Best of our wild blogs: 12 Apr 09

The Chequered Lancer
Butterfly of the Month on the Butterflies of Singapore blog

Who's the Eggs-pert?
on the Lazy Lizard's Tales blog

Dubious names
on the annotated budak blog and button blue eyes

Four-Lined Tree Frog
on the Creatures in the Wild blog

Morning at Lim Chu Kang
from wild shores of singapore blog and tricky bruguiera and hoya diversifolia

Velvet-fronted Nuthatch taking a spider
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

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Fuelling his dreams: A Singaporean's biofuel empire

School and business hiccups haven't stopped SMU student from planting the seed of his biofuel empire
Ho Lian-Yi, The New Paper 12 Apr 09;

WHILE his peers were dreaming of a cushy job in a bank, Mr Lim Hongzhuang was out in a field, shovelling chicken manure on a plot of land.

It was, hoped the 25-year-old Singapore Management University (SMU) finance and sociology undergraduate, the beginning of his biofuel empire.

'I thought that energy prices are always on the uptrend. I asked my friends, and the easiest way to get in is biofuels,' he said.

He was going to plant Jatropha, a tree that produces oil-bearing seeds, on his farm in Kuala Pilah in Negri Sembilan, Malaysia.

Though still in school (he finishes his final year exams in nine days time, this is already Mr Lim's third attempt at business.

He previously started a mobile value-added services company and a web-hosting business. They didn't work out, but that didn't stop him from looking for other opportunities.

Mr Lim had zero agricultural experience, but that didn't deter him. With a friend, he drove up and down Malaysia, scouting the land.

He said he met a Singaporean businessman in July 2007 who promised to work with him and offer his agricultural know-how.

Ups and downs

In December 2007, he found the right piece of land, buying over the former Singaporean owner's company for $80,000. The land was about 90 acres (roughly the size of 30 football fields), dilapidated, full of weeds, with limited infrastructure.

He set up LX Holdings with his friend and the duo started clearing the land for planting, chopping down the banana trees that the former owners planted.

But in Feb 2007, his businessman advisor pulled out, saying Mr Lim and his friend were not 'established enough'.

Shortly after, his friend also left. He had an internship offer in a multi-national financial company, and decided he wanted to try the corporate world.

Now Mr Lim was straddled with a farm but with no agricultural knowledge.

'We were almost at a dead end,' he said. But he wasn't giving up.

No bank would lend him money for his start-up, so he pulled out the money he saved from his previous ventures and turned to his his relatives for loans. They invested RM1,000,000 ($400,000) in all.

But things really got going when they found a farm manager through a web forum, a Malaysian named Tye Tong Fatt, 45, who had a Jatropha nursery that was merged into LX Holdings.

By last October, the farm entered the black. But it wasn't thanks to biofuels. The recession was in full force and fuel prices were crashing.

To pay the bills, he planted vegetables, just like any farmer - a tag Mr Lim wears proudly. The farm now produces about 500kg of vegetables that he sells to markets in Malaysia and Singapore.

He said the farm makes RM2,000 to RM3,000 in revenue a day at a 60 per cent profit margin. That's about $10,000 a month in profit.

Showing off his richly purple eggplants and sumptious ladyfingers, Mr Lim is clearly pleased with his progress. He brings a basket of fresh produce home for his friends and family every week.

However, he has not given up on his biofuel dreams - he is still offering potential clients samples from his farm. One day, he hopes to be able to power their pumps with their own biodiesel.

Driving to the farm is a three-hour trip from Singapore. Mr Lim has made the trip nearly every weekend. He admitted that his grades 'toppled', but he said he gets by doing school projects related to his work.

Still, running his business wasn't easy.

There are middlemen and labour agents to deal with. One squatter even threatened him with a parang when he tried to evict him from his land, he said.

But most pressing is the labour shortage. Mr Lim has nine workers. Mr Tye estimates they would need around 50 to be able to work the whole farm.

Despite all the problems, he is glad he entered the business. In the past, he had hoped to just join a bank and work his way up. But as one of his potential clients told him, what he has learnt, money cannot buy.

Also, because of the recession, he said one in 10 of his peers hasn't got a job.

'So I was thinking of helping them get jobs,' he said.

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3 hours to move fish farm by 3km

Straits Times 12 Apr 09;

How do you move a fish farm the size of half a football field?

Slowly. Excruciatingly slowly.

Last week, three fish farmers, with help from at least eight others in the same business, hauled one such floating platform filled with nearly 70,000 fish across the Johor Strait. It was a distance of just 3km but the move took nearly three hours.

