Tag Archives: fish

Beavers, some of the best dam builders

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I ran for water commissioner in 2016 (Oakland county, Michigan; I’ll be running again in 2020), and one of my big issues was improving our rivers. Many are dirty and “flashy”. Shortly after a rain they rise too high and move dangerously fast. At other times, they become, low, smelly, and almost disappear. There are flash floods in these rivers, few fish or frogs, and a major problem with erosion. A big part of a solution, I thought, would be to add few small dams, and to refurbish a few others by adding over-flow or underflow weirs. We had a small dam in the middle of campus at Michigan State University where I’d taught, and I’d seen that it did wonders for river control, fishing, and erosion. The fellow I was running against had been removing small dams in the belief that this made the rivers “more natural”. The Sierra Club thought he was right doing this; the fishing community and some homeowners and MSU alumni thought I was. My problem was that I was a Republican running in a Democratic district. Besides, the county executive, L. Brooks Patterson (also a Republican) was a tightwad. Among my the first stops on my campaign trail was to his office, and while he liked many of my ideas, and promised to support me, he didn’t like the idea of spending money on dams. I suggested, somewhat facetiously, using beavers, and idea that’s grown on me since. I’m still not totally convinced it’s a good idea, but bear with me as I walk you through it.

Red Cedar River dam as seen from behind the Michigan State University Administration Building.

Small dam on the Red Cedar River at Michigan State University behind the Administration Building. The dam provided good fishing and canoeing, and cleaned the water somewhat.

The picture at right shows the dam on the Red Cedar River right behind the Administration building at Michigan State University, looking south. During normal times the dam slows the river flow and raises the water level high enough to proved a good canoe trail, 2 1/2 miles to Okemos. Kids would fish behind the dam, and found it a very good fishing spot. The slow flow meant less erosion, and some pollution control. The speed of flow and the height of the river are related; see calculation here. After a big rain, a standing wave (a “jump”) would set up at the dam, raising its effective height by three or four feet. Students would surf the standing wave. More importantly, the three or four feet of river rise provided retention so that the Red Cedar did little damage. Some picnic area got flooded, but that was a lot better than having a destructive torrent. Here’s some more on the benefits of dams.

Between July 31 and Aug 1 the Clinton River rose nine feet in 3 hours, sending 130,000,000 cubic feet of water and sewage to lake St Clair.

Between July 31 and Aug 1 the Clinton River rose nine feet in 3 hours, sending 130,000,000 cubic feet of water to lake St Clair.

The Sierra club supported (supports) my opponent, in part because he supports natural rivers, without dams. I think they are wrong about this, and about their political support in general. Last night, following a 1 1/2 inch rain, the Clinton River flash flooded, going from 5.2 feet depth to 14 feet depth in just two hours. My sense is that the natural state of our rivers had included beavers and beaver dams until at least the mid 1700s. I figured that a few well-designed dams, similar to those at Michigan State would do wonders to stop this. Among the key locations were Birmingham, on the Rouge, Rochester, near Oakland University, Auburn Hills, and the Clinton River gorge, and near Lawrence Technical University. If we could not afford to build man-made dams, I figured we could seed some beaver into nearby nature areas, and let the beavers dam the rivers for free. It would bring back the natural look of these areas, as in the picture below. And engineers at Lawrence Tech and Oakland University might benefit from seeing the original dam engineers at work.

Beaver dam on a branch of the Huron River. Beavers are some of the best dam builders.

Beaver dam on a branch of the Huron River. A rather professional and attractive job at a bargain price.

Beavers are remarkably diligent. Once they set about a task, they build the basics of a dam in a few days, then slowly improve it like any good craftsman. As with modern dams, beaver dams begin with vertical piles set into the river bottom. Beavers then fill in the dam with cross-pieces, moving as much as 1000 lbs of wood in a night to add to the structure and slow the flow. They then add mud. They use their hearing to detect leaks, and slowly plug the leaks till the dam is suitably tight. Most of the streams I identified are narrow and pass through wooded areas. I think a beaver might dam them in a few days. Based on the amount of wood beavers move, and the fact that beavers are shaped like big woodchucks, I was able to answer the age-old question: how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood — see my calculation here.

