Tules on Twitchell Island in the Delta. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

With thousands of acres of rich farmland, the Delta has a long agricultural legacy. But farming there can be a risky business. Dozens of farms have been flooded over the past half century as aging levees have collapsed.

That became a reality for farmer Rudy Mussi on the morning of June 3, 2004. It was clear, sunny day. "You never expect a flood in the summer months," says Mussi.

Mussi was growing corn and asparagus on lower Jones Tract, an island in the Delta, 10 miles west of Stockton. That morning, he got a phone call. Water was flooding onto his farmland.

"Your heart stops for a second or two and then realism sets in. And you just start moving your equipment and get it to high ground," says Mussi.

How did a flood happen a on a sunny day? It's because of a basic rule of physics. Mussi farmed on an island below sea level, like a lot of the islands in the Delta. The Delta used to be a huge swath of wetlands, where two major rivers met San Francisco Bay. Today, earthen levees hold that water back – most of the time.

"Once a break occurs, you know, there's no way you're gonna stop that, not with 10 feet of water on the other side," Mussi says. Draining the island and repairing the levees around Jones Tract cost about $90 million.

The levee break on Jones Tract in 2004. (Photo: CA Department of Water Resources)

It wasn't an isolated incident. Over the last century, more than 150 levees have failed in the Delta.

Delta Infrastructure at Risk

"This is how we get ourselves in kind of an arms race between the water and the land," says Jeff Mount, professor with the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California-Davis.

Levee-building began in the 1850s, when settlers came to the Delta for the rich soil. More than a thousand miles of levees were built. "This network of levees through time had to get bigger and bigger for a very basic reason: the land has been steadily lowering," says Mount.

As farmers exposed the rich peat soil, it started decomposing. The land level dropped; "In some places they talked about four inches per year," says Mount. Today, it's less than an inch per year thanks to better farming practices.

Add up all those inches over the past century and some islands are now 30 feet below sea level. That puts a lot of stress on the levees. There are also other concerns: rising sea levels and extreme floods. "And then the big 800-pound gorilla in the room – we're due for a very large earthquake on the San Andreas system."

Add up all these risks and Mount says there's a two-thirds chance of a catastrophic levee failure in the next 50 years. That, of course, affects farmers and communities in the Delta, but it could also impact California's water supply.

"The raindrops that fall in Mount Shasta are consumed by people in San Diego. Water moves a great distance and this is one of the critical hubs in that system," says Mount.

Fixing the Delta's levees is estimated to cost billions. But on some islands, scientists are experimenting with a new fix.

Farming Carbon

Peat soil samples on Twitchell Island. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

On a windy day on Twitchell Island in the Delta, ecologist Lisa Windham-Myers of the US Geological Survey pushes her way through a wetland filled with a tall, reed-like plant known as tule.

"The plant grows… some of these are 16 feet tall. They're just huge," she says. That growth is changing the ground we're standing on. Windham-Myers pulls out a sample of the dark peat soil.

The wetland produces soil at a rapid rate – four inches a year on average. That's huge, says USGS scientist Brian Bergamaschi, in a place where the land is sinking. "These islands are like bowls and the way we see projects like this is you want to fill up the middle of that bowl and help level out the whole island."

Planting wetlands like this one could raise the land level and water table on the inside of levees, relieving some of the pressure. But why would farmers want to replace cash crops with tule? Windham-Myers points to the soil.

"This is basically almost 100 percent carbon. These take up far more than a typical forest environment," she says. California is setting up a market for carbon, as part of the state's effort to cut global warming emissions. Early next year, companies that need to reduce their emissions could pay farmers to store carbon in wetlands like this.

USGS scientist Brian Bergamaschi talks with Delta farmer Al Medvitch. (Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED)

Today, two farmers are here checking out the project: Steve Mello, a Delta farmer on Tyler Island and Al Medvitch, a farmer in the Montezuma Hills.

