Costing the earth?

This is the third general election that has taken place during the lifetime of this blog and, looking back at the posts I wrote in the run-up to the 2015 and 2017 elections, I see one overwhelming difference.  In both 2015 (see “A plague on both their houses”) and 2017 (see “How green is my party?“) I lamented the lack of focus that the major parties gave to the environment.   The same is not true this time, though the way that the major parties approach the issue varies considerably.

I’m not going to go through the manifestos in detail: there is a good comparison of environmental policies on the BBC website that already does this.  Instead, I want to take a step back and look at the broader context and, bearing in mind the present lead that the Conservatives have in the polls, I think it is appropriate that their environmental pledges get the closest scrutiny.   As is always the case, manifestos are glossy brochures that can be frustrating documents for anyone interested in the nuts-and-bolts of implementation. However, in the case of the Conservatives, we have a better idea of what their promises will look like in practice as their Environment Bill was working its way through Parliament when the election was called. The implication from their manifesto is that this will be picked up again (perhaps with some modifications) if they are re-elected.

Greener UK, a coalition of environmental organisations in the UK sees “many welcome measures” in the Environment Bill, but has a number of concerns (summarised in this briefing paper.   There was a hope that some of these could be addressed during the second reading and committee stages but my fear would be that a Conservative government with a Parliamentary majority would be in a position to drive through the bill without taking these concerns into account.  One of my key concerns (shared with Greener UK) is that the proposed Office for Environment Protection is not sufficiently independent from DEFRA to be truly independent (see “(In)competent authority”).

My major concern, however, is not what the Conservatives promise to do, but whether they will provide the administrative infrastructure that allows this to happen.   Earlier this week, I spent a day in a meeting with representatives from the Environment Agency, Natural England, a utility company and a rivers trust, considering the actions needed to manage one catchment in northern England.   There were ten of us around the table, all bringing different perspectives and expertise to the discussion.   This is a timely reminder that, whilst the politicians might want to present a series of neat prescriptions to drive environmental improvement, the reality will always be more complicated.   Conservative (and Labour, Lib-Dem and Green) promises need to be backed up by the resources (and adequate staff) to allow the ambition encapsulated in the manifestos to be fine-tuned to local circumstances.

And this is where the Conservative manifesto falls down.  The Institute for Fiscal Studies has looked at the spending pledges of all the major parties and found that neither Labour nor the Conservatives have spending plans that are in line with their manifesto commitments (you can see an analysis of the IFS report by the BBC’s Reality Check team, based on the IFS report here.  However, whilst Labour and the Lib-Dems are, at least, honest about the need to raise extra revenue through taxation and borrowing (even if Labour’s sums don’t add up), the Conservatives actually make a promise not to raise rates of income tax, VAT or national insurance.   That might play well, at a purely superficial level with voters with a libertarian bent, but will lead either to a gulf between ambition and delivery or to broken promises.

As 2020 dawns, the manifestos will be largely forgotten and newspaper headlines will focus on the crisis in the NHS.  We’ll still see articles about the climate emergency but, unless provoked by extreme events such as flooding, concrete pledges on spending will be few and far between.   The Environment Agency will still be limping along with senior management trumpeting a “more with less” ethos whilst their Poor Bloody Infantry will, if the polling is accurate, have barely enough resources to make the shrewd interpretations of the limited data now available that are necessary for effective decisions at a local scale.

At the root of my concerns is a question about whether the preoccupation of neoliberals with “small government” can ever be compatible with environmental management. Turning this around, the reason why academics and environmental professionals tend to be pro-EU is that they understand that the scale of the problems facing us is such that the broadly Keynesian, interventionist approach that the EU espoused was more likely to bring changes than laissez-faire economics.  That is not to say that the EU gets everything right (the Common Agricultural Programme, for example, the Common Agricultural Programme, for example, desperately needs an overhaul), just that it is going to be difficult for the UK to achieve the goals set out in all the major party manifestos unless we are prepared to pay for a public sector with a budget that is proportional to the task in hand.

