Women in Science

For most of my undergraduate career, I was operating under the assumption that prejudice against women in the professional community was largely a thing of the past. As a result, I felt that quota-based hiring practices, etc. were largely artifacts whose only effect was to diminish male's ability to compete. If nothing else, I thought this was certainly true in science.

Going through graduate school disabused me of this notion, in a variety of ways. Primarily, I was surprised that many female grad students, and virtually every woman over 30, believed women were discriminated against in science. Perception isn't always reality, but it is hard to dismiss someone's opinion without reason, and I didn't have any good reasons. In fact, some pretty good reasons for how this discrimination were happening were explained to me.

Let's take perception. The North American Benthological Society is one of the few society conferences I've attended regularly. The society is small, and seems young, but there are perhaps a few dozen 'stars' of the society. These are the rock stars of the stream ecology world.

As my friend Sally pointed out at the last NABS I attended, the male and female rock stars are very different. The males are out late drinking every night of the conference, going to strip clubs, etc., etc. For many of them it shows in the talks (which tend to be incoherent and rambling; but funny), yet people pack the hall to see them speak because everyone loves them. The comparable women rock stars are generally described with words like scary or intense. The women tend to produce these fantastic (ok...good) talks that don't quite attract the same attention.

Why? Because women in science are judged much harsher than are men! Recent research is now documenting this (see a nice discussion and good references here), and demonstrating that being a woman reduces your odds of getting a paper published in Nature (holy grail for ecologists). In fact, this paper suggested a woman has to be over twice as productive as a man to be viewed with the same esteem.

And this isn't just an abstract factor. This translates into things like funding (pdf), where women are less likely to be getting funding.

So what is causing this? Most male scientists I know are surprised by studies like this. Women scientists are, literally, all over the place in academic science. I think I the male:female ratio of grad students I knew in graduate school was probably skewed slightly towards the female side, and I certainly know a lot of female rock star professors. Overall, I'm guessing it is happening because most scientists don't think its happening.

Coal Plants in Kansas: Ashtray of the Midwest

Well, as everyone suspected, legislators in Kansas have taken up the gauntlet on behalf of Sunflower Electric Power Corp. to build a pair of new coal mines in Holcomb, KS (previous posts on this here and here). From the Lawrence Journal World:

Bills addressing the top environmental issue of the legislative session were written in secret by those who support construction of two coal-burning power plants in western Kansas.

Energy bills written in secret? No input from environmental groups or stakeholders outside of the companies that will be directly profiting? Doesn't this sound like a certain presidential administration's Energy Task Force?

The bill that has been written is being described by intelligent people as a poor excuse for a compromise between the coal industry and environmental concerns. Diane Silver (from In This Moment) quotes Gov. Sebelius's press release:

Under the current bill, any coal plant, from anywhere in the country, applying for a permit and meeting the very minimum standards established by the EPA would have to be given a permit. It wouldn’t matter whether Kansas needed the energy or not. All the coal plants that have been denied permits or withdrawn applications in other states would be knocking at our door.

As the Sierra Club's Bruce Nilles puts it, this would make Kansas the ashtray of the midwest:

“Kansas is the first state that we know that is proposing to accelerate global warming,” Nilles said. “That is a real black eye for Kansas to be the one state right now proposing to accelerate global warming.”

Ok, that's what is happening, but what does this all mean? Well, basically it means that the Kansas legislators are not interested in listening to the interests of Kansas citizens. Earlier polls have indicated Kansans are heavily opposed to the construction of the coal plants, so why do elected officials continue to push an idea that is clearly unpopular? The reason is, of course, money. These legislators are guided only by the unholy dollar. Anything that is perceived, real or imagined, to be financially beneficial is going to be ram-rodded through the legislature.

Kansans need to let the legislature know how they feel about this issue. Here is the website where you can find your state representatives. Send them a letter.

[Hat tip: In this Moment]

Wind Farms

I'm a big proponent of alternative energy solutions. On a broad scale, I think producing energy that doesn't rely on simply burning fossil fuels, combined with a reduced consumption, is the only long-term solution to global climate change issues.

