Antinatal

I’m approaching impending dadhood (very impending, in fact – D-Day Thursday (although see below for the difference between ‘due date’ and ‘expected date’…)) with what I assume is about the usual mix of excitement and fear. One thing I definitely can’t wait to be rid of, though, is the torrent of antenatal advice that floods in from all directions. Oh, I know, advice on every aspect of parenting is sure to follow, but I figure I will at least be in a better position to sort the wheat from the chaff once Jr. enters the real world and ceases to be (for me – his/her mum, of course, has already become reasonably intimately acquanted with him/her as an actual physical being!) somwhat hypothetical. Now, as Mike wrote the other day, parenthood comes with no manual, so you would think I’d be grateful for advice. And that’s absolutely right – there are things we didn’t know, that we needed to know, and that we do now, thanks to a few NHS antenatal classes, as well as those run by the NCT (all of which I missed – Bad Dad!) and some yoga (which aimed to relax us, but had the opposite effect on me through use of the term ‘energy’ in a non thermodynamic sense). The problem is not that there is no good, sensible advice. It’s that it is more or less impossible to sift this out from the rubbish. You just know that some of what you hear or read comes straight from anti-vaccine nutjobs, or at least people who would rather place their trust in mystical gobbledegook than the nasty medical establishment. But, without spending an age tracking down sources for bit of information, it’s very hard to tell these points of view apart.

Part of the problem is the general aversion to numbers in any of the leaflets, classes, or whatever. Now, I know there are reasons for this. For instance, the midwife refused to give me any kind of ballpark figure about what, in degrees C, constitutes ‘warm’ (for a baby’s bath), largely I think because she doesn’t want people becoming absolutely neurotic about such things. (I asked, incidentally, out of interest – I used to make a lot of bread, so have a reasonable feel for different temperatures of water, and was curious what ‘warm’ is!)

Other times, it is to do with the nationalised nature of our health service. Now, I will not have a bad word said about the NHS – it’s a wonderful institution that, despite its faults, works amazingly well, and I fear for it under our current government. But, the NHS has to issue advice that will do the maximum good to the maximum number of people (the National Institute of Clinical Excellence has the tough job of making such calls, and does so very well). The calculation has clearly been done, for example, that the potential risk to the developing foetus of too much vitamin A outweighs, on average, the benefits of certain foods to pregnant mums: hence, no liver when pregnant. An individual-level assessment may have concluded that, in our case, liver would have been good – and would have maybe avoided a recent bout of anaemia.

Of course, as a society we are terrible at assessing risk, so it’s perhaps not surprising that there are so few details given about these things that thou shalt not do. So for instance, with an excess of vitamin A, what does the risk of foetal abnormality increase from and to? If we hadn’t bought a new matress for the second hand cot, I know from the FSID (who, by the way, do fantastic work, which you all should support) this would apparently increase the risk of Sudden Infant Death, but again, from what, and to what? For some issues, some of us might accept even a doubling of risk in some circumstances, if it was from, say, a miniscule risk to a tiny risk.

Now, I know this level of detail is going to be of interest to a very small proportion of expectant parents. And if I really wanted, I could spend hours on the internet hunting down sources (you would think, anyway – although a colleague, having absent-mindedly made some mayonnaise for his partner, failed in a flurry of panicked research to find any evidence of a raw egg ever having hurt anyone during pregnancy!) But for those of us who take an interest in such things, without obsessing over them, it would be nice if routine leaflets and so on had some kind of… appendix, I suppose, with some numbers there.

One final bugbear – as I said, our ‘due date’ is this Thursday, 18th. But, as everyone knows, first children are always late (or, about 90% of them are). So, the ‘due date’ is clearly not the ‘expected date’, in terms of the day that Jr. is most likely to appear. Wouldn’t it make more sense to give us a due date that reflects the expected arrival? Then I have a day or two more, anyway, of not jumping out of my skin every time the phone goes.

Right, off to take Mike’s advice and get some pre-emptive sleep…

Nuclear Fishing

It’s looking pretty certain that nuclear power is going to play an important role in meeting the UK’s energy demands in a low(ish) carbon future. Various other schemes, perhaps most notably the planned Severn barrage, are starting to look too expensive and, ironically, environmentally unacceptable. I say ironically, because nuclear power has long been unpalatable to the environmental movement. But, faced with the choice between the certain destruction of large areas of ecologically sensitive wetlands, and the remote possibility of a nuclear catastrophe, many environmentalists are starting to think that uranium’s not such a bad option.

Now, I don’t want to enter the debate about how safe nuclear power really is, nor about the actual carbon emissions (factoring in building, running and decomissioning) of ‘carbon free’ nuclear power. Frankly, if I want to be able to power this laptop and see the occasional landscape free of turbines, like Lovelock I can’t see much alternative. But, there is an interesting environmental impact of nuclear power stations that is not widely appreciated: their effects on fish stocks.

