A company called ArborGen is working on altering Eucalyptus trees, so they can be turned into paper and biofuels more easily. (Photo courtesy of the National Biological Information Infastructure)
There’s already a lot of genetically
modified corn and soybeans out there.
Now, Mark Brush reports, one company
is working on genetically modifying
trees:
Transcript
There’s already a lot of genetically
modified corn and soybeans out there.
Now, Mark Brush reports, one company
is working on genetically modifying
trees:
The company is called ArborGen. And it’s working on altering Eucalyptus trees, so they can be turned into paper and biofuels more easily.
Eucalyptus is native to Australia and New Zealand.
But ArborGen has already got 330 acres of these genetically altered trees planted scattered across the South.
And now it wants the government to allow these trees to flower. And that has people like George Kimbrall worried.
He’s an attorney with the International Center for Technology Assessment. He says if they spread they’ll be bad for the environment.
“They’re water suckers. They don’t allow for much undergrowth. They’re poisonous to most animals. The leaves, the animals can’t eat them. Why would we want the south covered in Eucalyptus trees?”
When eucalyptus was brought over to California – it did become invasive. And there are some reports that it’s invasive in Florida too.
ArborGen says it’s altering these trees so they won’t spread in the wild.
Wen Baldwin, a volunteer with the National Park service,
pulls a non-stick teflon frying pan out of Lake Mead, the reservoir
of Hoover Dam. Quagga mussels smothered the pan in a matter of weeks. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Signs leading out of Lake Mead stress the importance of properly
cleaning any boat leaving the area. Quagga mussels can hitch rides from
one lake or river to the next by attaching to boats' hulls. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:
Transcript
A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:
n 2007, biologists declared that quagga mussels had infested infested Lake Mead just outside
Las Vegas.
But years before that, park staff and volunteers like Wen Baldwin told folks how to avoid the
problem.
Baldwin says some people helped – most people told him to just drop it.
“Oh, it won’t happen to us. That’s the American theory – fire, cancer, whatever. Oh, it
won’t happen to me.”
But it did happen, and here’s how it went down.
Baldwin went to this conference out East where biologists explained how quaggas clog pipes at
water treatment centers and power plants.
“There was a presentation about them and I realized, hey, they could get in here and they
could cost me money, you money, everybody money. They could raise havoc as they have in
the Great Lakes.”
Baldwin got worried.
Quagga mussles hitchhike on boats, and Lake Mead is a boating hot spot.
Baldwin warned people – wash down your boat before you put it in the lake!
“I put on a lot of programs trying to get people on board. Just didn’t work that well.”
Now, quagga mussels are making a mess of Lake Mead – and Web Baldwin can show how.
Baldwin tests how well quagga stick to different material.
We’re on this dock one morning, and he pulls a rope out of the water.
The rope’s covered with shells that look like fingernail-sized clams.
Allee: “I reckon you have to be pretty careful with your hands, there.”
Baldwin: “Boy, they’ll cut you to ribbons. I go home looking like my hands went through a
meat grinder.”
At the end of the rope – he’s tied a skillet.
Baldwin: “They’ll stick to teflon.”
Allee: “They’ll stick to teflon. Your eggs won’t stick to teflon all that well, but quagga
mussels will.”
Baldwin: “They will. And anywhere they attach the glue they use will hasten the
deterioration of the surface they attach to.”
A quagga-coated teflon pan is a shocker – but what does a quagga invasion mean?
Well, for one, if you dock your boat at Lake Mead – you’ve gotta scrape it all the time.
Swimmers wear shoes to protect their feet from quagga-coated rocks.
And quagga are getting costly.
Zegers: “We’ve been monitoring water quality in the lake pretty extensively.”
Roefer: “These are the six locations we collect samples at.”
I’m with Ron Zegers and Peggy Roefer. They’re with the Southern Nevada Water System. It
provides water to Las Vegas and other cities.
They walk me through slides divers took near water intake pipes – deep in Lake Mead.
Roefer: “And this is where our intake is, on Saddle Island. This is actually the inside of the
rock structure you can see the quaggas on the inside of that. Quagga mussels were
approximately two inches thick.”
