DailyDirt: Joe Life Versus The Volcano

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Volcanoes are not exactly predictable, so the best way to avoid getting killed by one is probably to just live far, far away. But Nature doesn't worry about death and destruction, so all kinds of life seems to thrive around active volcanoes, even where no one would expect life to be able to survive at all.

• Sharks have been discovered at the bottom of Kavachi, an active underwater volcano in the Pacific ocean. It's not clear how large animals deal with the possibility of dying instantly in an eruption -- or if they just don't realize they're hanging out in a caldera at all. [url]
• A tiny scaleless blackfish appears to enjoy growing up in the warm, acidic waters near underwater volcanoes. A research vessel found this new species off the coast of Australia, and it looks like the warm waters from volcanoes foster all kinds of tiny creatures nobody was expecting to find. [url]
• Until 1977, scientists thought that all life on Earth depended on the photosynthetic food chain. Underwater volcanic vents near the Galapagos Islands presented us with a different ecosystem that feeds on chemicals released from geological activity. [url]

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Filed Under: biology, blackfish, extremophiles, food chain, life, nature, sharks, volcanoes

DailyDirt: How Clean Are Our Chickens?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

For years, there has been concern over using antibiotics in our food supply, feeding animals "sub-therapeutic" medicines that make them grow bigger. The chicken industry seems to be shifting slowly towards removing certain antibiotics from its farms, but are consumers really aware of what the progress is (and isn't)?

• The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) covers a lot of areas, and one topic that seems to gross out our European neighbors is our chlorinated chicken. While Europeans have painstakingly reduced the incidence of salmonella from their chicken farms with breeding and testing procedures, US growers just give our chickens a bath in chlorinated water tanks. [url]
• The antibiotics tylosin and virginiamycin are used in chicken feed to help the birds gain weight and grow more efficiently. The problem is that these antibiotics are also "critically important" in human medicine, and the uncontrolled use of these drugs in our food chain could endanger the effectiveness of medicines and create superbugs for us. [url]
• Perdue Foods now raises an antibiotic-free chicken (well, no antibiotics that are used in human medicine, at least), claiming to be the first to do so for all of its hatcheries. Other chicken growers (eg. Tyson) have been testing antibiotic-free chickens for several years as well, with chickens raised with different kinds of antibiotic-like substances (aka ionophores). Perdue's chickens may also be treated with ionophores, but US farmers are trying to move closer and closer towards an antibiotic-free process. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: antibiotic-free, antibiotics, chicken, farming, food, food chain, ionophores, salmonella, superbugs, ttip, tylosin, virginiamycin
Companies: perdue foods, tyson