Permaculture Blog

Finch Frolic Garden

https://www.meetup.com/SanDiegoPermaculture/events/249550662/

PuraVidaAquatic.com

Vegan musician, activist, author, and restaurateur, Moby, is turning his backyard pool into a tree and plant-filled pollinator paradise for bees, butterflies, and other creatures vital to the ecosystem.

Source: Vegan Musician and Activist Moby is Turning His Pool Into a Paradise for Bees

Good for him! Although I certainly wish that I could get information about turning your swimming pool into a pond pool2pond out to more people.

I am sure that it cost him a fair penny to fill in that pool with soil. And he has lost the benefits of that water resource in his backyard for native beneficial insects other than just the honey bees. Also bees need a Non-toxic Water Resource in the summer time in order to cool their hives. My guess is that he’s got a lot of trees and flowers and plants but not a lot of water for the critters. But that’s just a guess.

But again I welcome his beginning work at providing bees and other native pollinators and other beneficial insects a safe habitat in his backyard let’s start adding bats and dragonflies and damselflies and Pacific chorus frogs and so many more to the list.
Best to all
Bob

I have to credit some of my clients who sincerely care about the environment and work with me to create habitat for the native critters.

Here is a 20 second YouTube on why I do it. https://youtu.be/I5vU653XQjU

That little crowned sparrow is not bathing in toxins – algaecide, fungicide, neem oil, etc, etc. These chemical toxins have not dried on it after it has finished bathing. Have not increased their concentrations which the bird then preens from its feathers and _swallows_. These chemicals have not remained on the bird’s feathers and skin.

Why? Because there are no toxic chemicals added in the first place. What a foolish idea to think that simply because you’re not injecting an algaecide or other pesticide directly into an animal with a syringe that it it doesn’t get into their bloodstream.

I have to give this particular client a lot of credit.

Best to you all

Bob
PuraVidaAquatic.com

Ahhhhhhh this might be fun folks. Hopefully this judge can figure out unlike the judge in 2016 that a human cell and a person are two different legal entities.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has rejected a motion by Monsanto to dismiss a lawsuit by advocacy groups Beyond Pesticides and the Organic Consumers Association alleging that the labeling on its Roundup weedkiller is misleading.

Source: Judge rejects Monsanto’s bid to toss lawsuit over Roundup label

Is possible that this judge will do everything possible to protect Monsanto but the cracks are starting. That former judge should be removed from the bench in my opinion.

GMO apples that do not brown when exposed to air after being cut are hitting the marketplace. They are created by suppressing the production of an enzyme known as PPO

scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Piyada_Tantasawat/publication/8411582_Antisense_downregulation_of_polyphenol_oxidase_results_in_enhanced_disease_susceptibili…
This PDF source

www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-hms-tmobile-us&biw=320&bih=257&ei=edTCWsfCJ8SuzwKk1KPICQ&q=polyphenol+oxidase+disease&oq=polyphenol+oxidase+disease&gs_l=mobile-gws-serp.12…2924.14685..159…
Other sources

Polyphenol oxidases (PPOs; EC 1.14.18.1 or EC 1.10.3.2) catalyze the oxidation of phenolics to quinones, highly reactive intermediates whose secondary reactions are responsible for much of the oxidative browning that accompanies plant senescence, wounding, and responses to pathogens.

So the authors of this paper made two plant types both deficient in the PPO enzyme. They then exposed the two plant types to various bacterial pathogens. The results were that the first …

PPO construct exhibited a 55-fold increase in bacterial growth, three times larger lesion area, and ten times more lesions cm)2

The second set of PPO deficient …

plants exhibited 100- fold increases in bacterial growth and ten times more lesions cm)2

Snip

these findings suggest a critical role for PPO-catalyzed phenolic oxidation in limiting disease development.

So your bright looking, clean appearing, pure sort of, non-browning apples are very susceptible to disease and thus have probably been sprayed with several fold the amount of pesticides of even a regular apple. And those who don’t remember the Alar scare in apple juice many years ago might want to look it up :-) Isn’t instant gratification great :-)

Best
PuraVidaAquatic.com

Title: Virus found to adapt through newly discovered path of evolution.

Source: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180329141037.htm

Petrie and colleagues found that a single gene sometimes yields multiple different proteins. The lambda virus evolved a protein sequence that was prone to structural instability that results in the creation of at least two different host-recognition proteins. Fortunately for the virus — but not its host — these different types of proteins can exploit different locks.

tRNAs were known to do this 10 years ago. It’s a nice experiment, it’s a lovely experiment, but it is not a new type of evolution. It just is that those systems have evolved to be a little sloppy transcriptionally or translationally because “a little sloppy” benefits long term evolution too. It may have been how our immune systems started.

CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NEWSWEEK, Even science magazines want to scream “hey look at me” given any opportunity 😏 Settle down people take it with a grain of salt ☺. And it doesn’t mean that they set out to intentionally deceive you necessarily.

PuraVidaAquatic.com

Where did the news go telling us that we are all going to die of zika? It has served its purpose and is no longer required in the news. City council’s everywhere are buying pesticides and aerial spraying but hiding the fact that they are aerial spraying

Most claim that they are spraying to protect us from zika. However as a microbiologist and molecular geneticist who has researched a fair amount on zika and the brain damage and agree with all the reports that conclude, counter to the CDC, that
zika is not the cause of micro encephaly..

And the aerial spraying blows away the native mosquito predators far quicker than the mosquitoes themselves.
dragonflies-damselflies-and-multi-layer-mosquito-defense/

Sad.
PuraVidaAquatic.com

Monsanto is going beyond GMOs and investing in the gene-editing startup Pairwise. The deal could herald the arrival of the first Crispr produce.

Source: Monsanto is on the verge of producing the first fruit made with a blockbuster gene-editing tool that could revolutionize agriculture

My friends Crispr is just another name for GMO. It is a gene editing tool. And as the old saying goes about how a leopard cannot change its spots, so goes that Monsanto can’t change its GMOs.

But this story was probably paid for in part by Monsanto because it lays the groundwork for Crispr “going beyond GMOs”. You know that Monsanto will threaten anybody now trying to label Crispr products as a GMO.

And some food companies will joyfully now be free of having to label their GMO(Crispr) material as GMO. We need the genetic testing companies.

Good luck to you all
Bob

Pesticides from California’s Central Valley farms are found in Pacific chorus frogs living in pristine Sierra Nevada national parks.

Source: Pesticides Contaminating Critters in California’s National Parks

Scientists first noticed sharply declining frog populations in the Sierra Nevada starting in the 1980s. (The problem is global. Amphibians everywhere are suffering steep population losses and strange deformities.) Earlier studies by the USGS researchers found toxic pesticide concentrations in several frog species living in the national parks.

I have been saying for a long time that it would be nice to have a five or ten mile pesticide exclusion zone around our national parks. I would like to see this for many reasons but certainly one of the biggest reasons is the pesticide creep into our more or less pristine habitats.

Just an idea

So a good friend of mine asked me a very interesting question the other day: what would the evolutionary advantage of morning sickness be?

I think that this is a great question because; as he points out, the woman loses food that she has eaten and what could be the possible advantage of losing food value and energy be to a pregnant woman?

My brain works in funny ways :-) and all of a sudden I started thinking about it again and I have two ideas. I have no idea whether either of these is remotely true, they are just hand-waving possibilities in my opinion.

The first is that it’s a genetic sympathy ploy by her genes. Not a conscious effort by her to get sympathy, but a recognition by her tribe’s evolution that she may now need to be a more sympathetic figure – and not be expected to work as hard, not expected to to defend the tribe as much, not expected to play as active a role in the tribes day-to-day activity, etc. – all because she is pregnant.

These are the genes talking, not her conscious desire for better treatment one way or another. It really wouldn’t be susceptible to Game Theory.

The other idea is that it is also a non-verbal signal and the tribe is ” notified” that the woman is pregnant before she is visibly pregnant. And this scenario is more for her value to the tribe. She is now worth more to the tribe because she is in essence (1+a fraction) of a member and thus deserves (1+fraction) more protection from the warriors, (1+fraction) share of the tribe resources, etc.

These situations could also be merged but they probably have separate brain chemistry involved and could be initiated as separate events. They could even be separated on the X and Y chromosomes for further regulation. The overall benefit could be fine-tuned by how strong her reactions are in this scenario (how pysically sick to be and how incapacitated). How strong the tribes reactions would be could also be subject to fine-tuning.

The actual physical presentation of this scenario is also an interesting point. I believe that evolution is not able to decide what the best way of doing something is it just is able to to take an existing biological system and use it for the ultimate goal. And in this case the ultimate goal is just to communicate with the tribe in a manner that is not easily corruptible.

Corruptible in that this scenario would not be dependent on language. It would not depend on particular tribe member(s) trying to verbally convince other tribe member(s) that these actions were nessesary or required. How verbal and intelligent a species is might play a role in some genes “deciding” to find a method that was unconscious. To any witness, someone actually throwing up would be “proof”. I don’t believe that there are many people who could purposefully throw up without any mechanical assistance

See how much time I’ve wasted thinking about morning sickness this morning :-)

Best
PuraVidaAquatic.com