Zegers and Roefer say they’re trying plenty of things to keep quagga out of the water supply.
The first is the old stand-by: chlorine.
But too much chlorine can make people sick.
Zegers: “More of those disenfection byproducts form, which puts us closer to our
regulatory compliance issues, so we also have to be concerned about that also.”
Roefer: “You know we’re watching the alternative control strategies, the bio-bullets and
pseudo-flourence and those kinds of things.”
Allee: “Sounds like an arms race.”
Roefer: “Yeah, who can get there first. The annual for this is one to four million dollars.”
Allee: “One to four million dollars. You know, you could clean a lot of water if you didn’t
have to deal with these critters.”
Zegers: “That’s correct. Now it’s just an anticipated expenditure that certainly wasn’t
budgeted for when they first appeared, and now it’s just gonna be a way of life.”
And it could become a a way of life for more lakes if we don’t stop quaggas from spreading
around.
Large Burmese pythons are now regularly encountered along trails and visitor areas in the park (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)
A python native to Asia is popping up in one national park. Kyle Norris reports:
Transcript
A python native to Asia is popping up in one national park. Kyle Norris reports:
The Burmese Python is showing up in Everglades National Park in Florida.
That’s because people who no longer want their pet pythons are releasing them there.
Now these babies are big — usually they between 6 to 12 feet long. And there could be as many as 150,000 pythons in the Everglades.
The snakes are not so much a threat to humans. But they are a threat to animals – especially to endangered ones.
Scott Hardin is an exotic species coordinator. He’s with the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission.
“You just got a great big snake, nothing like it, nothing analogous in the native snake fauna in Florida. So it opens up a whole new range of prey that was not susceptible before.”
He says officials are brainstorming ways to deal with the problem.
They’re trying to rig up some really big traps. And they’ve also thrown out the idea of a bounty — basically a cash reward for catching the snakes.
Hoover Dam's backside stretches more than 700 feet from top
to bottom, but the dam's seeing trouble from the tiny aquatic zebra
mussel. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Lake Mead is the reservoir held back by Hoover Dam. Someone first
spotted an adult quagga mussel in early 2007. Now, the mussel's grown
on rocks, fishing lines, boats, and nearly everything else with a hard
surface. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Signs leading out of Lake Mead stress the importance of properly
cleaning any boat leaving the area. Quagga mussels can hitch rides from
one lake or river to the next by attaching to boats' hulls. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Hoover Dam generates some of the power that lights Las Vegas all night long. But there’s something
that’s making that job a bit more difficult. Shawn Allee found out, it’s a tiny aquatic pest:
Transcript
Hoover Dam generates some of the power that lights Las Vegas all night long. But there’s something
that’s making that job a bit more difficult. Shawn Allee found out, it’s a tiny aquatic pest:
The usual tour of Hoover Dam starts at the visitor’s center – way at the top.
Robert Walsh works with the federal agency that runs Hoover.
He shows me a sandal that was in water – and is smothered in them.
They’re like clams the size of your pinky fingernail.
“We went from zero to THAT in seven months.”
And that’s the problem.
Hoover Dam uses water from Lake Mead to spin generators.
The water moves around in pipes – and quagga mussels can attach to them – just like on that sandal.
Allee: “What does that mean in a real practical sense?”
Willet: “Our intake towers would close off. Once you start closing off, you can’t spin the
generators. That’s just kind of the big view of it.”
Zero power generation.
That’s the worst-case scenario. It hasn’t happened – but it’s a fight to prevent it.
“Now, we’re going to go down to the third floor, which is the generator floor.”
The generators are inside broad metal cylinders.
Big water pipes turn the generators. Smaller ones cool them off.
“Well, we circulate cold water from those pipes. If those start to plug up with mussels, then
you can’t keep a generator cool, if those … it shuts down due to overheating.”
Right now, it takes a lot of scraping to keep everything clear.
All this effort’s adding up – Willet says he’ll spend 2 million dollars soon on new equipment.
Even with that, Willet is still a bit jittery about some pipes outside, at the very bottom of the dam.