"The potential has been demonstrated well. You guys are standing in the middle of it. But in order to move from here to market, we need to develop a lot more techniques so people can come and verify that the carbon is stored," says Brian Bergamaschi, describing how wetland farming might work.

Both farmers seem open to the idea. But Mello says ultimately, it depends on the bottom line. "It would absolutely need to cash flow. While it could dovetail with levee stability, it would still need to generate enough to amortize your property value."

Still, Mello says assuming carbon prices are high enough, growing patches of wetlands could be a feasible way to improve the levees and to stay farming.

A map of the Delta created by the US Geological Survey in the 1910s.

As detective stories go, this sunny, spring day in the Delta isn't a typical backdrop. In the distance, tractors move slowly through dry fields of row crops.

"Once he got lost, they were wandering all over," says Alison Whipple of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a non-profit research group based in Richmond. Her colleague, Robin Grossinger, agrees. "They were all over this place." The two are trying to piece together the path of William Wright, a man who got hopelessly lost somewhere nearby.

I should probably mention: it happened 160 years ago. Whipple and Grossinger are historical ecologists. They use sources like old photos, hand-drawn maps and early land surveys to sleuth out what this landscape looked like before it was dramatically remade by Californians.

The Delta's landscape has been dramatically remade over the last 200 years. Today, it's a crucial part of the state's water system, supplying 25 million people and irrigating millions of acres of farm land. But with this re-engineering, the Delta's ecosystem has collapsed, harming the fishing industry and putting water supplies at risk. Little is known about what it once looked like.

Lost in a Delta Marsh

Standing on a levee about 20 miles south of Sacramento, Whipple and Grossinger are discussing what they found a tattered, yellowing notebook uncovered in a state archive. It contains stories from William Wright, a duck hunter who spent a long, cold night lost in the Delta in 1850.

"On all sides stretched a vast wilderness of tules from ten to fifteen feet in height. The driving storm of sleet was bad, but the pitchy darkness was infinitely worse… Our situation was so miserable that no words can do justice to it."

It's not just the dramatic story they're interested in. It's passages this like one:

"The lakes proved to be from one hundred to three hundred yards in width, as near as we could judge. The water was very cold and often waist‐deep."

When Whipple and Grossinger read his account, they knew they’d found a Holy Grail source document. Its detail reveal a landscape that doesn't exist here today and hasn’t existed for some time.

"The Delta is probably one of the most intensively transformed parts of California and it was also changed really early on because of such fertile land," says Grossinger.

As California's Gold Rush boomed, farmers came to the Delta for its rich soil. Land went for a dollar an acre and settlers turned the wetlands into dry, agricultural land. 97% of the historic marshes were lost.

“We have here maybe one of the most important parts of the state's ecosystem and we don’t actually know how it used to work," Says Grossinger.

Alison Whipple and Robin Grossinger examine historic maps in the Delta.

He and Whipple have layered together thousands of historical sources that reveal an ecosystem of incredible complexity. “We would be in trees right here with a couple winding channels that were dry in the summer but had flowing water in the wintertime," explains Whipple.

Yearly floods from the Sacramento River inundated Delta marshes creating habitat for birds and young salmon. Closer to San Francisco Bay, hundreds of miles of small tidal channels branched out like capillaries in the wetlands. Today, most of those channels have been filled in.

Returning the Delta to this pristine state just isn’t possible, says Whipple, and that’s not the goal of the project. But knowing how the ecosystem once worked could improve the habitat restoration efforts that are happening.

Restoring Habitat

Liberty Island is one place in the Delta that looks as it might have 200 years ago. Not long ago, it was a low-lying expanse of farmland, protected by tall levees.

“The levees broke and it wasn’t financially worth reclaiming,” Says Carl Wilcox of with California’s Department of Fish and Game. The landowners gave up when the island flooded 15 years ago. After that, nature took over. Tules and cattails started sprouting and wildlife followed.

Returning vegetation at Liberty Island in the Delta.

