Tag: seaweed

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Company Green Grazing from Vietnam is aiming to grow and sell red seaweed, as an additive to livestock feed

Why is this important?

red seaweed photo credit Peter Southwood

Around the world there are around 3 billion cattle and sheep. These produce around 231 billion pounds of methane each year, which is around 10 billion metric tonnes of methane into the air. Remember that over the first 20 years (it reduces after this) methane traps roughly 80 times the same amount of carbon dioxide. So this is the equivalent of a huge amount of carbon.

To put this in perspective, if we shrink the worlds carbon emissions to zero, but are left with all this methane, we are likely to have runaway global warming anyway.

So what does this seaweed do? It essentially causes the cows and sheep to create less methane. How much? Well, while around 100 million tonnes of this seaweed would be needed, they could eliminate 98% of the methane emissions from these livestock!

In 2019 around 34.7million tonnes of seaweed was farmed, which is leading some sceptical researchers to suggest that it cannot be done. However, if we look logically, this is already enough seaweed to reduce methane emissions by 1 third – not to be sneezed at.

Another problem, is that currently Greener Grazing is restricted to only growing 1/3 of the year, as the water temperature kills the seaweed the rest of the time. However, this could be fantastic – if cross breeding can give this seaweed the ability to cope with warmer water, they might be able to meet the whole worlds demands.

More work is needed, and other tests have proved less successful in the reduction of methane, but still, this is a field, where we might be able to green peoples behaviour without requiring them to stop eating meat.

Now, of course, if meat grown in a lab could reach price parity, it may deal with this problem overnight, though it would also eliminate many peoples source of income.

Time will tell if this company is going to have a large effect or not. We need to have farmers wanting this additive, thereby creating a valuable market for coastal communities around the world.

Arctic fox

Arctic fox

The Arctic fox is a white fox which lives throughout the Arctic region, and is common throughout the Arctic biome. Other names include white fox, polar fox or snow fox.

It is a similar size to other foxes, although generally more rounded, so as to loose as little weight as possible.

The Arctic fox preys on many small creatures such as lemmings, voles, ringed seal pups, fish, waterfowl, and seabirds. It also eats carrion, berries, seaweed, and insects and other small invertebrates.

Natural predators of the Arctic fox are golden eagles, Arctic wolves, polar bears, wolverines, red foxes, and grizzly bears. Having said this, they are also keen scavengers and seem to get alarmingly close to these animals on relatively regular occasions. in places where they occur, rodents such as lemmings can form a large part of an arctic fox families diet. In areas where their range overlaps with red foxes, they often build bigger dens with more exits, so as to be able to escape. One of the issues with reduced snow cover, is the fact that red foxes can seize range formerly used by Arctic foxes.

During much of the year, there is as much as a 90-100 degree difference between the internal temperature of the fox and the air temperature. When inactive, they will curl up into a ball, tucking in all extremities to preserve heat as much as possible.

Primarily monogamous, a pair of arctic foxes are required in order to raise their cubs. In areas where predation is higher, arctic foxes change their behaviour. Here they are often far more promiscuous, possibly so that there are more adults who think the young is theirs and therefore more help for protection, should one of the true parents get killed.

They are the only fox with fur on their feet, so as to avoid even more heat loss. It appears to have originated out of foxes from the Tibetan Plateau.

There are 4 recognized subspecies (beyond the common one)

 

    • Bering Islands Arctic fox, V. l. beringensis

    • Greenland Arctic fox, V. l. foragoapusis

    • Iceland Arctic fox, V. l. fuliginosus

    • Pribilof Islands Arctic fox, V. l. pribilofensis

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I have written in the past about the discovery that seaweed added to a cows diet greatly reduces methane emissions, now Morrisons wants to act

Morrisons is to have its cows given additives of seaweed in an attempt to reduce methane emissions.

Cows that can graze along the sea shore will happily eat seaweed, but adding it to all cow diets will greatly reduce emissions

This additive reduces methane emissions by as much as 80%, and given that morrisons currently has roughly 10% of the country shopping there, they have the potential of reducing cow based emissions by 8%. Now other brands need to follow Morrisons lead on this, but about 5% of the UK emissions is accounted for by the emissions of cows, which means that Morrisons move alone, should cut carbon emissions in the UK by around 0.5%, now while this is not huge, if everyone across the country chose to use this meat, 5% of emissions is a pretty substantial cut.

More to the point, with the main supermarket chains in such close competition in the UK, I find it hard to believe that others are not going to follow Morrisons lead. I for one will be happy to get our beef from Morrisons (though in our case, we have already replaced most of our beef mince with turkey mince which has a far lower carbon footprint anyway.

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