“The one that’s probably the scariest of all is, we have a fireline that runs around here.
Mussels love it. Then, your firelines, when they’re needed, are plugged with mussels. So
that’s another area you have to really be careful of, safety-wise.”
This didn’t have to happen.
Quagga mussels invaded eastern rivers and the Great Lakes first.
Experts figure the mussels hitched a ride West on someone’s fishing boat.
Apparently – someone didn’t clean their boat properly – and mussels dropped into Lake Mead.
Allee: “When they built this amazing structure during the Depression, do you think they had
any idea that something like this could ever happen?”
Willet: “I think there was a lot of disagreement among professionals that a little mussel the
size of your finger nail could impact a large hydro facility, but we’re quickly learning a bunch
of them can impact water and power delivery.”
Willet says if boaters aren’t careful – they’ll spread quagga mussels to the Pacific Northwest, where
there’re lots of dams and hydro power plants.
After all, if it can happen at mighty Hoover Dam – it could happen anywhere.
Ships sometimes bring unwanted travelers with them (Photo by Lester Graham)
Invasive species hitchike on foreign cargo ships and end up in US waterways. Lester Graham talked with the author of a new book about why the government has done so little to stop these aquatic invaders that are damaging the environment:
Transcript
Invasive species hitchike on foreign cargo ships and end up in US waterways.
Lester Graham talked with the author of a new book about why the government has done so little to stop these aquatic invaders that are damaging the environment:
Lester Graham: “Maybe you’ve heard about Zebra Mussels. The thumbnail-sized mussels have invaded freshwater lakes, rivers, clogged water intake pipes, and damaged the environment across a good portion of the US – and they’re still spreading. The Zebra Mussel is just one of dozens and dozens of invasive species brought into the US by foreign cargo ships entering the Great Lakes though the St. Lawrence Seaway, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. What happens is ships in Europe or Africa or Asia take on ballast water, sucking up millions of gallons of water from a foreign port. Aquatic life is sucked up with it. Then, as the ships take on cargo in the Great Lakes, the ballast water is discharged, and with it things like Zebra Mussels and other foreign pests. Many of those species have spread from the Great Lakes into the Mississippi River system, and then transported by recreational boating in every direction from there. Jeff Alexander has written a book that chronicles not only those invasions, but the utter failure of the government to do anything effective to stop these introductions. Jeff, you make the argument that these invasive species, biological pollution if you will, amount to a more serious environmental disaster than the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska. How’s that?”
Jeff Alexander: “Well the Valdez, there’s no discounting the severity of the Valdez oil spill. But oil spills, over time, can be cleaned up to a certain extent, and the ecosystem can recover. In the Great Lakes, ocean freighters have brought in 57 species, they’ve caused billions of dollars in damage, and they’ve transformed the entire ecosystem.”
Graham: “There are eight states that border the Great Lakes, and members of Congress are aware of this problem, why haven’t they taken action to ensure this problem is dealt with once and for all?”
Alexander: “The shipping lobby has been very effective at keeping regulations at bay, the Coast Guard, which is the lead agency in the US, has just totally dropped the ball on this issue. They’re the ones who’re supposed to be the guardians of the Great Lakes when it comes to ships, and the Coast Guard is very close to the shipping industry. They have social events together every year. A lot of people blame the shipping industry for this problem, but I tend not to. They certainly have fought the regulations but, in the end, the reason that we have regulatory agencies is to protect public health and the environment. And our regulatory agencies haven’t done the job, and our politicians haven’t done the job – no one seems to have the backbone to stand up to the shipping industry and deal with this problem.”
Graham: “Are the foreign ships that bring in this cargo and take away grain or the other things from the Midwest so economically valuable that it is worth this economic and environmental cost?”
Alexander: “There is some debate on that, but the best economic study estimated if we kept these ocean freighters out of the Great Lakes, made them offload their cargo in Montreal and put it on trains and trucks, it would cost us an extra $55 million a year to move that cargo. That’s compared to the estimate of $200 million a year that foreign species are costing us in terms of economic and environmental damage. It’s not a stretch to make the case that the environmental and economic costs have far exceeded the economic benefits.”