Now, “some of the endangered native fishes, Delta smelt, longfin smelt are using this area,” says Wilcox. They're finding endangered Chinook salmon as well. "These are more productive areas for them, they’re more protected, they’re less prone to predators."

California Considers Ambitious Restoration Plans

California is using the Liberty Island project as a model for a proposal to restore 65,000 acres of Delta habitat. It's part of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan – a major overhaul of the Delta’s water infrastructure.

Leo Winternitz of the Nature Conservancy says bringing back habitat for declining wildlife could make the state’s water supply more reliable. Restrictions under the Endangered Species Act have limited how much water can be pumped from the Delta in recent years.

There is one big problem with restoration: most of the islands in the Delta are below sea level.

"Just south of here, some of the islands, they're in the 17 to 25 below sea level range. So if their levees broke, what you’d have is a large open body of water. You can’t create tidal marshes in those areas," says Winternitz.

That leaves only a few places where restoration is feasible. Winternitz says in those areas it’s crucial the state look to the past to create the same interconnected habitat that once was.

Governor Jerry Brown's administration is set to unveil the sweeping plan to restore the Delta later this year.

A canal in the Delta, heading to the Central Valley Project.

If you're not familiar with where the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is or why it's so important to the state, you're not alone. Polls show most Californians have never heard of it.

This relatively small part of California plays a crucial role in the state's water supply. And, as might be expected, it's become ground zero for a decades-long water war involving cities, farmers and fish. This year, the state is taking on an ambitious planning effort to break that deadlock.

Re-plumbing California

The reason the Delta has this starring role is thanks to a basic geography problem. Almost all of the state's water is found in the top third of the state. Most of the population lives in the bottom two-thirds of the state.

This issue was painfully obvious to state planners a century ago. The Central Valley promised rich soil for farmers, but had little rainfall. They knew for California to grow, they had to move water to drier parts of the state.

The Delta is where California's two largest rivers come together, carrying runoff from the Sierra Nevada Mountains. To water planners, it looked like the perfect place to tap into. California began building water infrastructure at a massive scale.

Water is exported out of the Delta primarily through two large pumping plants near Tracy, about 60 miles east of San Francisco. Each moves millions of gallons of water a minute. From there, the water rushes into concrete canals that reach Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and millions of acres of farmland.

This 700-mile system has made California the state it is today. But it's come with a cost…

An Ecosystem in Decline

On a boat in the western Delta, environmental scientist Julio Adib-Samii and team from California's Department of Fish and Game pull in a long fishing net.

A Delta smelt.

"Well, we have an adult Delta smelt," he says, holding a small, silver endangered fish that smells distinctly like a cucumber.

Fish and Game scientists have done these monthly fish surveys for decades. But starting in 2002, they noticed something strange. Where they once caught a lot of Delta smelt, now, they weren't catching any. The population had crashed, as well as populations of striped bass, threadfin shad, longfin smelt and Chinook salmon. In 2008, the commercial salmon fishery shut down completely for two years.

"Their decline is an indication of a changing environment and place they didn't evolve to be in," says Adib-Samii.

The Delta was once a massive tidal marsh, full of winding channels that spread out like capillaries. After the Gold Rush, settlers put up levees to create low-lying islands for farming. Ninety-seven percent of the historic wetlands were lost.

Multiple Stressors, One Big Question

"We've converted almost every scrap of habitat in the Delta to farmland and we need to return some of that to habitat," says Barry Nelson, senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. The ecosystem has also been hit by pollution, invasive species – and by the pumping plants.

"The pumps in the south Delta are so powerful that they literally reverse the direction of flow. It's very easy for those fish to follow that water and get sucked right into the pumps," says Nelson. A few years ago, federal wildlife agencies issued decisions requiring the pumping to slow down during certain times of year to protect fish.

This brings us to the central debate in the Delta: how much water should be pumped out and how much should be left for fish?

