(MY) dam and logging plan shelved in Pahang and diverse life in the deep

[Guest guest]

New Straits Times

 

Yusof wants dam in Sabah instead of Bakun power

 

Sept 16 2002:

 

THE Government should consider building a dam in Sabah instead of providing

electricity to it from the Bakun Dam in Sarawak, Datuk Dr Yusof Yacob

(BN-Sipitang) said.

 

The project, estimated at RM2 billion, was too expensive, he said.

 

" Build a new dam on Sungai Papar in Sabah and this will automatically solve

three problems, " he said when debating the Supplementary Supply (2002) (No. 2)

Bill 2002.

 

It would provide energy for the State, a water catchment area, and it could be

landscaped into a recreational area.

 

" Making the new dam a recreation area would turn it into an attractive tourist

spot, " he added.

 

 

 

The Star -Tuesday, September 24, 2002

Logging plan shelved to re-assess area impact

 

KUANTAN: International Islamic University of Malaysia's appointed loggers, IIUM

Educational and Cultural Development Sdn Bhd (IECD), has shelved plans to log

the 480ha Bukit Galing Forest Reserve.

 

This is to enable it to re-study the impact of the planned logging in the

surrounding low-lying areas.

 

In a faxed statement, IIUM Holdings Sdn Bhd media and communications executive

Rudy Sham Ab Raof said IECD would make a thorough check on the issues raised by

The Star in its Sept 22 report.

 

In the article, thousands of residents living at the foot of the forest reserve

had voiced concern that logging at the area, which is at a 30-degree gradient,

would cause floods.

 

At least six housing schemes, with more than 2,000 residents, are situated near

the reserve, where 50,700 trees have been tagged for extraction.

 

Rudy Sham said the company had no intention of extracting the logs but would use

selective logging technique should the need arise, adding that the area

highlighted in The Star was not part of the campus' development plans.

 

 

The Star

 

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

 

Diverse life in the deep

 

IT COVERS two-thirds of the Earth's surface. It is the largest ecosystem on the

planet. The number of species within its fold may be higher than the numbers

found in coral reefs or rainforests. Most of them are unnamed, many are unknown.

And yet the ocean floor is largely composed of kilometres of unending mud. How

can so many species survive in what seems such a barren environment?

 

That the number of species within the ocean may rival those found in the

rainforests has long been suspected, but until now there has been little

evidence. Dr Ron Etter, an oceanographer from the University of Massachusetts,

Boston, discovered a collection of clams, Deminicula atacellana, that had been

housed at Woodshole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts for the past 30

years.

 

Like most oceanic species, the clams had been pickled in formaldehyde which

degrades DNA; without this genetic material, it is nearly impossible to tell

whether an animal is of the same species as a different, similar-looking

specimen.

 

Despite the difficulties, Etter was able to take samples from 89 clams and

discovered a huge amount of genetic variation between them, even though the

clams had been gathered in an area 200km wide and had hardly moved throughout

their lives.

 

Thinking this might be some kind of aberration, he sampled a second set of

creatures, a snail called Frigidoalvania brychia. Various samples had been

collected, none more than 12km apart, yet Etter discovered that, genetically,

what was thought of as one species was actually three. When he looked at an

underwater topographical map of the region, he could see no reason why the

animals were so markedly different from each other.

 

The only explanation he was left with was depth. A change in pressure due to

depth can affect animals dramatically because enzymes used for metabolism are

highly sensitive to pressure. The only conclusion he could come to was that

given that species seem to evolve into new species rapidly and within the same

area, perhaps due to slight changes in depth, there must be many more species in

the sea than we have estimated. Current theories suggest that more than 250

invertebrates live in a single square metre, but this may be an underestimation.

 

Dr Craig Smith, from the department of oceanography at the University of Hawaii,

agrees that the snails and clams sampled by Etter are a typical example of deep

sea biodiversity: species are evenly distributed and are often very similar.

Unlike a rainforest or a coral reef, the ocean shows little variation since it

comprises plains of mud and there's very little to eat.

 

Smith argues that although food is scarce, when it arrives, there is a surfeit.

Kelp, a phytoplankton bloom, a dead whale, all end up at the bottom. As a

result, most species grow very slowly so one species rarely becomes capable of

dominating and excluding others.

 

Unlike the rainforest, where animals have their own niche - each type of tree

will be fed upon by different species that concentrate on eating different parts

of it - ocean species seem to agree where it's best to be abundant and all get

along doing the same thing.

 

The deep sea seems to have a high biodiversity, yet only a fraction of the ocean

has been studied. It represents one of the last remaining pristine environments

on Earth. Dr Elliott Norse, from the Marine Conservation Biology Institute,

Redmond, Washington, likens it to the wild west.

 

" Legally, frontier areas are often beyond the law. Economically, frontiers are

places to extract and crudely process natural resources, often wastefully. These

observations are as true in the 21st century in the vastness of the deep sea as

they were in the 19th century in the open range of the American west. "

 

The world's fisheries are now in decline. Deep sea fishing decimates

bottom-dwelling creatures. Trawling can halve the diversity of an area and it

can take centuries for the region to recover.

 

Oil and gas drilling is increasingly taking place in the deep sea which, apart

from the risk of blow-outs, is polluting. Drilling brings up fossil water from

deep within the Earth's crust; the water is often radioactive and highly salty,

toxic to organisms adapted to today's oceans.

 

Another worrying area of exploitation is bioprospecting for minerals. For

instance, mining manganese nodules could be carried out by a robotic device that

would trawl the surface, churning out sediment that can asphyxiate slow-growing

organisms. The minerals themselves are a further problem: a lump of manganese as

big as a fist was produced by bacterial excretions and grew at the rate of a

millimetre a century for a thousand years.

 

It is hardly a sustainable harvest. Dumping at sea is sanctioned for " off-shore

processing of seabed mineral resources " , and " wastes derived from normal

operations in the ocean " , which is practically carte blanche for anyone with an

imagination.

 

" To the extent that the decision-makers think about the deep sea at all, " says

Norse, " they consider it primarily a place to first, hide submarines, secondly

extract non-living resources like oil and living resources such as fish, and

thirdly, dispose of wastes.

 

" The deep sea is 'out of sight, out of mind'. But because there is a growing

indication that the deep sea has high biodiversity and because deep-sea

ecological processes play a crucial role in the Earth's biogeochemistry, it

behoves humankind to treat the deep sea with uncharacteristic caution. " -

Guardian Newspapers Limited