Graham: “Jeff Alexander’s new book is ‘Pandora’s Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway’. Thanks, Jeff.”
Alexander: “Thank you.”
Jeff Alexander spoke with The Environment Report’s Lester Graham.
Dr. John Holden from Rockford, Illinois is the CEO of Heartland Processing, which aims to convert millions of tons of Asian carp into pet food, fishmeal and fish oil. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
There are rivers in the Midwest that are just flush with fish. Normally, that would be great, but these are two species of invasive Asian Carp – and they shouldn’t be there in the first place. These foreign fish breed so quickly and grow so large, they push out native fish species. There are entrepreneurs who dream of getting rid of Asian carp. Shawn Allee looks at what they’ve cooked up and whether it could do any good:
Transcript
There are rivers in the Midwest that are just flush with fish. Normally, that would be great, but these are two species of invasive Asian Carp – and they shouldn’t be there in the first place.
These foreign fish breed so quickly and grow so large, they push out native fish species. There are entrepreneurs who dream of getting rid of Asian carp.
Shawn Allee looks at what they’ve cooked up and whether it could do any good:
One businessman wants to take on Asian carp.
He’s John Holden and he started up the brand-new Heartland Processing company.
When I visit his factory in central Illinois, Holden walks me around his machines.
They transform fresh carp into fish oil and dry fishmeal. Holden says the fishmeal might make good pet food.
He’s tested it his own dog.
“He just inhaled it. You got more of that for me?”
Unfortunately, there are no carp today – and I have to settle for a dry-run demo.
John Holden is a doctor by trade, but he started his business after he watched Internet video of carp in the Illinois River.
“I went onto YouTube, and I said, this is nuts.”
“What did you see when you went onto YouTube?”
“Fish jumping like it was boiling water. The most poignant one was the department of natural resources one. All of a sudden they’re jumping out of the river, and smacking the DNR people.”
Actually, a guy from the state Department of Natural Resources is on-hand to vouch for this. He’s Chris McCloud.
“We’ve had conservation police have their teeth knocked out.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Oh no.”
McCloud says the state wants to cut back the carp population – not out of some vendetta, but because silver and big-head Asian carp pretty much took over the Illinois river from native fish.
McCloud says the agency’s got a plan.
Commercial fishing fits into it.
“It basically says, let’s see what this can do and then determine how much processing would be needed to make a dent in a population that’s so voracious.”
Now, my question is: Will massive, commercial harvesting of carp really work? I mean, the Illinois river’s 275 miles long, and I’ve seen videos that it’s thick with Asian carp.
To get an informed opinion, I head to the Illinois Natural History Survey.
Kevin Irons works there – he tracks carp populations along the Illinois River.
“As biologists we’re very encouraged by the Heartland Processing plant and commercial fishermen that are taking the fish out. From some of the research we’ve looked at, the only way we can reduce the numbers is by commercially harvesting them”
Irons walks me through his argument.
To start, he opens a freezer.
“These are the ones that will jump out and hit ya.”
“This one’s like 2.5 feet long.”
“That’s a relatively small one. There are many that are 3-4 feet long.”
Irons says the two troublesome varieties of Asian carp are native to Russia, the Mideast and China.
They’re small in China – they’re super-sized here.
“Nowhere else in the world do we have populations like this because they’re over-fished everywhere else. People in the YangTze River rarely see them over 4-5 pounds because they’re taken soon in their life cycles.”
How big can they get here?
“The world record was taken in St. Louis – nearly a hundred pounds.”
Irons says Chinese and other ethnic food markets in the US sell Asian carp but most Americans won’t touch them.
“We might go to a restaurant and get a walleye or perch fillet – they’re boneless and they’re beautifully done. These can be just as tasty, but they have bones. My wife, if she gets a bone in her fish, she’s just about done; she doesn’t want to mess with the bones. We’re pretty spoiled.”
Irons says if most Americans won’t eat Asian carp, maybe processors like Heartland can pick up the slack by making them into pet and animal feed.
