The purple sea urchins which are currently destroying California's kelp forests are nearly inedible. They aren't the same urchin species that people eat in sushi. There's very little actual meat under the shell. Sea otters will only eat them when there's nothing else available.
Not nearly inedible, just not commercially practical for the effort versus the amount of meat inside. I prefer their taste over the commercially sold reds, they are sweeter in a wider range of seasons. Purple uni crushed up with soy sauce is the perfect sauce for sheephead sashimi.
Spread this information to any sushi chefs you know. The opportunity to help sustainable fisheries by eating puple urchins into obscurity is huge. It's what our economic system is best at.
By "inedible" I didn't mean that purple urchins taste bad necessarily (acquired taste). It's just that shelling them takes so much work that it's not worth the effort for chefs. There are millions and millions all along the coast; convincing a few people to eat them won't make a dent in the population.
Even if there were an increase in demand for the purples you'd still be hard pressed to get them commercially, California has been squeezing the number of licensed commercial boats down to about 100 and the market's flexibility is constrained by that.
Purple Sea urchins are an appreciated "connoisseur" dish in all Southern countries of Europe. They are really, really good in fact, with a fine flavour and soft taste, but only when in season, when they feed on the appropriate algae and when taken from a clean source.
How do you use a small set of scientific studies to prove one is better? Studies are reductionist, which is a very powerful and useful perspective...but not as useful when you have to measure a dynamic living system that can be optimized along maybe 100 dimensions or more? Worse, what is the funding source of these studies, and what incentives are tied to it?
So you have many different types of soils, and that will produce variations. You have different histories on those soils, you can measure for a dozen minerals, but what about those tiny trace minerals? Top soil optimization...nutrient run-off that creates fungal blooms in the ocean killing life in the ocean, price per pound to produce produce, shelf life of produce, how it looks, is the taste in fashion ----- so take those dimensions that you can measure things on --- and then multiply that by the number of different veggies and fruits and all their different types (eg. how many different apples are there??)
It's too massive problem space to solve with a few studies...and the financial incentives and ideological thinking further muddies the waters.
You do this with a proper understanding of statistical power, and you report "no conclusion" when you don't have studies of adequate power. This is not actually a terribly difficult problem with a proper understanding of Bayesian statistics, it just doesn't lead to good headlines, because a lot of the time the answer is "the study couldn't really provide an answer."
I'm not saying you're wrong but doesn't that inherently favour the side claiming "there is no problem because you can't prove there's a problem." Until by the time someone can prove there's a problem we already have a generation with lead poisoning or a collapsed ecosystem or whatever it may be.
> How alive is your backyard's soil? A lab would have to analyze it. It may or may not have the right minerals, depending on what you're trying to grow.
I brought in a lot of compost to "start" it, so who knows what is in there. Furthermore my home is recently purchased, and the previous owners did the land no benefits (unkept dogs in the lawn, terrible looking dirt, etc). However I'm working towards / practicing no dig, heavy mulching of both green and brown (both in beds and out of beds) to promote natural breakdown and soil improvements, and tumbler composting (to combat rodents).
I plan to soil test in a few years, once I've become more established. Right now I'm primarily concerned with establishing whatever is sustainable for me, and then measuring what I might need to tweak. We'll see how it goes, hah - I'm pretty new to all of this; and I have more yard than I (an indoor man) knows how to deal with :D
BS Physics - I help bring non-drug health building approaches to the masses.
I get my information from scientific articles and approaches from clinicians in the field even if you can't prove everything 1-to-1.
This approach gives me loads of credibility in a space that's filled with very unscientific approaches.
I'm deepest in probiotics and digestive health. But the basics for improving health are quite simple - good sleep discipline, clean water, understanding signs of nutrient deficiencies, blood sugar management (even for non-diabetics), stress management, movement.
Simple labels to complex problems don't work most of the time.
To be fair, it's hard and time intensive to look at all problems this way. But it will probably lead to success more of the time...though sometimes a complex solution can be difficult to implement.
#1 strongest correlation with lifetime earnings is IQ
#2 strongest correlation with lifetime earnings is conscientiousness (which is roughly half orderliness, and half industriousness --- also contains traits of dependability, my word is my bond)
I can't find a reference right this moment. Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot so it should be in 1 of his videos on Youtube.
Likely not the research referenced by the GP, but this paper:
http://web.econ.ku.dk/gensowski/research/Terman/Terman.pdf
finds that Conscientiousness, IQ, and Extraversion are correlated with increased income (for men at least) among the Terman survey.
If I'm summarizing correctly, the Terman survey includes a group of 856 boys and 672 girls born around 1910 and selected in 1921-1922 who were followed until 1991.
I also don't have a reference right now, but I would assume they've taken a thousand of random people and ran some statistical analysis on that sample.
Chances of someone from this thousand people being among the highest end are indeed pretty small.
I lived in Taiwan for a year after I graduated college and I found their jungles to be difficult to navigate because of the mountainous terrain. It doesn't surprise me that they have been hiding out successfully for >10 years!
Totally! The clouded leopard is one of my favorite big cats. That's two great pieces of "species persists" news in a week! A few days ago, it was the giant bee:
> The tortoise is said to be in good health, but underweight. It is believed that she is about 100 years old.
I suppose it's easier to have relict populations survive without inbreeding issues when they've got century-plus lifespans. I'm glad they've relocated the tortoise to a breeding center - hopefully we'll be able to preserve them!
Wunderbar! That makes my day, thanks for sharing. Every time I think of tortoises, the book "Classic Shell Scripting" with its African tent tortoise cover springs to mind.
Definitely. And in in the last two weeks, the worlds largest bee that was thought to be extinct was found again in Indonesia. Particularly good news given the global decline of many bee species. [1]
And a type of tortoise thought to be extinct was seen for the first time in 106 years. [2]
Beware! You entered the "cutesy animals, let's save the planet, everyone's cool man" territory with nuance, humour and wider perspective. People don't forgive that easily.
If you want to be fun at parties, you can also try this: "What do you mean, 'YOLO, do what your heart tells you, no matter what they say'? Does that also apply to rapists and murderers?"
I'll make an exception for infectious diseases... certainly getting rid of smallpox was, and eventually getting rid of HIV will be, a cause for celebration.
You need to find something or a set of things that are meaningful to you. Those things will change, so you need to keep chasing things that are meaningful.
Otherwise, the bullshit of life will be too much...but doing meaningful things seems to dampen the blow of the natural tragedy and suckiness of life.
Sea urchins eat kelp forests. Sea otters eat sea urchins. Abalone live in kelp forests.
So I think that when sea otters are alive, then there are more kelp forests, which leads to more abalone net...even if sea otters are eating abalone.