The Suicide Girls Burlesque Show was fantastic! Fun fun fun. I loved it, all except the whiteboy rappers who opened for them. Remember that scene in Reservoir Dogs where Michael Madsen cuts off the cop's ear while dancing to "Stuck in the Middle With You"? One of the best scenes in movie history, right? Well, it's even better when the parts are played by Suicide Girls and instead of cutting off ears they just take off bras, and kiss. Anyways, I found this on the Suicide Girls website: the biomass of squid exceeds that of humans.
Speaking of marine biology, I gave a talk at the G tonight- I spoke about the accumulation of PCBs in polar bears, and love. I thought I would share with you some of the research I did.
Polychlorinated biphenyls, as you may know, were industrial chemicals used as coolants and in transformers and stuff. It became evident that they were very toxic, and so the US stopped producing them in 1977. Most everyone in the world followed suit, with the exception of Russia, who continued to use them up until 1998.
PCBs, once airborne, tend to become concentrated in the polar regions, where the cold causes them to precipitate, landing them in the ocean where they enter the foodchain. Phytoplankton, fish, seals, and finally polar bears absorb the PCBS, with an increase in concentration of up to 500% with every link up in the chain. So obviously the polar bears wind up with alarming levels of PCBs in their fatty tissues- between 10 and 100 PPM, depending on which side of the Arctic ocean the bear is on (the Russian side has higher levels). As if that wasn't bad enough, polar bears actually live off their reserves of fat (they go without eating entirely) for up to 7 months of the year.
The PCBs have an adverse effect on the bears' immune and reproductive systems. An alarming number of hermaphroditic cubs are being born in the Svalbard Islands.
Anyways, there isn't a lot that can be done at this point. Now that the Russians have stopped producing PCBs we can only hope that, over time, contamination levels will decline. But more research is needed to explore the precise effects PCBs have on polar bear populations.
The sad thing is, PCBs aren't the only pollutant that accumulate in the Arctic- all airborne, and many oceanic toxins will eventually gravitate that way, and stay there.
Here's a link.