However, global climate change is only one step of the environmental issues we're facing as a society. We're also threatening the healthy functioning of ecosystems by eliminating species through habitat destruction, introducing new species, etc.

Wind power is one of the most cost-effective alternatives to coal available today. The physics are simple, the mechanics are well-understood, and the supply of wind is abundant in many locations. Indeed, wind power is growing so fast the suppliers of turbines are having a hard time keeping up. The overall picture is that wind power is going to become an increasingly important part of our energy budget.

The downside? Like just about everything else we push up into the sky, wind turbines may take a pretty heavy toll on the bird populations. This paper suggests that most of the birds killed by a Minnesota wind farm were migrants, and in case anyone forgot, we have a treaty that covers migrants. Overall though, I haven't been able to find a lot of hard data on the magnitude of effects on birds, but as I've mentioned before, I have terrible journal access here. I'll be at the library later this week and I'll have to see if I can find out more then.

There seems to be some inherent reason to believe that this might be similar to what happens with bird-kills around cell and radio towers. The basic idea with the towers is that lights on the towers reflect off clouds, creating a "false dawn" that the birds respond to en-masse. The response? Flying around in circles while waiting for the sun to come up. Unfortunately, flying around a 400 foot tower supported by guyed wires isn't a great idea, even for birds with as much dexterity as a sparrow. Of course, the wind turbines don't have wires supporting them (at least, not as many), but the swinging blades might pose a similar hazard.

I mention this because a battle over the environmental impacts of wind is raging down in Texas. Essentially, the use of wind is going to lead to whole new areas of land being given over to energy production that were previously being used for something else. I think the large-scale, long-term benefits of increasing wind production and subsequently decreasing coal/petroleum use probably outweigh the impacts on migratory birds, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure enough information about the effect of wind turbines on bird populations is even known to answer that question.

Any thoughts?

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

This is hard to believe. The EPA has denied California the opportunity to set tougher emission standards than the federal government. Here's what EPA head Stephen Johnson said:

"The Bush administration is moving forward with a clear national solution — not a confusing patchwork of state rules," Mr. Johnson told reporters on a conference call. "I believe this is a better approach than if individual states were to act alone."

Um. What? What 'clear national solution' is he talking about? I've been watching the environmental idiocies of this presidency for the past 7 years, and I haven't seen a "clear national solution" for anything this administration has done. Is the solution "Do nothing."?

I can't help but wonder if this is the beginning of an attempt by the Bush administration to override the KDHE's decision to deny a permit for a new coal plant. I mean, really, isn't the KDHE's rejection of the permit on the basis of CO2 emissions essentially the same thing as California independently reducing car emissions?

The actions of the EPA and the government on this issue have, over the past 7 years, bordered on absolute lunacy. This appears to be a continuation of that trend.

Some more fallout from the coal plant denial

My thoughts on the KDHE denial of the coal plant near Holcomb have been previously identified. Hell, I even got into it with Greg Laden when he criticized Kansas without mentioning the denial.

Well, one of the big idiocies the pro-coal plant advocates have been promoting is the idea that without the coal plant all other alternative energy strategies in the region will be stymied. They've made this claim based on the understanding that without the coal plant investment money, there will be no attempt to build the high-energy wires that are needed to get wind power hooked into the grid.

I think this is a bogus argument on a number of fronts.

1. If the electricity is needed, the power lines will get built. The approval for their construction has already gone through state agencies, so one of the big hurdles is cleared already.

2. The power lines are/were being built by a consortia of power producers, government agencies, and other entities. I'm not convinced all those organizations are going to shut it down just because the coal plant won't be built (I could be wrong about that).

3. In Sunflower's own documentation on this plant, they cite a 15% increase in the power consumption over the next 25-50 years in SW Kansas. Even without high power transmission lines, it would appear the best way for SW Kansas to meet that increasing demand is through wind farms.