Me, visiting the DNR to talk beavers

Me, visiting the DNR to talk beavers

There are a few things to check out before I start hiring beavers to take care of Oakland county flooding, and I have not checked them all out yet. Beavers don’t necessarily build where you want or as solidly, and sometimes they don’t build at all. If there are no predators, beavers can get lazy and just build a low-water lodge and a high water lodge, moving from one to the other as the river rises and falls. Hiring a beaver is like hiring an artistic contractor, it seems: you don’t necessarily get what you ask for, and sometimes you get more. Given the flash flooding we have, it’s hard to picture they’d make things worse, but what do I know? In some cases, e.g. the Red Run near the 12 towns drain, the need is for more than a beaver can deliver. Still, without beavers, the need would be for a billion gallons of retention on the Clinton alone, a 10 billion dollar project if carried out as my opponent likes to build. So, with no budget to work with, my next stop was at the Department of Natural Resources Customer Service Center (Lansing). I had some nice chats with beaver experts, and I’m happy to say they liked the idea, or at least they were not opposed. I’ve yet to talk to the Michigan director of dams, and will have to see what he has to say, but so far it seems like, if I get elected in 2020, I’ll be looking for some hard-working beavers, willing to relocate. I’d like to leave it to Beaver.

Robert E. Buxbaum, August 2, 2018. I still don’t get the Sierra Club’s idea of what a natural river would look like, or their commitment to Democrats. In my opinion, a river should include beavers, fish, and fishermen, and drainage should be done by whoever can do it best. Sierra club folks are welcomed to comment below.

Slowing Cancer with Fish and Unhealth Food

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Some 25 years ago, while still a chemical engineering professor at Michigan State University, I did some statistical work for a group in the Physiology department on the relationship between diet and cancer. The research involved giving cancer to groups of rats and feeding them different diets of the same calorie intake to see which promoted or slowed the disease. It had been determined that low-calorie diets slowed cancer growth, and were good for longevity in general, while overweight rats died young (true in humans too, by the way, though there’s a limit and starvation will kill you).

The group found that fish oil was generally good for you, but they found that there were several unhealthy foods that slowed cancer growth in rats. The statistics were clouded by the fact that cancer growth rates are not normally distributed, and I was brought in to help untangle the observations.

With help from probability paper (a favorite trick of mine), I confirmed that healthy rats fared better on healthily diets, but cancerous rats did better with some unhealth food. Sick or well, all rats did best with fish oil, and all rats did pretty well with olive oil, but the cancerous rats did better with lard or palm oil (normally an unhealthy diet) and very poorly with corn oil or canola, oils that are normally healthful. The results are published in several articles in the journals “Cancer” and “Cancer Research.”

Among vitamins, they found something similar (it was before I joined the group). Several anti-oxidizing vitamins, A, D and E made things worse for carcinogenic rats while being good for healthy rats (and for people in moderation). Moderation is key; too much of a good thing isn’t good, and a diet with too much fish oil promotes cancer.

What seems to be happening is that the cancer cells grow at the same rate with all of the equi-caloric diets, but that there was a difference the rate of natural cancer cell death. More cancer cells died when the rat was fed junk food oils than those fed a diet of corn oil and canola. Similarly, the reason anti-oxidizing vitamins hurt cancerous rats was that fewer cancer cells died when the rats were fed these vitamins. A working hypothesis is that the junk oils (and the fish oil) produced free radicals that did more damage to the cancer than to the rats. In healthy rats (and people), these free radicals are bad, promoting cell mutation, cell degradation, and sometimes cancer. But perhaps our body use these same free radicals to fight disease.

