Welcome to 2022.  May it be a better year for all! 

I hope that all of you have been able to find many things to feel good about.

My life has been extraordinarily busy, but good.  Productive without a tremendous amount of busywork (busywork, after all is what I retired to avoid). 

I would like to share a few things with you – an upcoming event, a technical niblet, and something hopefully of general interest.  

Upcoming Event

Living close to the coast in mid-coast Maine, I have finally had time to renew and refresh my interest in marine biology.  This is something that has been a passion of mine since I was a teenager.  Making contacts within the incredibly knowledgeable community of those who live and breathe the ecology of Maine’s coastal zone, has been invigorating.

Climate change has caused more rapid warming to the waters of the Gulf of Maine than over 99.5% of the world’s oceans*. As a result, the epicenter of the east coast lobster population has been moving inexorably northward to Canada at rate of 4-5 miles a year following cooler water along the coast.  The center point of the range of the American lobster is estimated to have shifted northward by 215 miles (from New Jersey, to Maine) in the last 50 years*.  The center point of Maine’s lobster population is said to now be about 120 miles southwest of the Canadian border.* The Long Island Sound lobster industry has essentially disappeared within my lifetime.  Massachusetts’ is drastically reduced, and Maine lobsters are moving up into Canada at a rate of 4-5 miles a year, following the cooler water. The situation with this and all other fisheries is of course complex and does not depend only upon climate change.  However, if the water is too warm for the species to thrive optimally, it will either move or die out.

What is less well known is that as the coastal waters warm, a northward migration of less cold-tolerant invasive species is also occurring. One, in particular, the European Green Crab (ECG) has exploded locally.  It has captured the attention of local watermen since this voracious predator decimates the breeding grounds and beds of oysters, scallops, local crabs, clams, and particularly lobsters. It also competes with lobsters for both food and shelter. Strategies for dealing with them span a very wide range of options -- from eating them (the yield of meat per crab is very small), to using them for fertilizer, to extracting valuable pigments from their shells. Creating a fishery specifically for these predators is problematic for many reasons.

A new friend of mine will be giving a Zoom webinar about the European Green Crab and other critters that are threatening our ecosystem here and along the entire eastern seaboard – much of it accelerated by global warming and coastal water warming in the Atlantic off our coast.  Her webinar is sponsored by a couple of environmental education groups to which I belong.  I would love for any of you who are interested to attend this free, virtual seminar at 7 pm ET on April 11th.   

*The Last Lobster: Boom or Bust for Maine’s Greatest Fishery (2018) by Christopher White.  240 pp.  St. Martin’s Press, NY.

The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (2004) by Colin Woodard. 372 pp. Penguin Books, NY. 

Technical Niblet

For those of you who are interested in the history of science (remember, I’m a nutritional biochemist and I expect that some of you want me to wax philosophical about that), let me share with you a recent set of “musings” by an old friend.  Bruce Ames recently published a paper called “Musings in the Twilight of My Career” that offers a poignant and somewhat detailed overview of some of the advances in understanding nutrition and metabolism which Bruce has brought to the table over a very long and productive career. 

For those of you who can’t access it and are interested in having a pdf of this paper, I am happy to send you one.  Bruce’s “Triage Theory” was particularly inspiring and heartening to me as I was slowly putting together my ideas about phytochemicals and healthspan.

General Interest

In early December, Newsweek magazine had a cover story entitled Toxic Food.  It is well worth reading and in my opinion it is not over-sensationalized.  If anything, it is too conservative in its damning portrayal of “Big Food”.  I strongly recommend reading this story. 

To quote directly from the article: “. . .A few years ago, Kevin Hall set out to debunk the theory, espoused by a growing number of nutritionists, that Americans were getting fatter and sicker because of the complex industrial and chemical processing that food companies were using to make their products appealing. Hall believed the explanation had more to do with Americans simply eating too many calories, fats and sugars. The notion that extra processing might be causing the problem struck him as "ridiculous”. . .”

“. . .Hall, it turns out, had it all wrong—processing, in fact, made all the difference. The subjects in Hall's study who subsisted on Cheerios and Chef Boyardee gained one pound per week on average and consumed in excess of 500 calories a day more than the group with the healthier diet. What's more, when they later switched to a natural diet, they dropped the extra weight. The conclusion: whatever food company chemists are doing to food, it makes people fatter. . .”

For those of you who do wish to dive deeper on this I can provide anyone without access to pdfs of this and to many more like it.  Just ask me, please!