In conclusion, I don't think there's any way wind and solar power won't continue to grow within Kansas. If anything, I think the coal plant would have stymied the further development of wind power. Apparently that was the conclusion at the Dole Institute of Politics for the Kansas Electric Transmission Summit (what a name!) as reported by the Lawrence Journal World and Salina.com. In fact, the members of that conference pointed out that wind farms are increasing exponentially. If that continues, the power lines will be built, coal plant or not.

(Hat tip to Diane Silver's excellent blog In this Moment)

Cool Journal Articles: CO2 Enrichment and Crayfish

I have a lot less time to read good journal articles than I used to, and KDWP has incredibly limited access to on-line journals, so I am just now getting to the latest issue of the Journal of the North American Benthological Society (JNABS; which is actually listed as December 2007). I feel like JNABS is a vastly underrated journal, but I have to admit that I’ve published two papers there, so I may not be entirely without bias.

At any rate, there are several very interesting articles in this issue, and I hope to highlight them all on this blog. The most interesting/amazing by far (in my mind) is one by John Kominoski and others (see full citation below #1). I just did a quick google-search, and apparently Kominoski has his own google-page (you can get a .pdf of this article from there).

Ok, so let’s talk about this paper a little. Oddly enough, this paper integrates subjects I find very interesting: dissolved organic matter (DOM), periphyton and crayfish. The basic premise of the paper is that as CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise, the organic chemistry of plants is going to change. This has lead to a widespread idea that herbivores feeding on these elevated CO2 plants will be less able to extract needed nutrients. My friend and collaborator Paul Frost has published one paper exploring the stoichiometry behind this, but he certainly isn’t the only one (see his citation below #2). The basic idea is that as you increase the CO2 in the atmosphere, you increase the amount of carbon in the leaves/tissues of plants. That seems great, since it means more productivity when measured in terms of energy.

Unfortunately, it also means less (by percent weight) of other essential elements (i.e., nitrogen or phosphorus). So more CO2 in the atmosphere means you have to eat more food to get the same amount of nutrients (as in a lower CO2 atmosphere). At least, that’s one theory with some support.

The kicker is that the additional C in those leaves in plants may not just be adding nutrient-poor bulk to the plant, it may be in the form of compounds that are actively toxic. That’s what Paul Frost found in the 2005 paper I mentioned earlier. His little bugs eating elevated-CO2 leaves were leaking essential nutrients.

So back to the Kominoski paper. Kominoski (or Nancy Tuchman or one of the authors) got the idea that these leaves aren’t just a direct food source to detritivores and herbivores, they are also an indirect food source to the base of the aquatic foodweb (the biofilms on rocks, often referred to as periphyton). Here’s where the DOM story comes into play. See, DOM is a fantastically important component of most aquatic ecosystems, controlling light penetration through the water column, the bioavailability of heavy metals and nutrients, has a huge effect on the pH of water, and is a ‘food’ source for bacteria and algae. DOM is just organic matter, which is a pretty broad category, and it comes from a lot of different places (animal excretion, algal release, bacterial release), but one of the biggest sources in temperate forested streams (and lakes) is leaves.

That’s right, leaves. Leaves falling into streams or lakes or wetlands leach organic compounds. You can probably imagine where this is going. Kominoski et al. found that the DOM leached out of his CO2 enriched leaves caused a different biofilm to develop than the DOM leached out of leaves raised in ambient conditions. That difference proved to be one that crayfish (a hugely important species in many aquatic ecosystems) could detect, and avoid. The implication that Kominoski et al. draw is that crayfish in a CO2 enriched world will possibly stop eating periphyton and start eating other, more nutrient-rich sources of food preferentially. Say goodbye to smaller macroinverts!

One key implication of this paper is that climate change isn’t just going to cause ecological havoc because of changes in temperature or rainfall; simply changing the CO2 content of the atmosphere will have dramatic and subtle effects on the biosphere.

Now, I don’t necessarily get everything in this paper. For example, the conclusion is somewhat tenuous. I’ve measured the grazing rate of crayfish on periphyton: For some species it is not much. Of the crayfish I’ve seen, it seems like they don’t eat periphyton unless they’re starving, but I’m no expert on that. (Hopefully some experts will email me a smarter reply about that.)