Castle Eden Dene in November

For the first time this year, I heard Castle Eden Burn before I saw it.  Walking down from the car park, the distant roar of water was apparent almost as soon as the canopy of largely leafless branches closed over me.  A few trees still held their leaves – spectacularly golden on beech and birch, in particular, and the Dene’s famous yews were still green, of course – but the forest was dressed for winter now, much as it was on my first visit this year, back in January (see “Castle Eden Dene in January”).  Then, I was surprised that there was no water in the Burn.  On this trip, however, I wore my chest waders.  Back in August, I had compared Castle Eden Burn to a wadi (see “The presence of absence in Castle Eden Dene”) so the heavy rain of the previous few weeks had led me to suspect that today would be different.

The water surging through the Dene was very turbid, so collecting stones to examine involved feeling around on the river bed with my hand until I located one that was not sufficiently bedded into the substratum to remove.   That’s not ideal, but needs must and I got the five cobbles I needed, each with a distinct biofilm, slimy to the touch.  This is the first time, after eleven months, that Castle Eden Burn’s substratum has looked and felt remotely like the substratum from most of the other rivers I know in this part of the world.

Under the microscope, I see lots of particulate matter but also plenty of algae.   Apart from a few filaments of the cyanobacterium Phormidium, these were mostly diatoms.   The green algae I described in “When the going gets tough …” back in May were not obvious.  The diatoms were mostly largely motile cells of Navicula, with a few sigmoid cells of Nitzschia clausii and some smaller cells whose identity I will need to confirm once I have cleaned the sample and prepared a permanent slide.  The Navicula species, in particular, are typical inhabitants of local rivers during winter and early spring, all tolerant to a wide range of conditions.   I suspect that the rainfall has washed a lot of fine particulate debris from the industrial estates in the upper catchment into the river, and these diatoms will have the resilience to cope with such types of pollution.  A large storm sewer overflow also empties into the burn about a kilometre upstream of where I was standing and this, I suspect, has been flowing over the past month or two.

I also saw a few cells of Achnanthidium minutissimum, which I generally associate with cleaner conditions.  I suspect, however, that numbers will be relatively low compared to its more pollution-tolerant brethren.   Again, I can give a more authoritative answer once I have cleaned the sample and performed a full analysis.

Diatoms from Castle Eden Burn, November 2019.  a., b.: Navicula trpunctata; c. – e.: Navicula lanceolata; f., g.: Rhoicosphenia abbreviata; h., i.: Nitzschia clausii; j., k.: Navicula gregaria; l. Achnanthidium minutissimum.   Scale bar: 10 micrometres (= 1/100^thof a millimetre).   The photograph at the top of the post shows Castle Eden Burn just downstream from the point I sampled.

I originally set out to visit Castle Eden Burn six times during 2019 and this was the last of those. I’ve written about most of these visits already but not about my September visit.  There was, on that occasion, little new information to justify a separate post but I will include the sample I collected in my final overview of the algae of Castle Eden Burn, just as soon as I get this final sample cleaned and analysed.   Before then, I have one more post to write about the diatoms, based on some more detailed observations of a few of the species, and then it will be time to think about where to focus my observations during 2020.

Diatoms from the Troodos mountains

Back in April, I wrote two posts about the algae from a stream draining a chromite mine in the Troodos mountains in Cyprus (see “Survival of the fittest (1)” and “Survival of the fittest (2)”).  I also planned to write a post about the diatoms growing in the stream but the slide I prepared has been sitting on my desk over the summer whilst I was distracted by other things.  However, I have just started looking at some samples from metal-enriched streams in the northern Pennines and, curious to see whether a Cypriot chromite mine had similar effects, I blew the dust off the slide and slipped it under my microscope.

The principal effect of toxic pollution is to reduce the number of species found and, in this respect, my sample from the outflow of the Hadjipavlou mine outflow was true to form, containing just eight species.  The most abundant of these was Meridion circulare, accounting for one in four of all the cells.  What is more, many of the cells were visibly distorted (see images a., c. and d., in particular, in the plate below).  This is quite a common phenomenon in metal-polluted streams (see “A twist in the tale”) though I have not seen it quite so obviously in Meridion circulare before. My own pet theory is that one of the enzymes involved in laying down the silica cell wall has a metal co-factor that is displaced by heavy metals.

Meridion circulare from thepebbles from the stream draining Hadjipavlou chromite mine in the Troodos mountains, Cyprus, March 2019.  Scale bar: 10 micrometres ( = 1/100th of a millimetre).   The photograph at the top of the post shows snow on the Troodos mountains near the mine.

