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Re: algae mechanisms and spittoons



> I understand why you say it is not competition the
> mechanism, but can you say (more on) what the mechanism is?
> 
> Thanks,
> Scott H.

Hehe, I can speculate, but often times you do "not know what something is",
. Eventually you eliminate everything else to a reasonable degree and arrive
at "what it is". If you have done good work and turned over all the stones
in your search, you might be able to say something concrete. I have not
eliminated a number of issues but I have good idea what to look at and how
to do it.
One of the main ideas I am trying to relate this experiment to is a much
larger and more important issue. But the design thus far is good.

It will get around a few obstacles, such as root meditated advantages being
the cause for the plant success, allelopathic causes, a better analysis of
O2's effect on algae and plant growth at higher levels, controls, no
herbivores/fish to skew things.
Getting good quantitative data on algae growth rates and density is a key
element here. Plant dry weights will be used for assessing the plant mass.

 While this might seem easy, actually getting all of this together and
keeping on things is not. Fortunately, I have many years at setting up of
aquariums under my belt so that part is not as bad for me compared to many.
There are a few things that still bother me about the set up but I'll
develop it better as I look seriously into this further.

I can certainly say what competition it is "not" at higher CO2 levels
concerning algae and plants with the nutrients. Elucidating what it is will
be more challenging. I'll need to work on photorespiration of algae and
aquatic plants. This is difficult to do but I think if I noodle with things
and try to find an indirect test method or look more into the research, I'll
find something/a method that satisfies my standards in that area.

The Center for Aquatic Plants has offered to help in the literature search
and some design of the experiment. Any input is welcomed. Not sure where or
how I'm going to fund this, maybe out of my own pocket for some of it. Still
working on the proposal but it could develop nicely into a series of several
projects with algae and plants.

********

But if you think this is meaningless and something that relates only to this
hobby, you are quite mistaken. What I'm doing here is looking at the basic
food web that drives the whole planet and how it is effected by increasing
the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. If algae production drops by 10 or 50%
across the globe, there's going to be hell to pay. Will/can the food web
switch to higher plants? We need to know this information now before the CO2
levels get even worse. The corporations and politicians are not doing crap
about it but the scientific reality is going to be there, making it harder
and harder to look the other way as they have done for the last 30 or so
years about this problem. "Well we really don't know or are not 100% certain
etc about this finding etc, my researcher at Big oil says this is not true
even though this guy is the world's expert on the subject".

Kind of reminds me of how Big Tobacco said Cigarettes don't cause cancer and
when Bob Dole said on TV to the USA people, not that long ago either, "Well
we really are not sure that they do (cause cancer) or not". Kiss my
spittoon. Wake up, CO2 is like second hand smoke to the entire world. I'll
get down from the pulpit now:-)

Regards, 
Tom Barr