I’m also a little thrown off by a particular line in the abstract: “...cyanobacterial biovolume was higher in [elevated CO2] algal assemblages than in [ambient CO2] algal assemblages after 35 [days].” Yet in Figure 2, the differences in cyanobacterial biovolume don’t appear to be significant (visually or statistically), and leading up to the 35 day mark the different treatments appear to flip-flop in importance. So, I’m not sure I would have included that in the abstract, even though it is conceptually an appealing idea (cyanobacteria seem to be considered ‘poor quality’ food by most aquatic ecologists).

A few other notes:
- I’m curious to see on how many more posthumous papers the legendary Bob Wetzel will be a co-author. Will this be the last one? Is John Kominski (who seems pretty cool) the last first author with Wetzel as a co-author?

- I really thought this paper was Nature-worthy. That’s pretty much the holy grail of ecologists. However, after I read around a little, I realized that the implicit finding here (that CO2 enrichment will cause all kinds of weird and unexpected effects) is not that novel. Still, a great and complete story.

- I also saw a talk John Kominoski gave at NABS 2003 in Athens, GA. I talked to him at that conference, but I doubt he would remember me. I’m somewhat surprised that it has taken this long for the paper to come out. I wonder if it got rejected by a better journal, causing the delay. Formatting this thing for Nature would have been hard, and it would have been equally hard to re-format it for JNABS.

#1 Kominoski, J.S., P.A. Moore, R.G. Wetzel, and N.C. Tuchman. 2007. Elevated CO2 alters leaf-litter-derived dissolved organic carbon: effects on stream periphyton and crayfish feeding preferences. JNABS 26:663-680. DOI: 10.1899/07-002.1

#2 Frost, P.C. and N.C. Tuchman. 2005. Nutrient release rates and ratios by two stream detritivores fed leaf litter grown under elevated atmospheric CO2. Archiv für Hydrobiologie 163: 463-477

The Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC)

Last week I attended SETAC's annual conference, which took place in Milwaukee. I gave a talk about toxistoichiometry, and attended the whole meeting.

There's a lot to talk about with SETAC, so I think I'm just going to hit the memorable stuff for now:

1. SETAC's annual conference is riddled with extremely poor talks. The 2nd talk of the Green Chemistry session was by an EPA scientist who didn't really give a talk at all. He simply recited a list of criteria for what makes a chemical 'environmentally friendly.' No justification, no explanation, nothing but a recitation of conditions. I wish this were unusual, but in fact, SETAC appears plagued by talks from people who don't really seem to care about producing a quality talk. That's extremely disappointing, especially when the titles and/or abstracts sound so promising. By comparison, the annual conference for the North American Benthological Society (NABS) typically contains a slew of extremely well-done talks.

2. The heavy metals story is overwhelming. There were multiple sessions and hundreds of posters detailing the toxicity and effects of heavy metals. This was encouraging to me, since I've been working to stop a project by an energy company to dump heavy metals into the Kansas river. The sheer volume of evidence in support of the hazards of heavy metals makes my job easier.

3. Ecotoxicologists at SETAC need to get better, and that's all there is to it. One speaker used a tennis-shoe metaphor/literary device to get her point across ( the "Just do it." approach or a "New Balance"), without ever explaining what either meant. Another speaker referred to a 24 hr toxicity test on crustaceans as 'Chronic.' A third speaker (actually the chair of my session) gave a talk that consisted entirely of him recounting an unsuccessful survey for hellbender salamanders and then showing us pictures he took while he was doing the survey.
These are unacceptable, and we should expect better from scientists giving talks at major conferences. If you don't have any results or data, don't try to amuse me by showing me your pretty underwater photographs of a bluegill. A talk at a scientific conference should include, at minimum, a complete story of some research, along with necessary background info and some kind of data.

4. The good talks: While the "Ecotoxicology" sessions were mostly awful, the "Wildlife Ecotoxicology" session was amazing. I didn't agree with all of the science (particularly one speaker's assumption-laden justification for his qualitative interpretation of his data) in almost every talk we got an introduction, a compelling methodology, and a insightful synthesis. This peaked with Nico van den Brink and Frouke Vermeulen's separate talks demonstrating the importance of taking into account foraging on heavy metal uptake from both a theoretical and experimental basis. That whole session was stellar, and has to rank as the overall highlight of the conference.

