Frogs don’t like rock snot
This frog and his tadpole tramped up to the head of Lake Rotoiti in the Nelson Lakes last week. We were right at home, as after dark the valley filled with the sound of thousands of frogs (of the four-legged variety :)).
We had planned to wade across the Travers River and head back to St Arnaud via the far side of the lake, but at the DOC centre on the way in and at the hut itself were warnings about ‘rock snot’, a brown algae otherwise known as Didymosphenia geminata. Apparently if we got our gear wet we had to sterilise it when we got out, which sounded like too much hassle for one crossing on an overnight mission, so we took the main track back.
So given the threat from didymo to frogs, and all river life, I’m happy to read today that a sample of a mystery substance taken from the Travers has proven not to be this foul substance. My boots could have got wet after all!
When it was revealed last year that Southland’s Waiau River was full of Didymo then Green MP Ian Ewen-Street called on Biosecurity NZ to do everything to stop its spread. Only now that its been found further afield are all the stops being pulled out.
Yet again the Greens could say “we told you so”, but we won’t, because we’re too nice :). But all New Zealanders who value the South Island’s cool clear rivers should be seriously worried about this awful goo.
October 10th, 2005 at 8:46 pm
Hmmm.
Do we know how the snot got here?
More tourists. More kiwis flying out and in. People ordering plants over the internet (clearly the internet is the root of all evil…)
Biosecurity’s getting harder.
October 11th, 2005 at 8:38 am
I know a little bit about this issue, having worked on it. Quite simply there is nothing Biosecurity New Zealand could have done.
In a democracy, you cannot shut off 200km of river. And even if this was ordered, there is no ’standing army’ in MAF to enforce such a rule. This could be broken any time, anywhere, and the perpertrators likely to get away.
Neither can we eradicate this algae. It can survive for periods in the water below the river bed, so the wild declarations that MAF should ‘nuke’ the Waiau and Mataroa are inaccurate and unlikely to work. And even if MAF did flush a few thousand tonnes of chlorine through that river system, and by some fluke eradicate didymo, everything else would be dead. Then what? MAF doubts that the river will recover in a pristine state, god knows what will colonize first.
The speed of the response was tied directly to a lack of knowledge about the organism and it’s characteristics. These needed to be studied first before MAF had any idea of what to do. Research takes time, but only with research can some effective control measures be developed.
And finally, what proof is there that didymo was introduced into the Waiau? It bloomed there first, but this is no guaranteed it did not arrive in the Clutha, the Buller or maybe some other river yet to be identified. How many rivers do we ‘nuke’, how many do we cut off?
For those who criticize MAF, and say it should ‘do something’, a bit more clarity would be appreciated, as well as a recognition that MAF does not have unlimited funds nor an unlimited pool of staff to draw on.
October 11th, 2005 at 10:33 am
Seems we have to be inventive again.
Since nobody else knows how to get rid of it.
It has few vulnerabilities. Needs fresh water… needs nutrients… probably goes into a dormant state if it is dried. How far upriver is it spread? Can you cut off the flow of water and dry it up? What about temperature?
More to the point. How did it get here and how can it be prevented from getting here again. Require all vessels to sterilize their bilgewater before entering NZ waters? There’s issues around this and we may need to consider the real possibility that we’re going to have to live with this stuff like the rest of the world does.
On what terms can it coexist with other organisms. What eats it? Something surely does, but do we want whatever that is in our waters as well?
Keeping NZ isolated, pristine and untouched by the evolution that occurs in the rest of the world is every bit as much a problem as the unchecked importation of every vile (to us) organism ever conceived by Mother Nature.
We need to ask some hard questions of ourselves before we try to sterilize a river…
respectfully
BJ
October 11th, 2005 at 12:07 pm
Didymo is unlikely to infest all of our rivers, for all of their length. It needs flowing, pristine waters, with very little sediment. If there is a fair amount of silt in it, or the water is very slow (like in a lake), it doesn’t thrive, or even survive.
The environmental impact is less that it could be; it’s not poisonous, or dangerous. Impacts on invertabrates and other river life are uncertain, though there will be some. Time will tell on this one.
It’s an ugly mess, and it’s tragic that it’s in some of our rivers. But this particular algae will not be the end of NZ trout fishing or any other water sports. The best we can do is control it, but the problem is developing and implementing some workable controls, while accepting that this thing is likely to spread.
When you have millions of tourists and hundreds of thousands of shipping containers coming in every year, these things will happen
October 11th, 2005 at 2:52 pm
Tane’s points brings to mind where I decided not to go with the initial post.