"There's a limit to the amount of water you can pump from the Delta ecosystem and in the last decade it's become incredibly clear that we've exceeded that, and we've exceeded it by a lot," says Nelson.

Not everyone agrees. "There is, you know, always going to be shortages. But there's also a lot of years when we have absolutely plenty of water in the system to meet the reasonable needs that are out there," says Jason Peltier with Westlands Water District, an agricultural area in the San Joaquin Valley that depends on Delta water. He says limits on pumping have hurt the district's farmers.

"You can't get a loan to farm unless you can show the banker what water you have. And they don't have a lot of confidence in going to their bankers," says Peltier.

The battle over the environmental rules went to the courts. "There was lawsuit after lawsuit," says John Laird, California's Secretary for Natural Resources. "It got to the point that it made much more sense to look at the entire Delta as a whole."

A New Attempt at Progress

Laird's agency is trying to reach a compromise with the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. The 10,000-page plan calls for a new way to pump water out of the Delta, through what's commonly known as the peripheral canal. Huge tunnels would take water from further upstream, bypassing the Delta, which supporters say would make the water supply more reliable.

This isn't a new idea. In 1982, California voters defeated a similar plan. "The real debate is not the tunnel itself. It's how much water and when can it flow through the tunnel," says Laird.

The massive project could harm the Delta's endangered species, but Laird says they'll restore thousands of acres of wetlands to compensate. California voters would be on the hook for that cost, while the $12 billion tunnel would be paid for by water users.

It's a tough sell but, according to Laird, a necessary one since climate change will make the state's water supply more unpredictable. The agency will release a full draft of the plan in July.

Water from the Delta has been fought over for more than a half century. Reporter Lauren Sommer sat down with Jason Peltier, the Deputy General Manager of Westlands Water District to discuss the future of the Delta and California’s water supply. The Westlands Water District is a 600,000 acre agricultural district on the west side of the San Joaquin valley. It’s part of the 3 million acres of farmland that’s served by water that’s moved from the Delta.

For another viewpoint, check out this Q&A with Barry Nelson of the Natural Resources Defense Council or see the rest of our series coverage.

Jason Peltier, Deputy General Manager of Westlands Water District

Where does the water for Westlands agriculture come from?

Through our history, California has accomplished great engineering feats with a system of dams and reservoirs. Those dams, like Shasta and Folsom, allow us to store water and move it through time. In other words, from wet season to dry season. And the aqueducts allow us to move the water from place to place.

How has the allocation of water changed over the years?

Over the last 20 years, our farmers have seen dramatic swings in their water supply, mostly on the downside. We’ve experienced 40%, 60%, up to 90% reductions in deliveries out of the Delta. In some cases there were dry years, but mostly it’s driven by environmental laws, the Endangered Species Act and the Central Valley Project Improvement Act. They’ve had a rough couple of decades dealing with uncertainty, unpredictability. You can’t get a loan to farm unless you can show the banker what water you have. And they don’t have a lot of confidence in going to their bankers.

Fifteen years ago, people were astonished by it. Now they are learning how to cope with it to some extent. The district has purchased 100,000 acres of farmland and taken it out of irrigated agriculture. Our farmers have shifted their crops to higher value, permanent crops, so they can afford to buy water on the market when the projects can’t deliver water. 80% of the district is on drip irrigation today. We’ve seen our water rates go up tremendously — our cheapest water is $100 an acre foot. Sometimes on the market, farmers are paying $400 an acre-foot.

Where do those fluctuations come from?

Part of these 20 years of water supply uncertainty has been driven primarily by environmental laws and restrictions. The restrictions that emanate out of the Endangered Species Act in the form of the biological opinions issued by the federal agencies have been kind of an added wrinkle of complexity for us. We can look at the results of reallocating water supply over the last two decades, and here in the last few years, you know, the fish have not done any better. We’ve seen 40 million acre-feet reallocated from human use to environmental use, and we haven’t seen the kind of response any of us would like to see. It’s very frustrating.