The only other diatom that was at all common in the sample was Hantzschia amphioxys, which also occurred alongside a smaller population of Hantzschia abundans.  I’ve not come across Hantzschia in metal-enriched streams before: it is a species that is most often associated with habitats that are not permanently submerged.  That may be the case at Hadjipavlou but the water that flows from mines comes from groundwater rather than rainfall so would not be subject to the strong seasonal variations that we associate with Mediterranean streams.  It is hard to draw a firm conclusion from a single visit.   Unlike Meridion circulare, however, neither population of Hantzschia showed any obvious distortion, perhaps due to the Hantzschia cells being more heavily silicified than those of Meridion circulare.

The extent to which cellular distortions are obvious does vary between species, as can be seen in “A twist in the tale …”  which compared three different representatives of the same genus in a metal-polluted stream.  I chose the word “obvious” with care as I do think that these phenomena are more easily seen in long thin cells than in shorter ones.  In the same Pennine streams where distorted Fragilaria are common, for example, I can also see distorted cells of smaller diatoms such as Achnanthidium minutissimum.  But you need a keen eye to spot these reliably.   Some other people have used fluorescent stains to look at other cellular irregularities, such as the position of the nucleus and damage to the nuclear membrane, but these require specialist approaches whereas distortions to cell outlines can be spotted from a standard analysis.

Hantzschia abundans (k., l.) and Hantzschia amphioxys (m. – p.) in the from the stream draining Hadjipavlou chromite mine in the Troodos mountains, Cyprus, March 2019.  Scale bar: 10 micrometres ( = 1/100th of a millimetre). 

A few years ago I was involved in a study of diatoms from streams in Cyprus and I dug out some of these data in order to put the Hadjipavlou sample into context.  One immediate surprise was that many of the “reference” (i.e. pristine or near-pristine) samples in that survey also had relatively low diversity.   The 45 samples in this subset had, on average, nine species, and a mean Shannon diversity index of 1.7, compared to eight species and a Shannon diversity index of 1.42 for the Hadjipavlou sample.   I’ve never been a fan of diversity indices as measures of ecological quality (see “Baffled by the benthos (2) and links therein”) although I suspect that average diversity at Hadjipavlou measured over a period of time will always be low whereas average diversity at unimpacted sites is more likely to fluctuate. Equally, low diversity coupled with a second strand of evidence, such as distorted valves, is a useful sign to an ecologist that something untoward is happening.

Number of taxa (left) and Shannon diversity (right) recorded in 45 samples from “reference” sites (i.e. minimal evidence of anthropogenic alteration) in Cyprus.  The arrows indicate the location of the Hadjipavlou stream within this dataset. 

The irony of writing about a heavily-polluted stream in the Troodos mountains is that the geological conditions which created the metal-rich veins hereabouts also create conditions for many plants endemic to Cyprus.   The serpentine and other ultramafic rocks create metal-rich soils within which few plants can survive (more about these here. I suspect that few of the plant enthusiasts drawn to Cyprus will ever cast more than a cursory glance at the green flocs adorning the abandoned mines of the Troodos mountains.

References

Licursi, M., & Gómez, N. (2013). Short-term toxicity of hexavalent-chromium to epipsammic diatoms of a microtidal estuary (Río de la Plata): Responses from the individual cell to the community structure. Aquatic Toxicology 134-135: 82-91.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aquatox.2013.03.007

Messy bedrooms …

When I was tramping around the Shetland Islands earlier this year (see “Hyperepiphytes in the Shetland Islands“), looking at the algae that live in the freshwater lochs, I noticed some meandering hieroglyphs made from fine sediment on the tops of some of the stones in the littoral zone.   I see these occasionally at other places too, and know that they are the “galleries” of caseless caddis flies.  Caddis flies are close relatives of the butterflies and are best known because many of their larvae use “found materials” (in contemporary art jargon) to construct cases to protect themselves.  Some species use fine gravel, silt and sand, some use fragments of plants, some have cases that are very neat, some have a more haphazard approach to construction.  However, a few families of caddis flies eschew cases and, instead, build these galleries.

