Those sturgeon still plying the Yangtze today might end up being the last of their kind: "the living dead," says aquatic ecologist David Dudgeon of the University of Hong Kong.
The biology of the H5N1 viruses changed dramatically for the first time in late 2002, when the viruses were isolated from dead wild aquatic birds in Hong Kong and from decorative waterfowl that died in Kowloon Park, Hong Kong (6, 7).
Rain and irrigation carry synthetic fertilizers into streams and lakes, where the excess nutrients contribute to algae blooms that, in turn, produce aquatic "dead zones".
Not surprisingly, the shit in the ponds tends to migrate to nearby streams and rivers, causing algae blooms that kill fish and leave behind aquatic "dead zones".
The author, Mark Sutton, and his colleagues found that the natural nitrogen and phosphorus cycles are seriously affected by fertilizers used in farming and that the imbalance is causing a wide array of environmental problems, from aquatic dead zones to ozone depletion.
Run-off of excess fertilizer from cropland and excess manure from factory farms is the primary cause of enormous aquatic dead zones in coastal waters globally, devastating marine life (and ironically, threatening human seafood supply).
Agriculture expansion to increase food and biofuel production often contributes to deforestation, soil erosion and aquatic dead zones the size of New Jersey.
Every once in a while, however, there's an image that arrives out of the blue, like on July 17th when I started the morning with an alarming map of the world's aquatic dead zones.
This runoff causes algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico to swell to the size of New Jersey every year, creating dead zones where no aquatic life can survive.
Adverse water quality, moreover, makes the aquatic habitat biologically dead.
