(briancady413) wrote in message . com...
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With land constrained there, and with the distance, I think of trying
to gather sea products - In Japan, pink salmon are nurtured when
young, then let out to sea to fatten. Two years later they return to
their natal stream, where the water flow has been diverted through a
cannery. Here eggs and milt are harvested, brought to a hatchery
upstream, continuing the cycle of fishing without fuel, nets, motors
or boats. There are other migrating fish, some more tropical, as I
remember.

Damn clever Japanese. Unfortunately there are no rivers or sizeable
streams on the Islands, so salmon farming is probably not an option.

However, as the Pitcairner's religion - SDA - prohibits the
consumption of many types of seafood (in Seventh Day Adventist
communities, only finfish are consumed, due to religious prohibitions
on the consumption of anything without fins and scales; so effective
a conservation measure has this prohibition been, that there is great
abundance of invertebrates, especially crustaceans and holothurians
around the Pitcairn Islands) there would probably be some scope for
limited commercial harvesting within the 200 nautical-mile exclusive
economic zone surrounding the Pitcairn Islands (Pitcairn, Henderson,
Ducie, Oeno & Sandy).

I imagine any deal struck with the Japanese would need to be in accord
with:

'Convention on Maritime Boundaries between the Government of the
French Republic and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland'

http://www.un.org/Depts/los/LEGISLAT...-GBR1983MB.PDF


I keep wondering about the chances of getting extra iron
into fish that are going out into an iron-poor sea to feed, which
might help them as well as the production of that area of the sea
itself - iron concentration is _extremely_ low in these areas, near
half a microgram per kilo of seawater, if I calculate right, and the
iron that might 'leak' out of supplemented birds and fish could
nourish their next meal, making that meal possible. - it is the
limiting nutrient, so small amounts could yield large productivity
increases, and the ocean can quickly use any extra - everything else
is set to go.

Very interesting point. If memory serves the SE-Pacific is within the
40% of world's ocean which is extrememly low in iron concentrations
ie. production of phytoplankton is iron limited with obvious impact on
the marine food chain.

I'm not too sure about the efficacy of using birds or fish as iron
vectors; however there are two active submarine volcanoes about 100 km
southeast of Pitcairn. One of these rises to within 60 m/200 ft of sea
level; although pumice has a much lower hematite content than say
basalt, unlike the latter, it floats well & breaks down a lot faster.
I wonder if inducing regular pyroclastic flows from these cinder cones
would do the trick?

I also think of trying to reach to customers in the neighborhood;
round-the-world sailers could re-provision there, buying dried fruit
and nuts, pressed oils, canned or dried fish. If they can afford a
boat, they can at least afford to buy a bunch to resell later on.
Here big questions would be how many land there now, and how many
more would if they knew about such a thing.

The reason Christian selected the Island in the first place, was
precisely because there is no safe harbour. In fact the whole
littoral zone is extremely hazardous & is - currently - an
insurmountable barrier to the size of vessel able to be used by the
Islanders.

If there was a technological solution which would somehow allow the
berthing of an ocean-going vessel, able to make safe passage to
Rikitea on Mangareva, most of the Island's logistics problems could be
solved.


BC: Is water, or water quality limited? (It sure looks green and
verdant.) There are machines which use waves to pump water through
reverse osmosis filters, to get fresh from salt, and windmills might
help with this and power in general. I've heard of work on a wind
machine design that would pump air with a very simple structure, so it
would be economical, reliable and easy to fix.

There is no subterranean aquifer or spring water on the Island.
Potable water has to be harvested from rainfall. Huge scope here for a
technological fix.

Some stimulating ideas there Brian - esp. re. phytoplankton limiting
factors. Seems to me that there is huge scope for leveraging marine
food resources worldwide if there was a magic-bullet fix for this.


Brian Cady