Precision was the operative word.

The trio, Mr Malcolm Ong, Mr Lim Sin Guan and Mr Tay Yong Peng - partners in their company called MPG Trading - needed to wait till the tide was in their favour. Then, they needed 10 boats positioned at intervals around the platform to nudge it forward. They also had to make sure they did not crash into other farms along the way.

Tugboats were out of the question - they could well break up the fragile platform and set all the fish loose.

It was a logistical feat only experienced fishermen like Mr Lim and Mr Tay could pull off.

The two already had farms of their own when Mr Ong, 45, a former chief executive of a French software company, decided to join them two years ago.

Buoyed by the increasing demand in farmed fish, the three spent more than $200,000 to buy a retiring neighbour's offshore farm at Lim Chu Kang.

Last week, they moved the newly purchased farm to their existing one, also at Lim Chu Kang, and are looking at doubling their yearly output of milk fish and mullet to 300 tonnes.

With this new addition, the trio, who have invested more than $500,000, have 30 nets, making them the biggest fish farm operator in Lim Chu Kang and possibly in Singapore.

Each net on the farms contains 8,000 fish.

'You either buy or build. Buying saves time but building means it would be new,' said MrOng, adding that the company is looking for new overseas markets for its produce.

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Dutch poised to protect New York from the sea

Thijs Westerbeek van Eerten, Radio Netherlands 11 Apr 09;

Four hundred years after the English explorer Henry Hudson discovered 'by chance' what is now known as Manhattan, the Dutch are returning. Henry Hudson was actually trying to find the shortest route to India, but in 2009 the Dutch have a very different mission. They want to protect the island of Manhattan, and the city of New York, from the rising sea water.

New York's sea defences need major reconstruction to bring them up to the present-day standards of those in the Netherlands.

So Rotterdam City Council, the Arcadis engineering firm and Amsterdam's VU University are going to help improve matters. They have decided on a combination of a dam and a flood barrier already in use in the Netherlands.

The plans for the new sea defences in New York's Verrazano Narrows were presented last week and are expected to cost 6.5 million dollars.

Defenceless
New York's present sea defences allow for major flooding once every 100 years, but defences in the Netherlands allow for such floods only once every 10,000 years.

In the few hundred years since New York became a metropolis, it has narrowly escaped disaster a number of times. Rising sea levels make the situation more dangerous, as do the fiercer storms which will result from climate change. If a major storm hits such a big and economically important city, the damage will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Piet Dircke from Arcadis (photo © waterforum.net) illustrates the technical requirements of the new defences:

"It is after all the entrance to the Port of New York and must be able to accommodate the world's biggest ships. At the same time, you have to take care of the bay and maintain its tides for ecological reasons."

Why no dykes?
Jeroen Aerts (pictured right) from the VU University's Institute for Environmental Issues explains:

"The New York coast is enormously long. You could think about constructing dykes all the way along, but that would be hugely expensive because you'd have to start from scratch. What we are proposing is to close off all the openings to the sea with flood defences, in precisely the way it's done here in the Netherlands."

The Verrazano Narrows at 1.6 kilometres are too wide for an ordinary flood barrier, which closes off the opening to the sea with two enormous gates. The system which has been chosen combines the properties of two sea defence systems in the Netherlands: the storm surge barrier and dam at Oosterschelde in the province of Zealand, a huge construction comprising 18 floodgates which move up and down; and the Maeslantkering storm surge barrier near Rotterdam where two enormous gates open sideways.

Expensive?
The plans were enthusiastically received at a recent international conference on protecting coastal cities, but they do call for an investment of 6.5 billion dollars. Jeroen Aerts thinks the money will be found. He even suspects the present economic crisis could actually prove an advantage because of the number of jobs created by this sort of huge infrastructure project.

Mr Dircke also believes in the viability of the project:

"The idea that New York is in real danger has got through since Hurricane Katrina. Policy makers and those in power realise something has to be done. Our plans are very expensive, but doing nothing will end up costing even more. In the end, it's a shrewd economic investment".

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Will climate change spread disease?

Bob Holmes, New Scientist 11 Apr 09;

MUD-SLINGING has broken out among ecologists over a study suggesting that climate change might not spread tropical diseases far and wide after all. When the paper triggered an uproar, editors at the journal Ecology decided to publish not one but six responses alongside the original research. The collection appears in the April issue.

Many disease researchers have warned that rising global temperatures could lead to more disease, for example by allowing tropical diseases to expand their ranges into what are now temperate regions. This is a particular fear for insect-borne diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness.