It might not eliminate carp, but Irons says it might get darn close.
If it works too well – and Heartland runs out of fish on the Illinois River – Irons says there are plenty of carp waiting for processing in the Mississippi and other rivers.
The Hawaii Superferry service has been suspended until an environmental impact study can be completed. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
It’s been rough sailing for a Superferry that transports passengers and vehicles around the Hawaiian Islands. A lot of people who live in Hawaii, as well as businesses and tourists, depend on the Superferry. But there’s been a lot of concern about the ferry’s impact on the environment. Heidi Chang reports the Superferry is now suspending its service. The last voyage will take place today:
Transcript
It’s been rough sailing for a Superferry that transports passengers and vehicles around the Hawaiian Islands. A lot of people who live in Hawaii, as well as businesses and tourists, depend on the Superferry. But there’s been a lot of concern about the ferry’s impact on the environment. Heidi Chang reports the Superferry is now suspending its service. The last voyage will take place today:
Back in 2007, Hawaii legislators passed a special law that allowed the Superferry to sail between Oahu and Maui, before an environmental study was completed. The Hawaii Supreme Court has ruled that’s against the law.
Robert Harris is the director of the Sierra Club. It’s one of the groups that challenged the Superferry and the state in court. He’s worried about the impact it might have on traffic and that natural resources could be taken without better oversight.
“One of the first days of operation, some people on Oahu drove a truck over to Maui and loaded up on a bunch of river rocks, and were transporting it back to Oahu, and they were fined, I think significantly for that.”
Harris says the environmental review will also look at whether the ferry might be disturbing whales or transporting invasive species that could endanger native plants and animals.
Asian Carp is one species that is very dangerous to the Great Lakes ecosystem (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
Nature never made a connection between the nation’s big rivers and the Great Lakes. But Chicago did. A canal was dug connecting the Mississippi River system – including the Missouri, the Ohio and all their tributaries – to all of the Great Lakes at a point on Lake Michigan. It opened up commercial shipping to the interior of the nation.
But it also opened up both bodies of waters to aquatic life you don’t want traveling back and forth. Invasive species such as the zebra mussel have traveled from one to the other. Asian Carp have already caused havoc in the Mississippi. Some biologists worry the Asian Carp will destroy the four-billion dollar fishing industry in the Great Lakes if it gets in. There’s an electric barrier in place, but some people don’t think that’s enough.
Joel Brammeier is with the environmental group Alliance for the Great Lakes. His group is proposing a barrier that will separate the Mississippi system from the Great Lakes completely, to stop those invasive species. He talked with Lester Graham about the barrier:
Transcript
Nature never made a connection between the nation’s big rivers and the Great Lakes. But Chicago did. A canal was dug connecting the Mississippi River system – including the Missouri, the Ohio and all their tributaries – to all of the Great Lakes at a point on Lake Michigan. It opened up commercial shipping to the interior of the nation. But it also opened up both bodies of waters to aquatic life you don’t want traveling back and forth. Invasive species such as the zebra mussel have traveled from one to the other. Asian Carp have already caused havoc in the Mississippi. Some biologists worry the Asian Carp will destroy the four-billion dollar fishing industry in the Great Lakes if it gets in. There’s an electric barrier in place, but some people don’t think that’s enough. Joel Brammeier is with the environmental group Alliance for the Great Lakes. His group is proposing a barrier that will separate the Mississippi system from the Great Lakes completely, to stop those invasive species. He talked with Lester Graham about the barrier:
Joel Brammeier: Well, ecological separation means no species moving between
the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes. When you consider the problem of
invasive species, unlike chemical pollution, which you can reduce to a certain
safe level, there is no safe level of invasive species. Once two get in, they can
reproduce, and the damage is done, and there’s no going back. So, an
ecological separation means stopping fish, and eggs, and other critters from
moving back and forth between the two systems.
Lester Graham: How do you do that when there’s so much commercial traffic
and recreational boating, and just the water flowing through?
