A variety of reading has been helping me work toward something for GDM learning of chemistry. I'd like to start with hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon and work up to chlorine and methyl mercury and bioaccumulation. Since there is "no such thing as difficulty in the abstract" there must be a way to gain confidence with these "threshold concepts" and start acting to stop "ecocide" the biological deformations of irresponsible chemical manipulations by industry.
Gutenberg.org has interesting, probably useful, old books on chemistry. I was getting warmed up by re-reading and discovering part of Primo Levi's
The Periodic Table. I had read the parts on
arsenic and
mercury before. They are interesting, but those parts haven't yet helped me comprehend
Toroku and
Minamata . Toroku was poisoned by arsenic mining for war and cotton agriculture, Minamata by mercury-processing for war, fertilizer, and plastic. The fertilizer connection got me thinking of nitrogen, Eutrophication, and
dead zones... So I read the section on
nitrogen and got distracted. I didn't realize that reptile droppings may be even more valuable than chicken manure. I wonder if and Earthship (by Michael Reynolds) could pay for itself designed to maintain yeear-round temperatures that keep lizards feeding on Black Soldier Fies and other insects?
We—I mean to say we mammals—who in general do not have problems about obtaining water, have learned to wedge it into the urea molecule, which is soluble in water, and as urea we free ourselves of it; other animals, for whom water is precious (or it was for their distant progenitors), have made the ingenious invention of packaging their nitrogen in the form of uric acid, which is insoluble in water, and of eliminating it as a solid, with no necessity of having recourse to water as a vehicle. In an analogous fashion one thinks today of eliminating urban garbage by pressing it into blocks, which can be carried to the dumps or buried inexpensively....
Snakes are a clean species, they have neither feathers nor lice, and they don’t scrabble in the dirt; and besides, a python is quite a bit larger than a chicken. Perhaps their excrement, at 90 percent uric acid, could be obtained in abundance, in sizes not too minute and in conditions of reasonable purity....
Who did I think I was showing up just like that, as if it were the most natural thing, asking for python shit? Out of the question, not even a gram; pythons are frugal, they eat twice a month and vice versa; especially when they don’t get much exercise. Their very scanty shit is worth its weight in gold; besides, they—and all exhibitors and owners of snakes—have permanent and exclusive contracts with big pharmaceutical companies. So get out and stop wasting our time. ---- Primo Levi in The Periodic Table
A quick search did not reveal a desperate market for reptile manure, but did turn up a few interesting (distracting) articles.
Lizards and snakes share something with birds that explains their unique droppings. Unlike mammals, who both urinate and defecate, lizards, snakes and birds have only one bodily excretory function and only one expelling orifice, the cloaca. Urine and poop are combined into one dropping. (There may be several droppings left by the animal, but each is a combination dropping.) Droppings are brown cords, several times longer than wide but usually with some white nitrogenous material incorporated. The white portion is crystallized uric acid. Droppings vary in size, depending on the size and species of the animal.
- https://www.pctonline.com/article/poop-patrol/
I'm not sure how much of the information in Primo Levi's short story is (or was) accurate now..
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