fish

The Healing Water Institute is an international education and research group with charitable trusts in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and currently being formed in the United States.

Our whole aim is to help water support life better. Water is under great attack from agricultural and industrial pollution and urban mis-use , greatly reducing its ability to support life.

To achieve this we provide education events, we research water and also design technology that helps improve water's condition.

It is a wonderfully clear expression, used by a U. S. biologist about the impact of bottom trawling. "Imagine using a bulldozer to catch songbirds for food — that's what it's like," marine biologist Sylvia Earle says. "After a trawler has gone by, it looks like a superhighway, it's just flat. Nobody's home. A few fish may swim in and out but the residents, those that occupy the substrate, they're just smothered, they're crushed. It's like paving them over."

Rising population, water shortages, climate change, and the growing costs of fossil fuel-based fertilisers point to a calamitous shortfall in the world's grain supplies in the near future, according to Canada's National Farmers Union (NFU).

Thirty years ago, the oceans were teeming with fish, but today more people rely on farmers to produce their food than ever before, says Stewart Wells, NFU's president.

In five of the last six years, global population ate significantly more grains than farmers produced.

http://news.com.com/Turning+natures+design+into+scientific+breakthrough/2100-1008_3-6044461.html

When Jay Harman was a skinny 10-year-old swimming off the coral reefs of Australia's western coast, he had an insight that 37 years later would lead him to invent an industrial design that could change personal computing, aeronautics and how drinking water is purified.

As a nature-loving boy, the young Australian just wanted to swim faster, so he watched how fish moved through water and how seaweed undulated against the reef when a wave crashed.

The shape he noticed that day was a simple curve that fluidly formed into a spiral. From then on, Harman would see spirals as a common design in nature--in pinecones, whirlpools, a puff of smoke.

Jay Harman

Now he believes spirals are a key to making a wide array of machines more energy-efficient. Through his 9-year-old company, Pax Scientific, he's trying to bring that natural form into the technological world. So far, he's invented industrial designs for fans, pumps and propellors that mimic the geometries of spiraling whirlpools. Experts believe these designs can reduce friction, wasted energy, noise and unwanted heat.

This clip is from the documentary  "Les Maîtres de l'Eau"  which I found at:-
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/firefly/eau/

Please click download instead of play

Transcript:

...For certain scientists, research on water should go farther than problems about pollution.  Documentary by Frantz Fitzke (Germany 2001 - 41mn) ZDF. Water which, in ancient civilizations and religions, was capable of miracles, has now become a trivial resource. Worse, science and technique do not consider its globality anymore, but only it's formula H2O. Some researchers have nevertheless launched original works, like Viktor Schauberger, considered as the father of modern research in this matter. He notably developed a theory along which water does not flow in straight lines, but in whirlpools, un a movement that ressembles that of a corkscrew. His revolutionary ideas inspired real applications. His students are for example working on new types of conducts, more reliable analysis processes, and better recycling systems. He is today followed and supported in his unorthodox methods by academics finally convinced than water is more than <gets cut>more than a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. ..."

 

 

By Viktor Schauberger

This article is taken from IMPLOSION nr 7.

translated by QRT (Curt Hallberg)
http://home.swipnet.se/jens_katrin/EnSchauberger/introduction.html

The family coat of arms for the von der Schauenburg family was a broken trunk with a savage hedge rose wreathing around. The family motto was: "Findus in silvis sientibus" (Faithful to the silent forests).

Their castle once stood on Schauenberg. The last descendants of one of the last robber barons was caught in an ambush by the archbishop of Passau. The elder one was decapitated but the youngest was reprieved and exiled. Being the last of his family he went into the vaste primeval forests around Dreisselberg and settled down on the shore of Plöckensteinsee. Here he lived a life as a forester. From him the family Schauberger emerges, who during nearly one millennium have been foresters, fishermen and woodsmen.

Prof. A.H. Techet
Department of Ocean Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139

To better understand the fluid forcing produced by fish when they are swimming it is necessary to first discuss the basic concept of a vortex and vorticity. A vortex arises when flow encircles a central point. Examples of where vortices occur in nature include: whirlpools, tornados, ocean eddies, blood flow through heart valves, and flow swirling behind rocks in a river current. Vortices appear in engineering fluid applications as well: flow around offshore platforms, tip-vortices from aircraft wings, helical vortices in propeller wakes and helicopter rotors. In general, vortices can form when flow passes any object with a non-streamlined shape or a sharp corner, and separates from the body.

 James C. Liao,  David N. Beal,  George V. Lauder,  Michael S. Triantafyllou

Fishes moving through turbulent flows or in formation are regularly exposed to vortices. Although animals living in fluid environments commonly capture energy from vortices, experimental data on the hydrodynamics and neural control of interactions between fish and vortices are lacking. We used quantitative flow visualization and electromyography to show that trout will adopt a novel mode of locomotion to slalom in between experimentally generated vortices by activating only their anterior axial muscles. Reduced muscle activity during vortex exploitation compared with the activity of fishes engaged in undulatory swimming suggests a decrease in the cost of locomotion and provides a mechanism to understand the patterns of fish distributions in schools and riverine environments.....

"...For years, apparent increases in illness among marine creatures, from whales to coral, have left marine scientists with the uneasy suspicion that the seas are increasingly plagued by disease. Now, US researchers have uncovered the first good evidence that they are right...."

"The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure...."

"... "An estimated 90% of the total weight of the ocean's large predators - tuna, swordfish and sharks - has disappeared in recent years. An estimated 12% of bird species, 25% of mammals and more than 30% of all amphibians are threatened with extinction within the next century. Some of them are threatened by invaders."..."

"...Bringing the oceans' ecosystems back from the edge of collapse -- one recent study found that 90 percent of the world's big fish have disappeared -- requires dramatic, controversial and expensive efforts to limit fishing, coastal development and runoff from cities and farms, according to the Pew Oceans Commission. Its report is the product of a three-year, $5.5 million study...."

"...Earth's population will be forced to colonise two planets within 50 years if natural resources continue to be exploited at the current rate, according to a report out this week....""...Experts say that seas will become emptied of fish while forests - which absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed and freshwater supplies become scarce and polluted. The report offers a vivid warning that either people curb their extravagant lifestyles or risk leaving the onus on scientists to locate another planet that can sustain human life. Since this is unlikely to happen, the only option is to cut consumption now. ..."

"...Greed and corruption are draining the gulf, also known as the Sea of Cortés. It is not dead yet, but it is exhausted. American and Japanese ships were the first to exploit it. Now fleets of Mexican fishermen, mostly unlicensed and ungoverned, are taking whatever they can, as fast as they can, for American and Asian markets. Every important species of fish in the sea is in sharp decline, fishermen and marine scientists say. Overfishing is a global problem. People are taking marine life faster than it can reproduce. The world's catch peaked at 86 million tons in 1989, up fourfold in 50 years. But many governments, including the United States, Mexico, the European Union, Japan and China, kept on pouring subsidies into commercial fishing fleets to keep them afloat. Crucial fisheries have collapsed worldwide..."

"...Fish farming has delivered cheap salmon to the consumer - but at a high environmental price. In this in-depth investigation, Stuart Millar talks to farmers, ecologists and scientists about the growing crisis ..." "...Perhaps the cruellest irony of the exponential growth in fish farming is that it has come close to driving wild fish, the very creature it was designed to save, to the brink of extinction. Over the past 10 years, wild salmon stocks have declined to all-time lows, but in the north-west Highlands, centre of the aquaculture industry, stocks have been devastated. The cause: infestation of sea lice on wild fish caused by the proximity of caged salmon...."