Nuclear power stations in the UK are all situated on the coast, for the simple reason that they require a constant supply of very large quantities of water to cool the reactors. This water is not contaminated (except thermally – bays and estuaries near the power stations tend to be rather warm, altering growth and phenology of some marine species) – but, there is still an impact. As well as sucking in sea water, these installations also, of course, suck in anything living in it.

Big things – fish, for example – do not mix well with power stations, and so are removed using a large screen. Everything over a minimum size will be retained. Survival is not high.

Of course, any callous ecologists reading this (is there any other kind?!) will immediately think, ‘that sounds like a fabulous sampling strategy’. Well, you’re too late – I only know all this because of a series of really interesting papers involving Peter Henderson, a fish ecologist from the University of Oxford and PISCES conservation who has been collecting data monthly from one power station (Hinkley Point, on the Severn esturary) for almost 30 years.

In a recent paper, Henderson and Anne Magurran, one of his regular collaborators in this work, confirm that

The sampling method will… catch adults and juveniles older than six months for all known British marine fishes

What struck me, reading this particular paper, is that the numbers presented allow some very rough guesstimates of the fish catch of the UK’s nuclear power stations. For instance, they describe a (mightily impressive) sample over 24 hours across 4 intake screens in Hinkley. I don’t know how many screens there are in total, but even just taking these 4, the intake trapped ‘approximately 20000 individuals from 49 fish species’. Simply multiplying by 365 gives an annual take on the order of 7.3 million individual fish. Times eight power stations in the UK, and with catches of decapod crustaceans (crabs, shrimp, and so on) around four times those of fish – the numbers quickly become colossal.

In the grand scheme of things, the fish killed by nuclear power stations pale into insignificance against the catch of the monstrous global fishing fleet, and the unprecedented threat of global climate change. But, power stations can be designed to eliminate this, using recirculation of water or even dry cooling. I wonder, if more people were aware of the terrific waste of prime marine protein that currently occurs, might we be prepared to pay the extra for such a system?

Return from the Frontiers of Science

My plan to blog nightly from the Royal Society / Australian Academy of Sciences FoS meeting in Perth, which started promisingly, was stymmied rather by the packed and punishing schedule. Add on >24h travelling either end of a 4 day meeting, and I’ve basically been away from a keyboard for a week. But, I did want to give some closing thoughts on the whole process. First, anyone who is at all environmentally aware will feel pangs of guilt about flying to any scientific meeting, let alone UK-Australia-UK in less than a week (especially when I should really have been manning the Science is Vital barricades). When half the meeting is spent discussing the consequences of similar patterns of consumption over the last couple of centuries – climate change in the broadest sense, with particular focus on ocean acidification – there is a special irony. But this is one kind of meeting where Skype doesn’t cut it, and on balance I feel that the carbon has been well spent.

Certainly, seeds of several ideas have been sown in my head – the kinds of ideas that almost never arise when attending a standard ‘disciplinary’ conference (meaning, a conference based around a single discipline, rather than anything kinky…). In part this was due to the structure of the sessions (each one consisting 1h of talks followed by a further hour of general discussion), and the broad mix of people there. But also, the total immersion in the meeting (to the extent that I only managed to stick my toe in the Indian Ocean, fully 5 minutes walk from the hotel, just before leaving) meant that ideas continued to ping around late into the night. (If this makes the experience sound horribly formal, let me add that these later ideas were inevitably generated in the bar, and, on sober reflection the following day, proved not all to be quite as superb as originally thought.)

Asked to sum up the conference, I chose one word: interdependence. Partly, this was to reflect the repeated message that to study the ocean is inevitably to enter the realms of interdisciplinary science. You can’t undestand marine ecology without some understanding of physics (e.g. ocean circulation) or chemistry (e.g. the availability of biologically essential trace metals); but equally the production and transfer of biomass through ecological networks affects both the physics and chemistry of the marine environment.

There was a lot of other intedependence on show too. The mutualism between modellers and empiricists, for example. A model not grounded in real data is perhaps diverting, but ultimately useless; collecting data with no theory for guidence is unlikely to be particularly profitable. And the need to integrate insights from the past – whether from the fossil record, or from the historical record of people’s exploitation of the sea – with contemporary data, both to understand the present and to predict the future as we enter climatic conditions unkown in human history.

Finally, there is always the temptation among the scientifically minded to take an engineering approach to managing natural systems. This leads to the mentality that human intervention is required to ‘fix’ the marine environment. Unquestionably, some such interventions are needed – setting some limits on fisheries, for example, and curbing carbon emissions (although I remain sceptical of some of the more drastic geoengineering suggestions, such as iron fertilisation to induce phytoplankton blooms – how much energy is needed to extract and transport that much iron to the Southern Ocean?). But this conference reminded us that really it is us who depend on the seas, and that the most convincing argument for managing them more wisely is simple self interest.