Something Westlands has sued over–

Well, yes, there’s been a lot of litigation and I’m sure there will be going forth because the stakes are so high. We’re quite happy to use the third branch of government to help to decide some of these huge differences we have with the administration. You know, we lose more than we win. But you know, it helps, even losing creates some certainty that, in the big picture, is of great value to us.

Now, there’s a new planning effort underway to create more certainty, right?

All the stakeholders kind of came together and said you know, what we’re living, this status quo is unacceptable for all of our interests. So we’ve got to try and find a new approach, a new way to address and resolve the conflicts between water project operations and our fisheries and our ecosystem. And that’s what gave rise to the Bay Delta Conservation Planning effort.

That plan, the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, calls for a large tunnel or canal to take water around the Delta, instead of through it.

It’s been recognized for decades that the location of the export pumps in the southern end of the Delta is a real problem for water quality issues, for vulnerability to earthquakes, for fish on some levels. So, we’re kind of trying to figure out how can we relocate those intakes up to the Sacramento River? We would be able to positively screen for fish, because we’d have a river flowing by. So there’s the alternative conveyance, probably cost $12 billion. And we think, you know, it is expensive. But it’s not because we have such a huge population base to spread our costs over. There’s a huge part of the economy of California that is at-risk today. And we shouldn’t accept that. We shouldn’t live with it.

The plan also calls for a lot of habitat restoration. Who should pay for that?

Our current planning target for recreation of intertidal habitat is about 60,000 acres. It’s to be determined how that’s going to be paid for. But in our minds, most of that is a public investment. That land was at one time fully in contact with water. With the Swamp and Overflow Act in the mid-1800s, islands were created, levees were built, and that water-land contact was lost. We can’t go back and find the people that built the levees in the 1800s, but we can recognize that there’s a broad public value for increasing intertidal habitat and trying to recreate some of the food conditions. Creating better habitat creates more food for the lower-end of the food chain, which then hopefully will work its way up to help the native fish.

Fish recovery is good for everybody, right?

The Delta is not dying – it’s a healthy and vibrant place. But there are those that think that the system is over-subscribed. We hear, “we don’t have enough water in California; we’ve got too many people, too many demands.” Some years, that’s the case. But there are also a lot of years when we have absolutely plenty of water in the system to meet the reasonable needs that are out there.

Plenty of water to meet the needs of both water users and the species?

All the beneficial uses. The average through the years is at about 80% of the water that flows into the Delta goes out to the ocean. And after a new conveyance is built, we’ll still be at about 80%. If somebody could tell me specifically where additional water is needed, when it’s needed and what good it’s going to do, we could have a conversation. As it is, it’s kind of a bumper sticker kind of a debate.

Right, fish vs. farms.

Farmers and fishermen have a heck of a lot more in common than they have dividing them. One of the saddest things for me right now is that we can’t work together more constructively: they want healthy fishery to sustain their fishing, and we want a healthy fishery to sustain our ability to export water. And we have an identity of interest. It’s just how we come at the problem.

When Spanish explorers first viewed the Delta from the top of Mt. Diablo in the late 1700’s, they thought they had discovered an inland sea. A vast low-lying, partly submerged marshland of wetland plants (tules) and winding tidal channels, the Delta teemed with birds and game animals, including elk, antelope, and grizzly bears. It’s only human inhabitants – small settlements of Miwok Indians – fished and hunted there during the drier months.

Today the Delta, dotted with levees and constructed islands, bears little resemblance to its native state; much has been reclaimed for agricultural use. But it wasn’t until the mid-Nineteenth Century, just over 150 years ago, that its momentous physical transformation began. It’s been a Herculean effort to meet the steep demands of California’s increasingly crowded and insatiably thirsty population, nearly two-thirds of who rely on the Delta as a primary water source. A stark symbol of our quest to bend nature to our will, the Delta also remains the epicenter of an epic drama of seemingly insurmountable political battles and power struggles, pitting north against south; farmer against environmentalist.