But the reality is more complex, argues Kevin Lafferty, a disease ecologist at the US Geological Survey's Western Ecological Research Center in Santa Barbara, California. He argues that a warming climate could favour some diseases in certain regions while inhibiting them in others.

Lafferty does not deny that climate change might allow malarial mosquitoes to spread to new areas. However, he believes that hotter and drier conditions may also eliminate mosquitoes from areas where they currently thrive, such as the Sahel region in Africa. If this were the case, he says, there would be little if any net increase in the risk of disease.

In addition, many temperate regions such as southern Europe or the southern US have good sanitation and insect control programmes which, Lafferty says, would prevent diseases from becoming prevalent even if climatic conditions were suitable.

Finally, he argues, climate change could wipe many species off the planet. Infectious pathogens depend on their hosts for survival so they too may become endangered - especially if, like malaria, they rely on more than one host (Ecology, vol 90, p 888).

Lafferty's paper caused such a furore among its reviewers that the editor handling it, Ken Wilson of Lancaster University in the UK, commissioned a series of responses arguing both sides of the debate to publish alongside it.

"I disagree with the whole line of reasoning," says Mercedes Pascual of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She points out that there are large human populations in the east African highlands, just outside of the existing range of malarial mosquitoes, and as temperatures rise, the mosquitoes will reach these areas. This will more than offset any benefits from decreased risk elsewhere, she says (Ecology, vol 90, p 906).

Richard Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, says that while better health infrastructure in developed nations "might be heartening to some, it is far from universal". For instance, several ecologists point out that there is evidence climate change is already increasing the incidence of malaria in the highlands of Ethiopia, where poor health infrastructure will harm any response.

Climate change is probably also causing an increase in non-human diseases. Drew Harvell, an ecologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, says winter warming in the Caribbean is leading to increased rates of disease in corals (Ecology, vol 90, p 912).

Most of the ecologists do, however, seem to agree on one point: predicting where a disease is going to go next involves far more than just climate. No matter how the debate is resolved, they all agree that health concerns should continue to play a critical role in climate policy, and the debate shouldn't be regarded as weakening the case for action on global warming.

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Galapagos volcano erupts, could threaten wildlife

Yahoo News 12 Apr 09;

QUITO, Ecuador – Ecuador officials say a volcano is erupting in the Galapagos Islands and could harm unique wildlife.

The Galapagos National Park says La Cumbre volcano began spewing lava, gas and smoke on uninhabited Fernandina Island on Saturday after four years of inactivity.

The park says in a statement the eruption is not a threat to people living on nearby Isabela Island.

But it says lava flowing to the sea will likely affect marine and terrestrial iguanas, wolves and other fauna.

The Galapagos are home to unique animal and plant species that became the basis for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Scientists say Fernandina is the island with the most volcanic activity in the archipelago. La Cumbre last erupted in May 2005.

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UK goes into ecological debt on Easter Sunday

Think-tank study points to the date Britain's ecological debt begins - when the country starts living beyond its means and relying on international imports
John Vidal, The Guardian 11 Apr 09;

Britain is living beyond its environmental means and is increasingly dependent on the rest of the world for its natural resources, a thinktank study has revealed.

The recession may have slowed consumption but the New Economics Foundation (Nef) says we are now drawing deep on the cropland, pasture, forests and fisheries of other countries.

The research also shows that by tomorrow the country will have used the levels of resources it should consume in an entire year if it were to be ecologically self-sufficient.

Andrew Simms, Nef's policy director, said: "We are consuming more and more, and as our ecosystems become more stressed the day in the year on which we effectively go beyond our environmental means, and move into ecological debt, is moving ever earlier in the year. In 1961 it was 9 July, but this year it falls on Easter Sunday."

The UK's ecological debt and reliance on the rest of the world are revealed in our dependence on imports of food and energy, says Nef: "National food self-sufficiency is in long term decline, and we are increasingly dependent on imports at precisely the time when the guarantee of the rest of the world ability to provide for us is weakening."

A combination of global factors such as climate change, competition for energy resources, economic instability and changing consumption patterns are all now compromising Britain's economy. "The impact of our lifestyles is felt worldwide and solutions to problems like climate change are unlikely until greater changes are made here in the UK."

Nef argues Britain is part of a "bizarrely" wasteful system of world trade. "Virtually identical amounts of gingerbread, fresh boneless chicken, chocolate covered waffles, are imported and exported ... In 2007, the UK exported 1.8m tonnes of essential oils, perfumes and toilet preparations, while it imported 1.5m tonnes."

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