduction plan to eliminate beach closures and reduce trash and toxic chemicals in 175 Los Angeles area waterways.

MANILA, Philippines — The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) in Region 3 Tuesday renewed its warning to the public to avoid gathering and eating shellfish from the Bataan coastal waters and Masinloc Bay in Zambales due to red tide toxin.

(Reuters) - Scientists, environmentalists and farm advocates are pressing the question about whether rewards of the trend toward using more and more crop chemicals are worth the risks, as the agricultural industry strives to ramp up production to feed the world's growing population. The debate has heated up in the last several weeks, with a series of warnings and calls for government action including a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The agriculture industry is responsible for 76 percent of the phosphorus pollution going into the Everglades yet the industry pays just 24 percent of the cost of removing the harmful nutrient, according to a new study commissioned by the Everglades Foundation.

As the impact of agriculture on water quality intensifies around the globe, two lawsuits in the United States aim to reduce the size of the Gulf of Mexico’s ‘dead zone’ by setting limits on nutrient pollution in the Mississippi River Basin.

The European Commission has today released a Communication on the first of its Macro-Regional Strategies, the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR), setting out how it proposes to take co operation between the participating states up a gear.

Each spring, female grouper and snapper move to sea grass beds in the Indian River and Mosquito lagoons to lay eggs, repeating a yearly cycle that helps make the area one of the more popular fishing destinations in the world, and one of the most biologically diverse places on Earth.

RIO DE JANEIRO — A local newspaper is reporting that Rio de Janeiro state’s iconic Guanabara Bay is heavily polluted as Brazil prepares to host the “Rio plus 20” Earth Summit in June.

SACRAMENTO, CA, Mar 15, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- The fertilizer industry is very concerned and engaged in the issue of nitrate contamination in California's groundwater supplies, according to Richard Cornett, communications director for the Western Plant Health Association in Sacramento, a trade group that represents fertilizer companies, manufacturers and retailers.

The Iowa Environmental Council and a raft of other environmental groups this week sued the U.S. Environmental Protection, contending the agency and the state of Iowa haven’t done enough to keep nitrogen and phosphorus out of the Mississippi River.