Many caddis fly larvae, whether cased or not, are grazers, scraping the algae off the rocks on the bed of the stream or lake.   There is evidence that the cases offer some protection against predators such as trout which, by increasing survival rate, means that it is worthwhile for the caddis larvae to divert some of their hard-earned energy into building these.   Presumably, their caseless cousins gain the same advantage to building their galleries but recent research has suggested that these galleries offer a further benefit.

Think of caddis larvae as adolescent caddis flies.  Now imagine that the caddis gallery is the equivalent of an adolescent’s bedroom.   Horribly messy, in other words.   Let’s leave that image of a teenager behind (as most human teenagers know their way to the bathroom) and consider what happens to all that waste material that emerges from the far end of a caddis larva’s digestive system.   This nutrient-rich “ manure” encourages algae, meaning that our caseless caddis flies are, in fact, gardeners and are able to tap into this extra energy resource within their galleries in order to grow.   That brings us back to the analogy with teenagers, as these also frequently graze in their bedrooms (the diatom Campylodiscus is even the same shape as a Pringle, whose empty containers litter the bedroom floor of my own progeny).   I guess it is a good thing that caddis larvae don’t wear socks as, with six legs and two prolegs, the mess inside the gallery would be indescribable.

Galleries of caseless caddis flies (possibly Psychomiidae) on the top surface of a cobble from Sand Loch, Shetland Islands with (right) a close-up of a single gallery. The photograph at the top of the post shows Sand Loch in May 2019.

A recent study in the Lake District has shown that this “gardening” means that the algae which grow in the fine sediment from which the galleries are constructed are different to those found elsewhere on the rock surface, with a greater proportion of diatoms, which are considered to be more palatable to invertebrates than other types of algae.  Some caddis flies are thought to go even further, and can selectively remove and discard the algae that are least palatable (some Cyanobacteira, for example).

It is possible that up to 40% of the larva’s energy needs are met from the gallery itself.   The tube is, in fact, not a static construction: the larva pokes its head out in order to graze the algae immediately in front of the gallery, and extends the gallery as the food supply within easy (and safe) reach is exhausted.   At the same time, it is consuming the alga-rich rear part of the gallery (reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel eating the gingerbread house?).   A gallery only has a life-span of 10 days in the laboratory; whether this is the same under field conditions is not clear but that gives us some idea of the transience of these structures.   This rapid turnover means that the caddis larva is always feeding on succulent early-succession species, rather than the tougher and less digestible algae that might appear in more mature biofilms.

I also see similar galleries on the bed of the River Ehen from time to time but have been told that these are formed by non-biting midge (chironomid) larvae, rather than by caddis.  I presume that the same processes are happening in these although I have not been able to find much written in the literature.

Organisms that can significantly alter the habitat in which they live, and affect the conditions experienced by other species in the habitat are termed “ecosystem engineers”.  Beavers are good examples, as their dams can have significant effects on organisms extending for hectares.  Yet, in their own small way, caseless caddis larvae are also ecosystem engineers.  As are adolescent boys.   Which makes me wonder, having only talked until now about the algae in their galleries, whether caseless caddis larvae also have patches of mould extending up their walls.

Galleries made by chironomid larvae on a boulder in the River Ehen, March 2019.

References

Hart, D. D. (1985). Grazing insects mediate algal interactions in a stream benthic community. Oikos 44: 40-46. https://doi.org/10.2307/3544041

Johansson, A. (1991). Caddis larvae cases (Trichoptera, Limnephilidae) as anti-predatory devices against brown trout and sculpin. Hydrobiologia 211: 185-194. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00008534

Ings, N. L., Hildrew, A. G., & Grey, J. (2010). Gardening by the psychomyiid caddisfly Tinodes waeneri: Evidence from stable isotopes. Oecologia 163: 127-139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-009-1558-8

Ings, N. L., Grey, J., King, L., McGowan, S., & Hildrew, A. G. (2017). Modification of littoral algal assemblages by gardening caddisfly larvae. Freshwater Biology 62: 507-518. https://doi.org/10.1111/fwb.12881

Otto, C., & Johansson, A. (1995). Why do some caddis larvae in running waters construct heavy, bulky cases? Animal Behaviour 49: 473-478. https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.1995.0061