Ohio State scientists, including from CFAES, have successfully tested a new chemical to control mosquitoes, including the ones that spread Zika, and it comes from a traditional medicinal plant found only in Madagascar.
Read the story. (Photo: Zika’s main carrier, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, iStock.)
Not all water filter pitchers are created equal when it comes to removing toxins from harmful algal blooms. So says a new study led by Justin Chaffin, research coordinator at CFAES’s Stone Lab. Read the Ohio State press release.
Do toxins from Lake Erie algal blooms get into Lake Erie fish you might eat? What about vegetables that growers watered with water they pulled from the lake? Scientists with CFAES, funded by Ohio Sea Grant and the Ohio Department of Higher Education’s Harmful Algal Bloom Research Initiative, are helping find answers.
Read the full story (with video) by WOSU Public Media’s Elizabeth Miller.
This is a jar of algae taken from Lake Erie. That's not a healthy lake. https://t.co/OFciYYdtNz pic.twitter.com/54nnKWIyPu
— WOSU News (@wosunews) September 19, 2017
NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory has posted some stunning aerial photos, taken Sept. 20, of a harmful algal bloom in western Lake Erie. You can see more, too, from Sept. 14 (the fifth one down, among many, may smack your gob) and Aug. 14.
A June 14 Great Lakes Today story by Elizabeth Miller said the proposed 2018 federal budget would “cut all federal funding for Sea Grant programs, including Ohio’s.” At risk, among other things, would be crucial health-related research on harmful algal blooms.
Miller, for example, interviewed two Ohio Sea Grant-funded researchers, Stuart Ludsin and CFAES’s Jiyoung Lee, who are trying to determine if toxins produced by harmful algal blooms can get into food — specifically, into fresh vegetables irrigated with bloom-tainted waters and fish such as walleye that swam in such waters.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which, among its work, keeps the air you breathe and water you drink clean, would see the biggest cut — 31 percent — of any federal agency in the White House’s proposed 2018 budget, according to a Reuters story. EPA’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative would be especially hard hit. It faces a 97-percent cut in the proposed budget.
How would those cuts, if approved, hit home? Jeff Reutter, special adviser to Ohio State’s Ohio Sea Grant program, said in a recent issue of Cleveland Scene, “If we lose the EPA, we lose Lake Erie.”
The lake, among other things, provides drinking water for 3 million Ohioans.
CFAES scientists are working to keep greenhouse-grown produce, like the tomatoes shown here, as safe to eat as possible. Here’s how …
“These kids have gone through a lot in life. They aren’t just defiant teens who simply decided to strike out on their own. They are a very vulnerable population.”
Ohio’s nearly 3,000 Master Gardener Volunteers share their plant-related knowledge with other people, and that knowledge improves, among other things, urban farms and backyard gardens. In turn, those farms and gardens reduce hunger, improve health and create income.
Learn more about the statewide program here. It’s run by CFAES’s outreach arm, OSU Extension, and offers training and volunteering in all 88 of Ohio’s counties.
In Wayne County, for instance, CFAES’s Secrest Arboretum just announced it’s taking applications for its 2017 Master Gardener training course. The deadline to apply is Jan. 27.