5. Tyrone Hayes. This guy gave the best scientific talk I have ever seen in my life. You can read about him online here, here, and here. He made a compelling case that Syngenta has bought out the integrity of several researchers and may be unfairly influencing the EPA. Apparently this fight has been going on for awhile, although I hadn't been fully aware of it. I do know that corporate interests certainly seem able to "buy" whatever results they want from unscrupulous researchers.

6. My talk. I thought my talk went fairly well. I had a lot of good questions, mostly on a more general front, but also a few that made me think. When people see this research, they start thinking up lots of intuitive ideas about how to go forward, and for some reason, a lot of these ideas are pretty obvious. I had multiple questions that paralleled my own thoughts, and the thoughts others have offered. One of my hopes during this conference was to interact with some profs who might be interested in doing some toxi-stoich research in their own labs. I don't know if that is going to happen.

There was a lot more that happened, and I'll try to recount some of it here, along with my thoughts on how to improve scientific conferences.

A good day for Kansas

Last Thursday, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment denied a permit to Sunflower Electric for 2 proposed coal power plants near Holcomb, KS. In the words of Secretary Roderick Bremby: “After careful consideration of my responsibility to protect the public health and environment from actual, threatened or potential harm from air pollution, I have decided to deny the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation application for an air quality permit.”

This decision was a bombshell across the state of Kansas. Almost everyone I know, and I know some people, assumed that the decision would be to allow the construction of the new coal power plants. The KDHE technical review actually recommended issuing the permit, despite protests from numerous individuals, organizations, and the Fish and Wildlife service.

Earl Watkins, Sunflower’s president and CEO was not happy (.pdf): “We are disappointed with the Secretary’s arbitrary and capricious action. It’s clear the KDHE technical staff followed the law in its treatment of Sunflower’s air permit application when the staff recommended that the permit be issued. All Kansans should be alarmed by this action, since the impact of this denial will be felt across many industries in Kansas, not just power plants.” Watkins went on to imply that Sunflower wouldn’t invest in the algae technology they had previously been planning to produce ethanol and other biofuels. Watkins characterized the decision as political. Steve Miller, a spokesperson for Sunflower, was quoted as saying investors would gather a “truckload of lawyers” and “find out if there’s a way around this or to overturn this.” As he put it: “Our main thing is we think this was an arbitrary and capricious decision.”

State legislators were quick to pile on as well, directing their wrath at the Democratic Governer:

“I am disappointed in the governor’s lack of support and leadership for western Kansas on this major development project. I am hopeful this effort will not live or die on Secretary Bremby’s decision.”

-- Steve Morris, R- Hugoton

“His [Bremby’s] action today sends a clear message that economic development is not welcomed in rural Kansas. This is clearly to me a political decision dictated by Governor Sebelius.”

-- House Speaker Melvin Neufeld, R-Ingalls

“As despicable as I find the national Republican Party, I find the leaders of the Kansas Democratic party even more despicable. Anyone who would throw a 3.5 billion-dollar investment away when it offered the citizens of this great state an opportunity to show the world what can be done with one of the most innovative energy programs ever conceived does not and will not get one minute of my time.”

-- Lon Wartman, who resigned as Finney County’s Democratic chairman.

"By forcing Secretary Bremby to deny the permit she (Sebelius) has not only caved to liberal special interest groups, but she has once again has shown her lack of commitment to promoting Kansas economic interests."

-- Kris Kobach, Republican state chairman (cites: 1, 2)

But this did not really reflect the range of opinions regarding the KDHE’s decision:

“I am encouraged by this decision, because protecting the people of Kansas – in every corner of our state – has always mattered more to me than anything else.”

-- Governor Sebelius

“moving forward it is critical that members of our administration and the Kansas Legislature continue to aggressively pursue renewable energy sources, such as wind generation. These opportunities will not only allow our state to lead the nation in clean energy, but will provide much-needed economic opportunities for rural Kansas.”