Biosecurity is one of those costs that the market so effectively manages to externalise. In this case the true cost of “millions of tourists and hundreds of thousands of shipping containers coming in every year” has come to include fowled rivers and spraying suburbs.
Is it inevitable that our environment will slowly and inevitably be compromised by our lifestyles? Or can we decide that those knick knacks from the Warehouse and a holiday in Enzed included the true cost of far more comprehensive biosecurity defences?
October 11th, 2005 at 3:37 pm
Well Peak Oil will prove to be the best of all biosecurity defences. You cannot stop organisms, the bloody things are too good for us humans. New Zealand is the only country in the world to have eradicated Red Imported Fire Ants (Google them to find out how much of a pain they are). And we’ve done it twice!!
But if we continue to fly in all those planes, sail in all those ships and admit all those travellers (NZ and foreign) we will have Fire Ants here one day. It’s a certainty (though it may take a few decades or centuries). And if it’s not ants, it’s crabs or sea squirts or wheat virus or algae.
Biosecurity is at best a delaying mechanism. Faced with the massive number of pathways into the country, and the impossibility of closing them all off, there is no way we can prevent unwanted organisms reaching these shores. Some you can’t stop, such as the natural spread of microbes and invertebrates blown here on the wind from Australia.
Only when the jets stop flying and the ships stop sailing will this situation improve. One small benefit to Peak Oil.
October 11th, 2005 at 5:29 pm
Tane
With any luck we can keep the Fire Ants from making it here for more than a few years. They really do spoil the neighborhood. I suspect that they are a LITTLE easier than the algae and other things at the microbial level.
respectfully
BJ
October 11th, 2005 at 7:15 pm
I suggest for the meantime, until peak oil :-p)
A levy of NZ$100 on every long-term visitor (say more than 3 days) and $1000 on every shipping container entering the country to be collected in their airline ticket, or at customs, deposited straight into a “National Bosecurity and Conversation Fund” and used to assist DOC and Bosecurity on their operationsand research.
If we can justify collecting an “airport tax”, we can sure as hell justify collecting a Bisecurity levy.
NZ$100 is only US$60 or 40 quid. A very small cost compared to getting here in the first place.
October 11th, 2005 at 9:12 pm
yeah good idea but we’d get nuked by the WTO.
It would be catalogued as protectionism. “Free trade” includes absorbing a lot of subtle externalised costs.
October 12th, 2005 at 2:18 am
Sure, it is protectionism. There are ways and means around the WTO, no powerful country would sign up if there weren’t.
I think NZ has been overly influenced by the free trade paradigm. Somehow we have to be ‘pure’. Bull. Everyone cheats, so should we.
Perhaps instead of collecting the money at the airport, we tax the tourism companies who then pass it straight on to their customers. AFAIK there is nothing to stop the government increasing GST on some products and services and not others. Maybe we can increase GST on airline tickets. Or put a 500% GST on airport levies. Frankly, I think we should cheat. If we get ‘caught’ change the rules until we get caught again. I have very little compunction about ‘cheating’ on free trade’. Because as you point out Alistair, it includes absorbing a lot of externalised costs.
In addition, the Greens as a policy could have our trade negotiators push hard on ensuring that the costs of ‘free trade’ are not externalised. There are many other countries facing the same issues here.
October 12th, 2005 at 3:17 am
I agree, but… we’re not a powerful country, so we’d get nuked. Only the big boys get away with cheating.
And I don’t think peak oil will actually hit international shipping all that hard, except as a consequence of diminished overall economic activity… fuel costs per ton are very low, they can go a lot higher and only knock out very low-value cargoes.
October 12th, 2005 at 8:30 am
BJ,
You’re right, fire ants are easier to spot than microbes, which is why MAF surveillance programmes have spotted them twice, and early enough to destroy them (only one nest on each occasion). But give the buggers enough time…….
Alastair,
The key to Peak Oil ‘improving our biosecurity’ is that it will firstly almost eliminate trans-oceanic flight. Secondly, as you say, economic activity will be so depressed that there will be a substantial reduction in trade. Not only can we expect ship sailings to reduce in number, but the ships themselves and the tonnages they carry will be smaller. No more car carriers in from Japan, no more bulk iron-sand carriers moving to China.
October 14th, 2005 at 11:42 pm
there was a letter in the Herald yesterday saying that controls on human and powerboat movements are pointless because ducks would spread the snot from river to river (ducks don’t sterilise their feet) and the whole country is doomed to eventual snottiness.
Sounds reasonable. I don’t know anything about the subject so I’m hoping someone else has a comment.