So how did it get like this?

Take a quick paddle through the key events in the slideshow above.

Water from the Delta has been fought over for more than a half century. Reporter Lauren Sommer sat down with Barry Nelson, the Senior Policy Analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council to discuss the future of the Delta and California’s water supply.

For another viewpoint, check out this Q&A with Jason Peltier of the Westlands Water District or see the rest of our series coverage.

Barry Nelson, Senior Policy Analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

When were the first signs that the Delta ecosystem was in trouble?

Since the 1960s, we’ve seen a steadily growing trend of diversions from the Delta. If you look at long-term averages, you filter out the impacts of droughts and wet years, we’ve taken more and more and more water from the Delta pretty steadily for the last 50 years, and that really hit a crisis point in the ‘90s. That’s the point at which we started seeing the winter-run salmon and the Delta smelt being protected under the state and federal Endangered Species Act.

And ten years ago, things really changed dramatically. Starting in 2000, suddenly we started taking a lot more water out of the Delta for a lot of reasons. It was an enormous increase, about a 20% increase on average. And the ecosystem crashed. It was called the “pelagic organism decline.” But what it meant was pretty simple: that everything swimming in the Delta was in deep trouble.

So now we’ve got half a dozen species in deep trouble in the estuary and a fishing industry that’s honestly fighting for survival.

What caused their decline?

A lot of work has been done looking at this catastrophic, across-the-board, collapse of the Bay Delta ecosystem. And the bottom line was recognition that, while there are lots of stressors, there are pollution problems in the ecosystem. We do have invasive species like clams that have come from overseas. But the core problem is the amount of water we pump out of that system.

There was a huge fight in the courts over this issue. And ultimately, the courts and then the agencies imposed a new set of rules that really have returned us to the level of pumping we saw for about 30 years prior to the 2000’s.

And what were those rules on pumping?

The Delta’s a complicated ecosystem. As water flows through it, it flows through it in a complicated pattern. Fish have evolved to survive with that pattern; water coming through at certain times of year, and flowing through those Delta channels into the Bay.

Basically, the federal rules control two things: the amount of water that flows all the way through the ecosystem into the Bay in order to maintain a healthy ecosystem and the extent to which some of the channels within the Delta flow backwards.

The pumps in the south Delta are so powerful that they literally reverse the direction of flow in these Delta channels. And if you’re a young migrating salmon swimming downstream towards the ocean as Mother Nature programmed you, when the Delta channels are flowing the wrong direction, it’s very easy for those fish to follow that water and get sucked right into the pumps. And that’s why those pumps have killed in the last decade or so not a million fish, not tens of millions of fish, but over a hundred million young fish killed just at the pumps.

So if you could design your ideal plan for the Delta, what would that look like?

First, we know we need to see some real habitat restoration in the Delta. We’ve converted almost every scrap of habitat in the Delta to farmland, and in order to restore a healthy Delta, we need to return some of that to habitat. And actually I think that’s something where there’s a fair amount of agreement. How you do that is not trivial, but I think there’s a fair amount of agreement around that. And given the challenge of maintaining all of the existing levees in perpetuity, the question is: are we going to do it in a planned and thoughtful way?

Second, we really don’t have a choice but to maintain a lot of our Delta levees for a couple of decades. It’s going to take a long time to make major changes in the Delta. And there is so much infrastructure, the Delta communities, Delta farming, and water supply that depend on Delta levees today.

Third, from our perspective, the challenge we face in terms of exporting water from the Delta is first figuring out how much water we can safely pump from the Delta. And then designing a facility around that.

You’re talking about the “peripheral canal,” right? A canal or tunnel that would take water around the Delta?