-- Janis Lee, D- Kensington

“The Holcomb plant would have locked the state into another 50 years of dirty, polluting coal energy and eliminated the market for the renewable forms of energy that are the future.”

-- Craig Volland, Kansas Chapter of the Sierra Club

“Based on this decision, we can say Kansas is becoming part of the solution rather than becoming part of the problem of global warming. It's a tough decision, but the right decision.”

-- Bob Eye, Topeka attorney for the Sierra Club

In my opinion, this was the best decision for Kansas. The supporters of this initiative are attempting to re-cast the issue as one of political development, and even in terms of Eastern Kansas dictating to Western Kansas, but these are misguided arguments. Allow me to explain:

1. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment is not mandated to promote economic development, but rather to protect the health and environment of Kansans. As a result, any argument based on economic development should be ignored. I’ve found no one arguing that the coal plant won’t produce greenhouse gases, and I’ve seen no evidence anywhere that greenhouse gases aren’t causing global climate change. Further, the citizens of Kansas were given an extraordinarily long time to make comments on this proposed permit, and based on the 117 page response to comments that KDHE generated, many of those comments expressed doubts that the EPA/KDHE air quality standards were strong enough to protect Kansans’ health. The only arguments in favor of the new coal plant were financial, but it isn’t the Kansas Department of “Making the Rich Richer.”

2. Individuals from Western Kansas (some of my in-laws among them) are trying to cast this as Eastern Kansas stifling Western Kansas development. My initial feeling is that Western Kansas is making a straw man argument here. Take a look at this map (.pdf) (or this one) showing the distribution of Kansans. Notice anything? The vast majority of Kansas lives in the Eastern half of the state. In fact, the top 3 metropolitan areas of the state (Kansas City, Topeka, and Wichita) make up over half of the state’s total population. So does Eastern Kansas have a bigger say in what goes on in the state: Of course it does. Last I checked, this was still a democracy.

Consider this, in the U.S. Senate, 51 representatives are voted in by just 17% of the U.S. population. I haven’t dug through all the numbers to find out, but I suspect a similar effect occurs in Kansas. I imagine the # of citizens per representative in Kansas is smaller in the west than in the east, and therefore the west is over-represented in the government.

Even if I were inclined to bicker over the financial aspects of this project, I suspect they would all come out bad for Kansas. The energy this coal plant would produce would be sent primarily to Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas. Just 15% of the proposed output from this plant would be going in-state, yet, 100% of the pollution would be occurring in-state. Air pollution from coal plants has been linked to increased infant mortality and asthma attacks, while filling the air with NOx, SOx, mercury, lead, and a host of other compounds that are known to cause human health concerns. The financial analyses done previously don’t really take these health effects into account, but if you think they don’t matter, you’re not paying attention.

All-in-all, I think this is a great day for Kansas. Secretary Bremby has drawn a line in the sand, and I hope we can defend it. The onus is now on the power industry to come up with some real solutions to our power needs, even if those solutions do not necessarily generate the most profit possible.

Toxistoichiometry: Integrating Ecological Stoichiometry and Ecotoxicology

In my current job I haven’t been doing a lot of original research, but that hardly means I am abandoning my wide range of research interests. I wanted to explain today a little bit about the “big idea” that I’ve been chipping away at for years. What follows are pieces from a talk I’m going to give to the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in Milwaukee on November 12^th.

