by
ScienceDave | June 30, 2007 at 02:27 pm
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If you've ever, erm, "evacuated your bodily fluid wastes" after eating asparagus, the following might not come as a surprise to you. Human urine has been shown to help rear small planktonic organisms that are used to feed farmed fish. The plankton were observed to reproduce four days earlier than if fed cow dung, cow urine, vermin compost, or cow and poultry poop.
Bara Bihari Jana and his colleagues at the University of Kalyani, India, mixed ground water with human urine from the university's urinals and added the zooplankton Moina micrura, which is often fed to hatchling fish in commercial fisheries...
..."Human urine is a stable liquid and contains valuable nutrients. I see no reason why it couldn't be used for this purpose if it provides a suitable chemical environment for the zooplankton to grow," says Stephen Smith, an environmental biochemist at Imperial College London"
Given the potential endless supply of urine, especially from beer-binging university students, this source could provide an alternative to other fertilizers that damage aquatic environments through eutrophication.
At this point, there's no reason to believe these plankton could act as a disease vector. I'd be happy to chow down on peepee-poissons, as long as they rinse the plankton before hand!
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 14:38 on June 30th, 2007
I'm proud that, as humans, our peepee is superior to that of cows. I'll be happy for the rest of the day.