Well, there are two conflicting visions for a facility in the Delta. One is the old plan. Fifty years ago, the state of California was planning to build a peripheral canal around the Delta, an enormous facility that would allow those pumps in the south Delta to take water from the north Delta and pump it around the Delta rather than through Delta channels. And that was really a simple proposal to simply take more water from the ecosystem. We know now that that, the amount of water that that would have taken would have been devastating to the ecosystem.

That’s the old version of the canal. But there’s a new version out there. And that is a proposal to deal with earthquake risks in the Delta. It’s to deal with the fact that there really are earthquake risks in the Delta that represent significant threats to water supply. And a facility could provide a lifeline in case the Delta was to temporarily fail. What we’re struggling with right now is that we have competing interests in California advancing two different visions for what the problem is in the Delta.

With such a long history of disagreement, what are the chances of agreeing on a plan?

There’s a reason that the discussion on the Delta is so politically heated that people don’t usually talk about. And that is California is out of rivers. If you look around the state of California at the Colorado River and the Klamath River and the Trinity River, the Owens River, the San Joaquin, on and on, we’ve really started to hit real hard physical limits in the amount of water we can take out of all of those rivers.

Ten years ago we weren’t paying enough attention to sea level rise impacts. We weren’t really thinking about earthquake risks in, in the Delta. So there really is a sense that we need to figure this problem out this time.

That’s what makes the Delta debate so compelling. The Delta is an incredibly important ecosystem. It’s an incredibly important place for a quarter million people who live there. And it’s a tremendously important water supply for the state of California. There are a lot of reasons why our planning efforts today could fail, but it’s so important to the future of the state. It’s so important to the health of the Bay and the Bay Area, it’s so important to the future of the salmon industry, to the residents of the Delta. We can’t let that effort fail.

If you’re like most Californians, you’ve probably never heard of the Delta or why it’s important to the state’s economy and wildlife. In three minutes, we’ll explain how the Delta is a key part of California’s water supply and why it’s been the focus of a decades-long water battle.

Flowering Tea - Vassia Atanassova (Spiritia)

Every time I drive from the South Bay to the East Bay, I pass the Numi tea factory and start to crave a hot cup. I love tea–the ritual of heating and pouring the water, the warm mug in my hands and the slow sipping as it cools–and Numi makes some of my favorites.

Knowing this, a friend recently gave me a Numi gift box: "FLOWERING TEA^TM handsewn leaves blossom when steeped." Pleased but confused, I did some research, and quickly figured it out.

Did you ever get those pill-shaped foam toys when you were a kid? You'd throw one in water, the capsule would dissolve, and the foam would expand into a huge dinosaur or shark.

Flowering tea is the classy grown-up version of grow monsters.

Grow Capsules - Alibaba

The teas don't expand quite as much as the toys, so you might be able to guess they're using a different technology. Grow monsters showed up in the 1970s, using super-absorbent polymers originally developed for medicine and hygiene (think diapers). Super-absorbent polymers are long-chain molecules that bind with water so enthusiastically that they can absorb up to 500 times their weight. (I presume that's why it says "expands hundreds of times!" on some toy packages; an inch-long capsule certainly does not expand to a 40-foot dinosaur.)

Blooming teas don't contain any super-absorbent polymers—only tea leaves and flowers. But because they've been dried, they have a lot of room to expand when soaked in water again. A Star Trek alien once called humans "ugly bags of mostly water," and the same could be said of almost all Earthling animals and plants. Fresh tea leaves contain 75-80% water, but are dried down to 2-7% before being sold as tea (flowering or otherwise). When you add water to this dried biological bundle, it readily expands and uncurls according to the whim of the tea artist.

Numi's Dragon Lily (which I drank while writing this post)

Numi isn't the only place to get blooming tea–you can also find it at Red Blossom Tea Company and Peet's, among others.

Of course, San Franscisco hipsters are keen to debate whether it is truly hip or merely a "gimmick." Apparently, no one is sure how long blooming tea has been around. It might be just a few decades old (about the same age as grow monsters–coincidence?) but there are thousand-year-old Chinese references to "display teas." These weren't quite the same as modern blooming teas, because nobody actually drank the water the display teas were steeped in–they were strictly for entertainment.