Evaluation of toxicity is most often done by the use of standard bioassays on commonly used test organisms. For example, you can pull up an EPA-approved method for determining the acute or chronic toxicity of any chemical to Daphnia spp. Theoretically, anyone in the world can follow the same protocol and get the same result. In reality, considerable differences occur between labs and even between Daphnia strains (not to mention different species), but this overall approach has been accepted for years as a means of estimating toxicity. The problem is that this method only estimates relative toxicity within a specific context. Relating the results of these short-term, laboratory tests to real-world scenarios is not only difficult, it may be impossible. For example, frequently used protocols often provide organisms with an abundance of high-quality resources, while in nature organisms are often faced with either low quantity or low-quality resources. A number of studies have tried to understand how the effect of a toxin varies with food quantity, but few have adequately addressed how food quality alters the effect of a toxin. Imbalances between the nutritional quality of a food source and an organism’s dietary needs are common in nature and appear to play a role in individual physiology, population dynamics, community interactions, and ecosystem processes. The study of how nutrient imbalances alter ecological relationships is often referred to as ecological stoichiometry. Organisms respond to changes in the stoichiometric ratio of elements in their food with corresponding variations in growth, reproduction, assimilation, and excretion. Essentially, nutritional imbalances have a large effect on ecosystem function.

My interest is in linking ecological stoichiometry with ecotoxicology. Initially, I have focused on how food quality affects acute toxicity in aquatic organisms. My collaborators at the University of Notre Dame and Trent University and I have shown that some toxins (iodine, cobalt, fluoxetine in particular) are stoichiometrically explicit, meaning the effects on organisms vary based on the quality of food the organism is getting. Other toxins do not appear to be stoichiometrically explicit (bendiocarb, triclosan, methanol) although it is obviously harder to prove.

The implications of stoichiometrically explicit toxins are presently unknown, but one can imagine a situation where the concentration of a toxin allowed by law is harmless when organisms are fed high-quality food, but detrimental when they are given poor quality food. Obviously, in nature species are often faced with food shortages or poor food quality, thus the actual effect of toxins may be much greater than the estimated effects. Evaluating the risk a chemical poses to an ecosystem therefore requires a more context specific approach. Are the receiving ecosystems frequently nutrient stressed? Are times of pollutant release going to coincide with occasions when ecosystems are nutrient stressed? I’m not sure whether regulatory agencies are equipped to permit in this way.

This kind of work is obviously just a first crack at the idea, and in many ways a very basic approach. Without this kind of base data, however, addressing more interesting questions becomes difficult. I believe that toxistoichiometry has the potential to provide a new axis of understanding for ecotoxicology.

Explanations: Why you can't convince me to not do my job.

I consistently hear complaints from residential developers, engineers, and builders that environmental legislation causes unnecessary “delays.” Occasionally these complainers will attempt to argue with me about whether or not I should require mitigation for the loss of wildlife areas. I find these complainers to be borderline offensive, for the following reasons.

First, and perhaps foremost, I am not the one requiring mitigation, and I am not the one causing the delays. The elected officials of the state of Kansas passed into law the Kansas Nongame and Endangered Species Conservation Act in 1975 and since then the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks (KDWP) has been required by law to require mitigation for loss of habitat. Since 1975, the citizens of Kansas (and the U.S. as a whole) have repeatedly been polled to gauge the level of support for this legislation, and have consistently responded that they favor such laws. Environmental regulations are no different than regulations governing workplace safety or speed limits. The majority of Kansas citizens want such regulations to prevent irresponsible practices.

Secondly, whether or not I personally believe that each species should be regulated, or that KDWP regulations represent the best science, I am obligated to regulate based on the KDWP-approved methods. Now that I’m a part of the process, and because I’m a scientist, I will work to make sure that the methods KDWP uses are objective and transparent. In many ways, what we do can’t be improved upon. In other ways they can. What’s true in all cases, though, is that I’m obligated to not use my own methods, but methods that KDWP has approved.

Finally, this country needs environmental regulation. The evidence from the past suggests that various industries will pollute as much as they are allowed, even when that pollution is the source of human and environmental health concerns, so long as it increases profit. The reasons are many, but ultimately it is because any industry governed by market forces will punish those who willingly forgo an advantage. Without environmental regulation, any industry that benefits from immoral polluting will be at a competitive disadvantage to those companies that will pollute immorally. Regulations insure that all competition occurs on a level playing field that the majority of society agrees is fair. A similar line of logic exists for developers, agriculturalists, etc.
To sum up: I’m going to protect the threatened and endangered species of Kansas. Nothing you say or do will convince me otherwise. As a result, feel free to keep your meaningless grumbling to yourself.