EXTRA...

Ptown, Vineyard get "rural aid" from Feds; Scallop-like oyster found; Cape threatened by sea rise

Rural Aid Goes to Urban Areas
USDA Development Program Helps Suburbs, Resort Cities

PROVINCETOWN, Mass. -- In a few weeks, artists, lawyers and bankers will begin arriving here for the busy summer season on high-speed ferries that take 90 minutes to make the trip from Boston. They will land at a recently refurbished municipal dock that was built with the help of a $1.95 million low-interest loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  A few blocks away, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum has used nearly $3 million in grants and loans from the Agriculture Department to add gallery space and renovate a historic sea captain's house. A short drive back down the Cape, the department is financing a new actors theater in Wellfleet and recently awarded a grant to a garden center in Hyannis to build a windmill.

Although Cape Cod is only a short trip from Boston and Providence, R.I., and is home to some of the wealthiest beach towns in the United States, to the Agriculture Department it meets the definition of rural America. That means it qualifies for aid originally intended for farmland and backwoods areas that were isolated and poor, struggling to keep their heads above water.

"Provincetown is many things to many people, and to USDA we're rural," said Keith A. Bergman, the town manager. "We'll take it."  He isn't alone.  On Martha's Vineyard, the USDA guaranteed a $4.5 million loan for the popular Black Dog Tavern.  The loan, which has since been repaid, was to refinance the tavern's mortgage and expand Black Dog's retail clothing stores. On Nantucket, where the population swells to the size of a small city in summer months, the Agriculture Department provides rental subsidies for families priced out of the local market...

More than three times as much money went to metropolitan areas with populations of 50,000 or more ($30.3 billion) as to poor or shrinking rural counties ($8.6 billion). Recreational or retirement communities alone got $8.8 billion...   Read the rest of this Washington Post story here, or in Free Internet Press here.
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Winter mystery surfaces at local clam flat
It looked like  an oyster that had turned into scallop

One low tide last January, Don Parsons' clam fork hit something hard in the soft mud of a clam flat off of the Annisquam River that re-opened in the winter.  The object turned out to be an intact, but dead, bivalve mollusk. The shells, about four inches in diameter, had a scallop shape, but an oyster's thick, rough, and layered texture.

"This is like an oyster that turned scallop. I've never seen a creature like this before, and I've been clamming commercially for 40 years," said the 53-year-old West Gloucester resident...  

Several close-up photos of the shells were e-mailed to Dr. Roxanna Smolowitz, the lab animal veterinarian and aquatic veterinary pathologist at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and to Bill Walton, an agent for the County of Barnstable Cape Cod Cooperative Extension, for an identification.  Parsons received some answers a couple of weeks ago.  "After some evaluation, we think this is an example of Ostrea edulis, the European oyster," Walton said. 

East Coast Shellfish Growers Association literature states, "The species was introduced in New England states by researchers in Milford Labs around the turn of the (20th) century. Wild populations became established in isolated areas in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine and Atlantic Canada. The European oyster has a unique flavor that's very metallic | sort of like sucking on pocket change"...  Read the rest of this Gloucester Times story here.   
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Emissions Already Affecting Climate, Says IPCC Report
Bleak forcast offered coastal areas, severe economic cost

Earth’s climate and ecosystems are already being affected, for better and mostly for worse, by the atmospheric buildup of smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, top climate experts said Friday.

While curbs in emissions can limit risks, they said, vulnerable regions must adapt to shifting weather patterns and rising seas.

The conclusions came in the latest report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has tracked research on human-caused global warming since being created by the United Nations in 1988. In February, the panel released a report that for the first time concluded with 90-percent certainty that humans were the main cause of warming since 1950. But in this report, focusing on the impact of warming, for the first time the group described how species, water supplies, ice sheets, and regional climate conditions were already responding...

The panel said the long-term outlook for all regions was for trouble should temperatures rise 3 to 5 degrees fahrenheit or so, with consequences ranging from the likely extinction of perhaps a fourth of the world’s species to eventual inundation of coasts and islands inhabited by hundreds of millions of people...  reas in drought will become even more dry, adding to the risks of hunger and disease, it said. The world will face heightened threats of flooding, severe storms and the erosion of coastlines...

North America will experience more severe storms with human and economic loss, and cultural and social disruptions. It can expect more hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves and wildfires, it said. Coasts will be swamped by rising sea levels. In the short term, crop yields may increase by 5 percent to 20 percent from a longer growing season, but will plummet if temperatures rise by 7.2 degrees...  Read the rest of this N Y Times story here.