Just like grow monsters, come to think of it.

"Attack of the Alien Invaders," produced by WVIZ/PBS, was first created as an educational series called "LSI: Life Science Investigation."

Lake Erie is considered to be the most productive of all five of the Great Lakes.Within its waters are diverse and interdependent plants and animals that make up an intricate web of life. Mostly due to human carelessness, the lake has become home to an increasing number of non-native plants, animals, and micro-organisms which threaten the balance of the entire ecosystem.

In the WVIZ/PBS program, Attack of the Alien Invaders, Dante Centuori, Director of Creative Productions at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio, traveled in and around Lake Erie visiting with scientists and government officials who are investigating Lake Erie’s ecosystem, the challenges it has faced in the past, as well as those it may face in the future. Of particular interest was one of the biggest potential threats to the lake- a voracious invasive species collectively called “Asian carp.”

Bighead carp (Hypophthalmichthys nobilis) and Silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) were first introduced to the U.S. in the 1970s as a chemical-free and “environmentally friendly” way of cleaning up algae in southern fish farms and water treatment plants. During the Mississippi River floods of the early 1990s, these fish escaped into “The Big River” and its tributaries. Since then, these big, hungry, and prolific fish have made their way north all the way up to the back door of the Great Lakes. If they enter the Great Lakes, it is feared that these fish will continue on to Lake Erie where they could further disrupt the Great Lakes’ most productive ecosystem, with unknown long-term consequences.

John Hageman from Ohio State's Stone Laboratory shows Dante Centuori an invasive Silver Carp.

Dante first visited Stone Laboratory, a research facility located in the Western Basin of Lake Erie in Put-in-Bay, Ohio. There, he met John Hageman who displayed, and dissected a Silver carp; revealing an anatomical structure that makes these fish particularly threatening to the food energy balance so important to Lake Erie’s native inhabitants. Dante then accompanied another Stone Lab researcher on a good old fashioned Lake Erie “fish trawl” where he came across many of the lake’s native and invasive species– such as the omnipresent zebra mussel and the abundant quagga mussel, two detrimental invasives brought in to the Great Lakes by the ballast water of ocean-going vessels.

Dante continued on to Old Woman Creek, a national research center and fresh water estuary in nearby Huron, Ohio, where he encountered some frisky common carp (Cyprinus carpio) whose behavior may help scientists predict what may happen to Ohio’s interior rivers and streams, if their distant relatives from the east choose to join them. Next, he returned to Stone Lab to investigate how the Bighead and Silver carp have influenced and impacted the native species of the Mississippi and Illinois River ecosystems. He next traveled to Lake Erie’s Central Basin- to Cleveland, Ohio for a rendezvous with a federal employee who explained how Asian carp are being monitored and controlled in one of the most probable points of entry into the Great Lakes, Chicago’s Shipping and Sanitary Canal at the southern end of Lake Michigan.

Lastly, Dante returned to Put-In-Bay where he talked with Jeff Tyson of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, who described the management techniques used to control one of the harmful invasive species in Lake Erie; the Sea Lamprey. Could techniques similar to those used to control the Lamprey be applied in the event of an Asian carp invasion? What other plans are in place if these strange and dangerous "jumping fish" make it to Lake Erie? If they do, and these strategies don’t work, what’s next? Even though each expert interviewed had his or her own theory, in the end, they all agreed that it is not a scenario that they’d want to see play out.

Before Attack of the Alien Invaders was broadcasted to a general audience in January of 2011, WVIZ Education produced “LSI: Life Science Investigation,” a multi-media resource created for the classroom. Scott Barber, a teacher in Berea, Ohio, explained how this “fish story,” presented as an interactive mystery, and accompanying classroom resources on the web, has helped his students learn core life science concepts.