Larger amounts of vitamins A, D, and E hurt cancerous-rats by removing the free radicals they normally use fight the disease, or so our model went. Bad oils and fish-oil in moderation, with calorie intake held constant, helped slow the cancer, by a presumed mechanism of adding a few more free radicals. Fish oil, it can be assumed, killed some healthy cells in the healthy rats too, but not enough to cause problems when taken in moderation. Even healthy people are often benefitted by poisons like sunlight, coffee, alcohol and radiation.

At this point, a warning is in-order: Don’t rely on fish oil and lard as home remedies if you’ve got cancer. Rats are not people, and your calorie intake is not held artificially constant with no other treatments given. Get treated by a real doctor — he or she will use radiation and/ or real drugs, and those will form the right amount of free radicals, targeted to the right places. Our rats were given massive amounts of cancer and had no other treatment besides diet. Excess vitamin A has been shown to be bad for humans under treatment for lung cancer, and that’s perhaps because of the mechanism we imagine, or perhaps everything works by some other mechanism. However it works, a little fish in your diet is probably a good idea whether you are sick or well.

A simpler health trick is that it couldn’t hurt most Americans is a lower calorie diet, especially if combined with exercise. Dr. Mites, a colleague of mine in the department (now deceased at 90+) liked to say that, if exercise could be put into a pill, it would be the most prescribed drug in America. There are few things that would benefit most Americans more than (moderate) exercise. There was a sign in the physiology office, perhaps his doing, “If it’s physical, it’s therapy.”

Anyway these are some useful things I learned as an associate professor in the physiology department at Michigan State. I ended up writing 30-35 physiology papers, e.g. on how cells crawl and cell regulation through architecture; and I met a lot of cool people. Perhaps I’ll blog more about health, biology, the body, or about non-normal statistics and probability paper. Please tell me what you’re interested in, or give me some keen insights of your own.

Dr. Robert Buxbaum is a Chemical Engineer who mostly works in hydrogen I’ve published some 75 technical papers, including two each in Science and Nature: fancy magazines that you’d normally have to pay for, but this blog is free. August 14, 2013

Surrealists art joke

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How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb.

 

The fish.

 

Surrealism aims to show the reality that exceeds realism; the dream-like absurd that is beyond the rational, common-sensical and practical. Beyond control engineering.

And you know “How many engineers would it take to screw in a lightbulb?” —- “Minimally two, and it would have to be a very large lightbulb.”

Even if the insights of surrealism are common-place, for example, that the eye is a false mirror of the world, I like is that they become real (if the surrealist is talented.)

False Mirror by Magritte; The idea, I suppose is that the eye is a false mirror of the world, seeing what's already within it.

False Mirror by Magritte; the idea, I suppose is that we see what’s already within us.

“The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.” What I particularly like is the falseness of the mirror is shown as both false and true. The world is rarely this or that. Another insight / joke.

We all have masks, especially with those we love.

We all have masks, especially with those we love.

I imagine most I could make second-rate surrealistic works. The way to know your work is second rate it’s beautiful and insightful, but not funny.

Creation of Man-the-militant in the style of Michelangelo

Creation of Man-the-militant. Kuksi. It’s well done, and interesting (a retake on Michelangelo), but it’s not funny. See my cartoon in mechanical v civil engineers joke.

And then there is bad modern art. You could argue that this isn’t surreal, but some sort of other modern art, or post modern art. But that’s all false: it’s just bad art.

Bad modern art: little skill, little meaning, no humor. If you have to ask: "is it art?" It usually isn't.

Bad modern art: little skill, little meaning, no humor. If you have to ask: “is it art?” It usually isn’t.

If you buy something like this, and put it in your corporate headquarters lobby, the joke’s on you, and the artist is laughing his or her way to the bank.  Here is a link to why surrealism should be funny, And why architecture should not be (someone’s got to live in that joke).

R. E. Buxbaum, August 5, 2013