Friday, December 10, 2010

Loose Feathers #268


Birds and birding news
Birds in the blogosphere
Oil spill

Environment and biodiversity
  • Blue whales can capture up to 500 kg of krill, good for 457,000 calories, in a single mouthful. This makes it the most efficient eater among sea mammals.
  • New Jersey's Oyster Creek nuclear reactor will stop operating by 2019, ten years earlier than planned. The reactor is the oldest operating nuclear power plant in the United States and would have had to build a cooling tower to stop pumping hot water into Barnegat Bay if it did not close. WolfeNotes has a roundup of the rest of the environmental news out of Trenton yesterday, including progress on new restoration plans for Barnegat Bay.
  • This week there has been more vocal criticism from scientists of the NASA study that reported bacteria subsisting on arsenic.
  • The Obama administration decided to further delay implementation of new environmental regulations for reducing smog and for industrial boilers.
  • Four people and four businesses were charged with dumping raw sewage and restaurant waste into Shell Bank Creek in Brooklyn, New York.
  • Scientists have been monitoring a former open-pit coal mine in Germany to see what sort of ecosystem develops there. The site was covered in sediments and graded, but it was otherwise untouched. Development and succession have occurred faster than expected, with the first trees appearing in five years.
Carnivals