Brammeier: Well, in our research, we found that tech fixes – electrical barriers,
sound barriers, blowing bubbles through the water to try and deter fish from
moving – those things can reduce the risk. But for invasive species, risk
reduction really isn’t enough – you need 100% protection. And to do that, we’re
probably looking at some physical barrier that prevents water and live organisms
from moving between those two great watersheds.
Graham: I can imagine the commercial shippers are not thrilled about that.
Brammeier: Well, I think it remains to be seen. Nobody’s quite sure where the
best place is to put a barrier. We discussed about half a dozen different
scenarios under which you could implement that kind of separation. The
Chicago waterway system does support about 25 million tons, give or take, a
year of commercial commodity traffic – and that’s a significant amount. The
reality is that most of that cargo is internal to the Chicago waterways. So, there
isn’t a huge exchange of cargo between the Chicago waterway and the Great
Lakes. And that’s a good thing. That means we have opportunities to actually
split the system back to the way it historically was, and at the same time, solve
our invasive species problem.
Graham: Now, we can see how that would benefit the environment, but how
would it affect the economy?
Brammeier: Well, again, going back to this issue of commercial navigation. If we
create a separation in this system that has a minimal impact on most of the cargo
in the Chicago waterway, we’re really talking about potentially a very small
impact. And, frankly, there’s an opportunity here to create a benefit for
commodity movements as well. A lot of the cargo transfer facilities on the south
side of Chicago are outmoded, outdated, and not competitive. And, any
investment in this kind of project that changed that and also allowed cargo to
move more efficiently and created new port facilities, could have that kind of
benefit, besides protecting the Great Lakes from invasive species.
Asian Carp can grow up to 110 pounds (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
A stronger electric barrier
to keep an invasive fish out of the
Great Lakes is set to be turned on.
But people who travel past the
underwater barrier are worried about
electric shocks. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:
Transcript
A stronger electric barrier
to keep an invasive fish out of the
Great Lakes is set to be turned on.
But people who travel past the
underwater barrier are worried about
electric shocks. Chuck Quirmbach
reports:
This barrier is supposed to keep Asian carp from getting into the Great Lakes.
Those fish escaped from Southern fish farms years ago. They’ve spread up the Mississippi river.
Now they’re near a canal that connects the Mississippi system with the Great Lakes.
Biologists worry the big fish would ruin Great Lakes fishing and the Lakes’ ecosystems. Start up
of ‘The Stronger Barrier’ was delayed because of concerns the electric current could hurt crews
on barges and people on recreational boats as the vessels passed by.
U.S. Coast Guard Captain Bruce Jones recently gave thumbs-up to running the new barrier at
low power.
“ We believe it will continue to keep the Great Lakes protected from carp through the winter, until
spawning season starts.”
But biologists don’t think the barrier will work well enough at low power. And barge operators
don’t want it on at all. They’ll be discussing the concerns at a meeting in Chicago in January.
Both Obama and McCain say they support fixing the Great Lakes (Photo by Lester Graham)
Barack Obama and John McCain
are greening up their effort to win
some battleground states in November.
The Obama campaign has released a five
point plan for protecting the Great Lakes.
Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
Barack Obama and John McCain
are greening up their effort to win
some battleground states in November. The Obama campaign has released a five
point plan for protecting the Great Lakes.
Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Great lakes advocates have been urging Washington to approve a 20 billion dollar restoration package for the lakes.
Illinois senator Obama says he’s willing to come up with an additional 5 billion dollars. He’d get the money by rolling back tax breaks for oil and natural gas companies.
Michigan Democratic senator Debbie Stabenow is helping promote Obama’s plan. She says it goes well beyond the Bush Administration’s unmet promises to pay for lakes cleanup.
“What we are seeing through this plan is actually putting the dollars into a trust fund so the dollars would be there.”
Senator Obama also wants a coordinator of Great Lakes programs to tackle toxic hot spots, invasive species and enforcing a compact to protect the lakes from large water withdrawals.
The McCain campaign says Senator McCain supports fixing the Great Lakes, but he’s not
ready to commit to an amount yet.
A company called ArborGen is working on altering Eucalyptus trees, so they can be turned into paper and biofuels more easily. (Photo courtesy of the National Biological Information Infastructure)
